Transitional month, although I am not sure what I am transitioning towards. I've spent it mainly in London, house-sitting, with weekend excursions for swims and football on the coast. I'll be in London until the end of June; give me a shout if you're in town. For the ~rest of May, however, I'm interrailing in Switzerland, France, Italy, and more.

some work ideas

Four weeks on, I am still working through the backlog of ideas from the US trip.

I'm trying to write a blog about how we should think about AI slop science. It's slow going. I can never commit to seeing things one way (either through indecisiveness or because my thinking is not up to the task), but this one is particularly tough. What is going to happen to hundreds of thousands of papers written by AI? Even if academic research turns into dead Internet, will the science at large suffer? (Perhaps it's been that way for a while.) Now that anyone can produce a nice paper, will AI make science more or less egalitarian?

I am also thinking about some basic metascientific properties of datasets for BEAR, as I continue to add more results to it. Why is it that in some studies you can draw many papers at random and find that >90% of the statistical claims they make are significant, but in many other systematic databases you may find this number to be less than 1 in 3? How come the estimates of how much publication bias there is in the literature are all over the place? There are many valid explanations, which I hope to cover in some upcoming papers/writing, but what I find surprising is that even when discussing this with some Very Serious People, many either don't have a comprehensive theory or simply haven't thought about it before. "Oh, I thought it's well known that it's 90%." Same for me and my colleagues: I feel our Zoom calls are about finding counterexamples to whatever story we end up telling ourselves. I find it weirdly reassuring, how even "simple" questions can be very complex and people don't have great answers.

Hoping to do more blogging about clinical trials this month.

My favourite sentence of the month was

"how do you stay sane?"

asked by a friend who has had lots of incredibly tough stuff laid on her in the last year. Not that her question meant to imply that I am in a position to give advice on this. But I thought to myself, hey, I am still here, which has to count for something. My reflexive reply was meditation and writing a lot--see last month's entry on why I journal--but I do not like that reply in retrospect.

Maybe it's a character flaw that I am always suspicious of structural critiques. At the same time, I am drawn to a Freudian take on civilisation, although I know little about it. In simple terms (and I do not for one second mean to make light of anyone who is really suffering), I think we are all already mad in a multitude of ways, or we would be if we were to stop and examine our situations carefully. I look at my normal day and it's a constant dance between repression and relaxation, hour by hour. I've been thinking about it a lot, but I do not yet grasp it.

It was Shakespeare's birthday the day I met my friend and someone just recited from memory:

Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings

Offerings

Some book reviews coming next month.

Best cinema of the month.

I went to a gig by one of my favourite artists, Juana Molina, almost ten years on since I last saw her in London. (There is something nice about aging, how time scales expand and attain their appropriate weight. Or is it just that I reach for nostalgia everywhere I go? I went to see Arsenal win the CL semi final in what used to be my local pub, Adam & Eve, and I felt a sudden surge of sensory pleasure stepping into it.)

I saw Copenhagen at Hampstead Theatre. It's finished now, but I think it's one of those plays where it's OK to listen to a radio version or simply read the text if you're curious. I jotted down: "There is something so contrived about this play. The conflict is contrived. Physics delivered by an expositional ramrod and there are some inevitably confusing quantum metaphors. Yet the murkiness of human interaction, decision, morality is conveyed well. So is the joy of science. But then it cannot help itself from trying to resolve the tensions cleanly either."

See you in June