Nic Weber
nmw.bsky.social
Nic Weber
@nmw.bsky.social
Associate Professor @ UW
Computational Social Science
The searchable database of books included in the Anthropic settlement might prove useful for nullifying previous results...

This paper on detecting LLM-generated code trained part of their model on assuming a Java book wasn't in the GPT corpus
November 6, 2025 at 7:55 PM
This is was essentially Tom Griffiths' keynote this morning at COLM
Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.
What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?
October 8, 2025 at 10:04 PM
This is good. Like really good.
September 18, 2025 at 7:49 PM
This is v good
The full write up is here:

Was It Something The Democrats Said?
A Response to Third Way’s Political Language Memo

open.substack.com/pub/dcinboxi...
August 23, 2025 at 10:06 PM
'Examining the effects of birth order on personality' in PNAS -> across multiple controls in three countries (UK, Germany, USA) "...we conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
July 24, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Simulacra is so back!
July 23, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Reposted by Nic Weber
today we will all read imbens 2021 on statistical significance and p values, which is a strong contender for having the best opening paragraph of any stats paper

pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
April 6, 2025 at 2:05 AM
Every department chair rn:
April 4, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Randomized policy experiments are often assumed to be hard, expensive (financially and politically), and disliked by voters...

"Collecting survey data representative of the Dutch electorate, we find clear evidence contradicting this view."

doi.org/10.1093/ej/u...
Who's Afraid of Policy Experiments?
Abstract. In many public policy areas, randomised policy experiments can greatly contribute to our knowledge of the effects of policies and can thus help t
doi.org
February 4, 2025 at 6:17 PM
I joined bsky 1 year ago to follow @electricalwsop.bsky.social ... Hope it turns out better for the rest of you
November 20, 2024 at 10:22 PM