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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2m

I saw your follow ups re rickroll but would also say this is solved by authors ignoring submission guidelines, submitting papers how they want them formatted and telling journals that they'll format as required if accepted...

Reposted by Alex Sutherland

Elisabeth Parés Pujolràs @epares.bsky.social · Sep 13

Excellent piece.

We know how to improve writing ability: it's by doing more, not less of it.

"LLMs do not improve one’s writing ability much like taking a taxi does not improve one’s driving ability. Students should hone their writing, thinking, and other academic skills at every opportunity."

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 13h

Everyone agrees that we're currently in a dotcom era-like AI bubble. People disagree what sort of bubble it is.

There are 3 stories one can tell about the dotcom crash: a startup story, a telecom story, and an accounting fraud story.

My take: it's giving Enron
open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

It's Giving Enron

On the AI bubble, and the various echoes of the dotcom crash

open.substack.com

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 13h

the capital flight issue isn't substantiated is it? Or are you thinking they can just minimise in different ways so it'll be expensive Vs the tax take?

Reposted by Alex Sutherland

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 15h

"Dunbar's Number" is a zombie that lives forever in the science press it seems. Estimates of Dunbar's Number with 95% intervals, for a range of model specifications (from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl... ):

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Reposted by Alex Sutherland

Gabriel Geiger @gabrielgeiger.bsky.social · 16h

On a Saturday night I stumbled across something on the internet that made me feel like ****** my pants. A giant dataset of real surveillance operations targeting 1000s of people across nearly every country. Unraveling it and the mysterious company behind it has consumed 1.5 years of my life

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 14h

It would at least stop SOME of the junk - esp quant - research in crim journals from being published eg "oh but hey it's not causal...but here's how it is causal" and what you don't see are the 500 attempts to find p<0.05

(Plus those "matey" papers that somehow get published even though they're 💩)

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Kate Clancy @kateclancy.bsky.social · 19h

I am being asked to tell my department which pieces of lab equipment should be supported with backup power because they expect rolling blackouts and brownouts in 2026 due to increased energy demands from AI. In case you're wondering how my day is going.

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 16h

Was any explanation given for the re-review? If not 💩💩💩

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 16h

I'd like "screamingly obvious Streisand effect" for 10 please.

Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot.bsky.social · 18h

Read this sorry story about how an academic was axed from conference panels because he was deemed too interesting.

He was told no one on the panel was expected to air difficult opinions in front of MPs that could damage the oil and gas sector

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Academic axed from Labour conference panel for criticising energy policy

Sustainability expert was told panellists discussing North Sea oil and gas were meant to ‘agree entirely’ with each other

www.theguardian.com

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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 1d

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved.

Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning.

ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

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Nick Brown @steamtraen.eu · 1d

Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...

In 1916 the BMJ published an article about the work done by James Shearer, an American physician working in the British Army as a sergeant (because he had no British qualification). He had described a
"delineator" which was better than x rays for portraying gunshot wounds. This caused a sensation and a lot of interest — but on investigation the work was found to have been invented. The BMJ published a retraction, but Shearer was tried by court martial and sentenced to death by firing squad.

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 1d

New one for me (novelty far outweighs inconvenience) for train delay:

"Horses on the track"

a close up of a white horse wearing a bridle and reins

ALT: a close up of a white horse wearing a bridle and reins

media.tenor.com

Reposted by Alex Sutherland

Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social · 1d

In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.

Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are

Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.

www.theatlantic.com

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 1d

Lol. Old remembered phone numbers. Hard wired into muscle memory from circular telephone dials.

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 1d

Literal survivor bias in action.

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Georgia Tomova @georgiatomova.bsky.social · 1d

“Results trended towards significance”

Peter Tennant @pwgtennant.bsky.social · 3d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand:

"Statistical analysis used SPSS"

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 5d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

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Reposted by Alex Sutherland

Sam Sims @drsamsims.bsky.social · 1d

Joel Mokyr won the Nobel prize today

Here is what I think he can teach us about improving schools:

samsims.education/2022/06/08/e...

Evidence, expertise, and the self-improving school system

(9 minute read) Rob Coe used his 2013 inaugural lecture at Durham to survey the evidence on long-run change in the performance of the English school system. He concluded that standards had not impr…

samsims.education

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

Hmmm I think many more of us would be dead because of all the killer radio waves?

Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

Yeah, and beyond 50% it starts to be "you sure? Really?".

Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

Yep. Heritability is what, 30-50% depending on which study(?) so that's a lot of room for other things.

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

I'm still wondering whether I'm supposed to be impressed or skeptical about the sample size. The provenance etc is what it is.

And as to the earlier point about 19 studies - they extracted data from 19 different studies. It's not like a combination of data from those studies.

so: N=87

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

Yes but I thought that they'd pulled data for the 87 twin pairs from those studies and ignored the rest?

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

"No, you're teaching today"

Nico Trajtenberg 🐝 @nicotrajtenberg.bsky.social · 2d

Essays/assignments ready for marking

Marjorie James Keenan @unenthusiast.com · 3d

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand.

rm -rf ~/

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Alex Sutherland @criminologist.bsky.social · 2d

Better than

"Statistical analysis used vibes"

'cos that's still a thing too!

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