Ben Recht

That’s great. It’s so funny to me.

Does Anthropic let its interviewees use Claude Code?

Digitally Twinning Justifying generative modeling and the principle of maximum likelihood

Justifying generative modeling and the principle of maximum likelihood in a single blog post.

'Nobody asked for this': Waymo cars flock to quiet Palo Alto street Palo Alto resident Ben Baum rose like normal before sunrise on Saturday morning, coffee in hand, and watched from his window as a driverless Waymo drove by. Then a second. Then a third. In total, Baum...

The NIMBYs are coming for Waymo... looking forward to the first filed CEQA complaint.

I keep reposting this, but Phil Koopman took a stab at it. There were two Waymo-involved fatalities this year. This means their stats aren't actually that great.

Statistical Models and Causal Inference Cambridge Core - Statistical Theory and Methods - Statistical Models and Causal Inference

Highly recommend the collected works of Freedman. Filled with gems. www.cambridge.org/core/books/s...

What is the chance of a Beast Quake? How win probabilities are made and who they're for.

Think it might have been me... www.argmin.net/p/what-is-th...

Homeboy's LinkedIn page is truly a piece of work.

This did not happen. Sorry, not sorry.

‘There’s Just No Reason to Deal With Young Employees’ AI is taking entry-level jobs. What happens when Gen-Z-ers can’t start their careers?

This article about "AI is taking entry-level jobs" was making the rounds yesterday... but the author uses LinkedIn as primary sourcing. Come on, man.

Thanks for this thread. You and @grimalkina.bsky.social should collaborate on a blog post!

But it's the only social science that consistently finds 5-sigma interventions.

Given the author of that piece, I'm sure it falls into the atrocious category.

Please write more about why, Stephen. It's worth it.

Actions from predictions A general framework for outcome maximization. Is this reinforcement learning?

A reduction of policymaking to prediction. I’ll write about why this is problematic tomorrow.

A+. Did you vibe code this?

Begun, the Butlerian Jihad has.

13 penalties, 12 points! great football.

More penalties than points in this Chiefs-Broncos game...

The valuations of those note-taking app companies are quite something, no?

Abridge: 5.3 billion
Ambience: 1.3 billion

6.6 billion is the price of having a robot to blame...

That 2nd one is not pre-registered RCT z-scores. It's z-scores scraped from the Cochrane Library database. Moreover, why is that one good and the other one bad?

From a recent talk of mine.

I’ll take a look, but what makes medicine different from the rest of the human facing sciences is *there are* magic bullets.

Could you explain a bit more what you mean by the 'motivating effect'? Why is it problematic in your mind?

Milton Friedman's p-values Remind me what happens when a measure becomes a target.

Yes, I agree it's an artifact that a threshold for publication is often "some p-value < 0.05." But in that case, I'd argue the distribution is exactly what I'd expect.

I wrote a bit about it here: www.argmin.net/p/milton-fri...

Yes. We can definitely say something non-gaussian is going on. But what is it? And how can we make normative claims that it's bad?

Most of the time, people point to this histogram as evidence of bad or questionable research practices. I want to know what backs such reactions.

Thanks for sharing.

I think the hard part there is pinning down how the interventions and outcomes are selected. I don't even think you can come up with a well-posed probability distribution over "interventions." What's the sigma-algebra?

And I appreciate you, Berna!

Yes, I've read van Zwet's papers before. He wasn't happy with my reading.

If you will, "fitting a mixture model" and explaining it with a just-so story is a questionable research practice.

I don't think this is a good model of science.