Matthew Russell

I love the scientist mindset at work in Sophie's email. Wiley's policy implies a hypothetical situation which can be falsified only by revising the policy.

It's important to remember that the AI doom scenario assumes not only that intelligence is a single well-defined thing, but also that intelligence solves literally every single problem, and that in every conflict overwhelming intelligence always wins. This is just not how anything works.

sure, sex is great but

My day feels very much like this! Although I only have a cold, Darwin was dealing with worse.

The humanities have been calling out genAI theft since the jump, while STEM has rallied around “discovery potential”. I am *ONCE AGAIN* reminding EVERYONE that science is not the sacred cow, STEM isn’t the exception. They are going to steal our IP, too. We aren’t special.

What does it say about me that my first thought was "deep fry"

Unit geekary is definitely my favourite kind of geekary.

This is an important take. Environmentalism as a generalisation of the principle that one shouldn't defecate in ones own bath water.

Love this framework. Current Me is always furious with Past Me but pushing burdens onto Future Me.

Reading a book before bed is such a dangerous activity. For example, last night: "I'll read a couple chapters." Suddenly it's 1:47 AM and I've negotiated with myself that being tired tomorrow is a problem for Future Me. Future Me is now furious at Past Me. #booksky

You fuckers made me do it. The Racist Academicals Patter Song.

Great little thread. Statistics and experimental design and policy all perfectly covered.

“…as peer reviewers or question askers at conferences, we must accept that our pet issue is not more important than the other 10 issues and if the analyst has had a good go at handling a bunch of issues, we can’t just pile more and more issues on them to fix. It is impossible.”

@rebeccasear.bsky.social Nails it here.

Sometimes society at large rejects certain ideas because they’ve been thoroughly shown to be wrong and also because they suck and the people who espouse them suck and when someone comes around arguing those ideas should be part of some edgy modern debate we can and should shun them and move on.

sorry, you want me to *revise* and then *resubmit* this shit? dog, i sent it to you because i never wanted to see it again

interesting how “correlation is not causation” shifted from a warning about spurious associations to something incurious people say to refute things

Fixed it

Sounds like an excellent system.

Very much relate to this.

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There's a real risk the loony vote will be split in this election.

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

U.S. science is once again subject to a basic confusion between the *observation* of how values shape science versus the *improper influence* of values on science. Federal grant agencies have banned research mentioning gender, equity, and many other politicized topics... 1/ #philsci #scicomm 🧪

No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be. "The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money."

With the climate change emergency gathering pace, the only thing history will remember about this moment is our failure to avert, mitigate and prepare. Future historians, if they exist, are likely to care about little else.

I’ve met Binface, broken bread with him, and though his views on Christopher Nolan films are wrong, he is a good man and would have my vote if I lived in Clacton.

Scientists, especially younger ones, are going to have to come to terms with the idea that “doing science” is no longer enough. We all have to fight for science: what it means, what are its values, and why it matters.

This probably applies to scientific papers as well.

“Scientists should stop trying to be neutral and instead embrace their values,”says a group of top climate scientists, including @katharinehayhoe.com. The neutrality myth is harming the reputation of science right when we need it most.” #ClimateCrisis Science isn’t neutral. It’s science.

UK politics and #rstats visualizations. This is brilliant.

This. Alas, I've double checked everything I'm going to say in the literature. Don't you want to hear about it?

What is up with #copilot in outlook sitting in the cursor on every line!? Begging me to press Alt+i. I already write short concise emails! What could #copilot do but waste my time? Even not using it, it's distracting me. Stupidest thing.

One of the good things about the AI co-scientist brouhaha is that it makes us discuss what science *is*, and how to measure its value, impact, quality. — Questions that have been there all along, but many preferred to gloss over.

Data Management Wisdom

Social media platforms and how academics use them change, but one thing doesn't

Excited to share that my 2025 collection of science-inspired drawings is now live on the Protein Data Bank (PDB) website. Thank you @rcsbpdb.bsky.social! It is free to explore and download. I’d love to hear what you think! pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/bezs...

I always imagined that papers would become quicker to write as I got more experienced with research, but the opposite has happened instead because now I better understand how papers can be improved and spend much more time tweaking and rewriting

The shared excitement over NASA’s recent mission compared to the general indifference to SpaceX missions speaks to the power of something seen as the product of communal human effort rather than just the ego and avarice of one obnoxious dork.

The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.

Very much this. My personal process with #proteomics data is gnu-make with comand line tools to get the data as far as #R, then quarto documents to describe reproducable analysis and figure generation.