Eric J. Pedersen | Lightnews

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · 4d

I second this; I find the most useful way to teach HW is by saying what question it was proposed to solve: do gene frequencies change in the absence of evolutionary forces?

Students often think that dominant traits will become more common on their own, which HW was meant to dispell

Carly Ziter @carlyziter.bsky.social · 8d

Really enjoying #BES2025. Things I appreciate:
- Morning plenaries (gets people in on time, doesn’t leave morning speakers w/ empty rooms)
- Good length coffee breaks (30 min!)
- Vegan lunch served on site
- Posters across all career stages & spread across rooms
- Strong presence of journals/editors

Nordic Society Oikos @nordicoikos.bsky.social · 9d

What's on your #BES2025 schedule today? We will be at the How to get published-workshop together with the @britishecologicalsociety.org and the @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social to talk about just that! And if you can't make it today, the same workshop is taking place tomorrow.

Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · Nov 22

"It may be uncomfortable to conclude that a widely used study design has been producing spurious results. But the evidence is in, and telling uncomfortable truths is a part of doing science."

Problems with twin studies.

theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missin...

The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered

Not with a bang but with a whimper

theinfinitesimal.substack.com

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Nov 12

I'm happy to answer hgam questions here! If you emailed me with questions already, my apologies for missing it

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Nov 11

The saddest thing here is that Musk doesn't recognize that he is clearly Saruman: a weak man corrupted by visions of technology and manipulated by the greater powers of evil, then discarded when he stops being useful

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Nov 11

Is it too much to ask for them to just show Bond's regeneration process on screen one time?

a man in a suit and tie holds up his hand in front of a wall with bbc written on it

Alt: A gif of David Tennant as Dr. Who starting his transformation sequence into the next doctor, with glowing particle effects coming out of his hands

media.tenor.com

Nick Harkaway @nickharkaway.com · Nov 11

Explanations that hew to realism in a universe like this can make things worse, because they require you to examine a sequence of events which is secretly not entirely sensible in the first place.

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Nov 7

I wasn't going to repost this until he mentioned his melancholy

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · Nov 6

This is abhorrent and repugnant. It’s further evidence of the vile and pernicious nature of these awful platforms. It makes me furious, incendiary with rage. Causes me to fall into deep sadness, melancholy and depression.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · Nov 5

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13%

Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006)

The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%).
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · Nov 6

This is abhorrent and repugnant. It’s further evidence of the vile and pernicious nature of these awful platforms. It makes me furious, incendiary with rage. Causes me to fall into deep sadness, melancholy and depression.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · Nov 5

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13%

Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006)

The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%).
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 21

In a similar low-fantasy procedural vein there's "The Witness for the Dead" and "The Grief of Stones" by Katherine Addison. Set in the same world as my favorite political thriller, "The Goblin Emperor"

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 21

Obsidian and Blood series by Aliette de Bodard: police procedural set in pre-contact Tenochtitlan where the investigator is the High Priest for the Dead, and has to deal with both murder and overly interested gods

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 20

The nth generation of species inventing paleontology would be increasingly confused by the horizons of acrylics in the rock record.

Then their chemists invented their own plastics and they suddenly got scared

International Initiative for Theoretical Ecology @iite-ecotheory.bsky.social · Oct 20

📣Tomorrow our next series of online seminars restarts: Chris Klausmeier (MSU) will present:

⭐Microbial cross-feeding: coexistence and collapse, spatial patterns and population cycles⭐

Free and open to all:
Zoom link: iite.info/seminar/
Global Times: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f...

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 16

I hope it comes with a little toga you can pull over it's head

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 16

And the Michaelis-Menten model is the same one we use in ecology to model type-II predator functional responses! Enzymes function a lot like predators, "feeding" on reactants

Frances Separovic @francesbiophys.bsky.social · Oct 16

Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience

Frances Separovic @francesbiophys.bsky.social · Oct 16

Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Oct 1

Similar energy here

Smeagol holding the ring, looking pallid, sickly, and deranged

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 21

That makes sense. Also, probably not worth the effort to improve estimates of "average belief" anyway: as you noted in the post the estimand likely doesn't exist.

Before today I doubt that I had a number in my mind for "fraction of people who own guns", so I'd have to estimate it at survey time

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 21

I also wonder about incentives for YouGov here: I would guess it would look better if they reported median rather than mean responses at least for correcting for random answers, but "people think 10% of all people are trans" would likely get many fewer headlines

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 21

Thanks for writing this! Adding this to my intro stats reading list.

Is there any work looking at whether people are better at estimating proportions when asked about concrete frequencies (e.g. "how many Americans out of 100 Americans own a car?".

Seems related to this:
doi.org/10.1016/0010...

Redirecting

doi.org

Danielle Navarro @djnavarro.net · Sep 21

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch

For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic

blog.djnavarro.net

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 14

I've played mycelia once and enjoyed it. It does feel like you're playing as a fungus in a forest community. I found its strategy a bit hard to get on first play, though, and it's definitely a "crunchy" game

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 14

Undergrove is fantastic: you play as Douglas Fir trees trading resources with fungi to grow seedlings. By the same designer as Wingspan, and both very fun to play and incredibly well-researched

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 4

I keep meaning to learn targets, but it's just complex enough that I end up doing things like the hash trick because I'm short on time for a given project

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 4

In one recent project I ended up with a function that checks the hash of the data, the simulation file, and the saved output, then only reran the costly sims if the calculated hashes didn't match the ones in the saved sim file.

Do not ask what lengths I'll go to to avoid relearning make files

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 2

Of course, Icarus is the OG failson

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 1

(important disclaimer: I don't hold any special knowledge or expertise in Cree stories, that's just my impression from reading English language versions of some of them)

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 1

Although you could see Weesageechak as a war god who is also occasionally a bumbling idiot for comedic effect

Eric Pedersen @ericjpedersen.bsky.social · Sep 1

A lot of trickster stories from many cultures have that kind of vibe for some of the stories, but the trickster is generally never depicted as a bumbling idiot across multiple stories

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