Information manipulation is going to get cheaper much faster than interacting with the world will. I expect that this will lead to the bottleneck in research shifting from production to consumption. We should be preparing for this shift now by building infrastructure that allows us to adjudicate claims and filter work in a world where production is cheap. The current journal system is not well positioned to do this, and so we should be experimenting with new institutions that can.

I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...

I think the issue is that two claims get conflated:

"Statistical learning over massively distributed representations is more similar to neural processing than symbol manipulation is"

"Connectionist / Neural Networks / Deep Learning / Transformer models are just like humans"

Sounds interesting. Have you read any of Greg Egan's stories exploring possible selves? The Infinite Assassin in _Axiomatic_ seems particularly closely related.

The Calvin's dad explaining records meme. He is explaining that the two kinds of meme are Calvin's dad and Loss. Despite being a meme about Calvin's dad, this one is Loss.

AI seems to be the topic of the year — nearly every conversation I have in my role as academic lead for good research practice touches on it in some way. I’d like to lay out my developing thoughts for conversation and critique. (1/7)

a close up of a gollum from the lord of the rings with a very angry look on his face Alt: a close up of a gollum from the lord of the rings with a very angry look on his face

Social media apps as Lord of the Rings characters, a thread:

Twitter: Twitter is Gollum. Began as a normal halfling. Overexposure to evil left it thin and stretched and bitter.

I've been doing a lot of Mad Libs with my son lately, and I thought it would be fun to put one together with a data management theme.

You can complete your own here: cghlewis.github.io/data_mgmt_ma...

Sarah is on a roll 🧵

“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object,” a young representative named Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1848. This was “understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” This quote, incidentally, is immortalized on the House’s website, if any members of Congress are looking for it.

In fairness it’s not like the consequences of having a mad king unilaterally take the country to war on a whim were so incredibly obvious that you could see it coming from the 18th and 19th centuries www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Examples

I just posted a new essay, forthcoming in the Florida Law Review, on Retrospective Surveillance. It focuses on geofence searches and how to assess them, in anticipation of the upcoming huge Supreme Court case on geofences.
Check it out: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

given the modern conservative fascination with Sparta it's at least a little funny that they've engineered a situation in which Persia is able to level a dramatically uneven battlefield by forcing the conflict into a narrow pathway

"There's no we we could do that in the US." 20 years ago there was no way they could do it in France, but here we are.

Do calculus? More like don’t calculus send tweet

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype

is this anything

I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Education and Training for three years before the office was disestablished last year. I owned the policy on professional military education for all five services. I have listened to Secretary Hegseth's announcement. I have thoughts. 🧵

Ok let's do it: "Can this be a solution?" A thread.

Minesweeper but it's the Strait of Hormuz. Source: sweepthestrait.com

always, always check the denominator

Tired: paperclip maximizer problem
Wired: datacenter maximizer problem

We turned away from the light when we invented a way to go online without the computer screaming in warning.

The Capacity of Cognitive Control Estimated from a Perceptual Decision Making Task - PubMed Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quanti …

A comment on Research Gate notes that it is roughly consistent with this calculation of cognitive control capacity as 3-4 bits per second.
The Capacity of Cognitive Control Estimated from a Perceptual Decision Making Task - PubMed share.google/5Y3QyWaol9Oq...

Ok I'm in a rabbit hole. If you search "how many decisions do we make in a day" the reported number is almost always 35,000, often reported that this is according to "multiple sources". Yet I can't actually find a single source that backs up that number. Anyone know where this number comes from?

I have a marvelous proof of the conditions under which an empirical project will be quick and straightforward, but this skeet is too short to contain it.

A long time ago, I used to know a lot about foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) and study them.

I guess that makes me qualified to write a thread about them, especially in wake of Trump bombing Iran.

So here goes nothing. 🧵

A screenshot of a story by Wired, "Inside the Gay Tech Mafia" featuring a bizarre image of a handshake with the hands emerging from within two mens' pans

Let's talk about the history of "the gay mafia" 🧵

My new book on fairies (out next month) deals with homunculi as a kind of fairy - or, at least, as fairy-adjacent beings. I'm just a bit worried that the popularity of 'Small Prophets' could lead to a spate of people trying to make them, without the proper skills or preparation

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

I am. But there are three things at play here regarding ICE collecting private data. Quick rundown on the issue, why you should be paying attention, and what I'm doing about it: