Valentin Klotzbücher

At least for academics, we often have a good comparison point, which is human Research Assistants, whose failure rates are… not always zero.

An LLM doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful to provide comparable work. Freeing up RAs to more interesting things than mini lit reviews or hand coding data

Comic. [block quote] “Far better an approximate answer to the *right* question, which is often vague, than an *exact* answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.” -John W. Tukey, The Future of Data Analysis (1962) [caption] Happy Approximate Birthday to John Tukey, author of my favorite statistics quote, who was born 110.000 years ago sometime this week.

Tukey

xkcd.com/3104/

Zimbabwe grandmas giving 45 minutes of therapy– among the most effective ways to boost wellbeing, says HLI meta-analysis/review/CEA.

bit.ly/44cvnh0 Both evaluators had ~confidence in main results. Also critiques & suggestions; authors responded in detail. ->

This is false and due to a bad math error in an academic paper that you can spot by just asking AI.

Prompting: “carefully check the math in this paper” when this paper came out (so this info was not yet in training data), o1 got it in a single shot. Worth using it to doublecheck claims.

After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Listening to headphones on the massive drugdealing goldfinch

What will AI do to (p)research? AI makes doing and communicating research much easier. Will there be any point to it?

I used AI to help write a paper and got it published. All in record time. What does this mean for research? My latest post. open.substack.com/pub/joshuaga...

Scam Inc. from Economist Podcasts+ Uncover a predatory, multi-billion-dollar industry emerging from the shadows.

When my colleague Sue-Lin first told me about this podcast idea, and how the global scam industry works, I thought she was joking. It is a lot darker and scarier than I thought.

Highly recommended.

www.economist.com/audio/podcas...

New research alert! Our study investigates the effectiveness of human-only, AI-assisted, and AI-led teams in assessing the reproducibility of quantitative social science research. We've got some surprising findings!

Organizational roles and responsibilities | The Unjournal: project and communication space More information on The Unjournal's roles and how to apply

Now accepting applications for "Unjournal Research Affiliates" (URAs).

Help:

- Improve how research is evaluated.
- Prioritize work with potential global impact.
- Promote open, robust research in quant. social science & economics.

More info & application link: https://bit.ly/3WFInZJ

"Bar is raised because gravity is lower" was a fun sentence to write

YouTube video by Off The Rails FIREWORK MADNESS & CHAOS in BERLIN 2025 NEW YEAR EVE

One could say that Berlin is a city perpetually at war with itself, its identity, its grasp of history, its language. And once a year, this spritual war manifests in the streets. Ancient Chinese weapons, from a more civilized age, are deployed. The goal is only chaos. www.youtube.com/watch?v=16sR...

‘Getting paid to review is justice’: journal pays peer reviewers in cryptocurrency ResearchHub Journal launches latest attempt to compensate referees for their labour.

https://bit.ly/3ZXgOx1 #researchhub

#Unjournal.org agrees: pay people for work, even peer reviewers.

We're committed to paying $450 in average compensation per evaluator, including prizes.

#450movement.

Consider joining our evaluator pool: https://bit.ly/3ZVcYEl

Once again reminded of @rmcelreath.bsky.social's "Science as Amateur Software Development" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qzV...). I know that time is a finite resource, but better coding would definitely be worth it -- it's a genuinely useful skill, outside of academia as well.

YouTube video by Steve Rosenberg Tbilisi, Georgia - our report on a third night of protests

Barricades, beatings and an interview with Georgia's president who - for now - is refusing to step down. Our latest report from Tbilisi for BBC News. Camera: Anton Chicherov Producer @bentavener.bsky.social

Time for a reminder.

Danke!!