D. Hicks
LightNews LightNews
danhicks.bsky.social
D. Hicks
@danhicks.bsky.social
2.9K followers 930 following 6.4K posts
philosopher turned data scientist turned philosopher. enviro policy, data science, phil sci/STS, lefty stuff. UC Merced. they/them. Signal: danhicks.50
Posts Replies Media Videos
danhicks.bsky.social
To: @faineg.bsky.social
Subject: Ass Tree, the tree with an ass
A snag (standing dead tree), very pale, with two growths(?) that look like butt cheeks. It is both thick and thicc.
November 2, 2025 at 1:30 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Though apparently the authors have not heard of a zero-inflated NB model
This analysis was restricted to dates on which at least one transient occurred (n = 310), an analysis that eliminates the substantial bias due to the large number of zero values in the transient data (there were no transients observed on 88.5% of the days in the dataset).
October 29, 2025 at 10:29 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
"No school only Jasper"
A white cat has just stood up from a red rug and is about to smush my phone with his face
October 28, 2025 at 2:46 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
FESTIVE JASPERWEEN BOWTIE
A big white cat wearing a bowtie with orange jack o' lanterns on black
October 26, 2025 at 7:55 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
I bot treets for trixor treetors!!
Three 6x packs of sparkle Play-Doh, 18 full-sized M&Ms, and 24 full-size Sour Patch Kids. I don't get a lot of trick-or-treaters so I give them the best stuff.
October 26, 2025 at 7:47 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
RIP my evals #academicsky
Screenshot of a Google slide. I'll paste the full text below, but basically I'm making the students prepare and deliver a flash talk of a key idea from the assigned reading. Fortunately I designed this class so that the students actually do the reading, and they're going to have like 30 minutes to put together a 3-minute flash talk. Slide title: The Endless Frontier science policy model (169-170) Slide text: Linear model of innovation Social contract between science and society Deficit model of public scientific controversies Value-free or politically neutral policy advice 3-minute, 3-slide, 3-presenter presentation: Explain your element Explain how the tapestry metaphor provides a critique of your element Do you agree with Elliott’s critique? What should we do (instead)? Presenter mode notes ~150 words per slide and there will be a timer
October 20, 2025 at 8:18 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
It's pie time!
A sweet potato and a butternut squash have been sliced in half lengthwise, brushed with oil, and laid out on a baking sheet for roasting
October 19, 2025 at 6:06 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
No kings only #Caturday
A black cat is relaxing on a blue couch and crocheted blue and white blanket. His face is in like 1/3 profile and the light creates some deep shadows on his dark fur.
October 18, 2025 at 8:43 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Happy Friday is Jag Cat
A black cat is laying on his side on a daybed with a flower print sheet. Roughly his lower half is in a nice patch of sunshine from the window behind him.
October 17, 2025 at 9:53 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Another day of getting the youths to corrupt themselves #philsci #philsky #sts
Screenshot of a Google slide. The header is "Which is more important for trust in science: value alignment or objectivity?" Underneath are ad hoc notes from the class discussion, hierarchy indicated using indentation. “100% value alignment” Can’t trust bias/biased science [indent] What does “bias” mean in this argument? [indent] strong opinion? closed-mindedness? in the statistical sense? [indent] non-representative sample Don’t trust (or distrust) the scientist; just go with “the data” [indent] obj: what if you’re too busy or lazy or don’t know how to analyze the data [indent] obj: what if the data collection had bias, e.g., undone science on women and heart attacks
October 17, 2025 at 7:54 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Repost with alt text
If the strengths of A.I. are to truly be harnessed, the tech industry should stop focusing so heavily on these one-size-fits-all tools, and instead concentrate on narrow, specialized A.I. tools engineered for particular problems. Because, frankly, they're often more effective.
October 17, 2025 at 2:14 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Would it surprise you to learn that
Screenshot from the Pangram AI detector, indicating that its model predicts the linked piece is fully AI-generated
October 16, 2025 at 10:09 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
It is time
Screenshot from about 2 seconds into the first episode of Over the Garden Wall. A frog is playing a melancholy song on the piano in a pitch-black void.
October 16, 2025 at 2:16 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
RETVRN
The cover of Hastie et al.'s classic textbook, The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction
October 15, 2025 at 7:43 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
The Jag Cat needs to get ready for Jagoween! #Caturday
A black cat with a green and white radio collar hanging out on some patio furniture
October 11, 2025 at 2:44 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
*sighs in philosopher of science*

Looking for confirmatory evidence is an entirely normal part of science. The primary problem here is the eugenics and the fascism, not the lies to children about "the scientific method."
One Bluesky account is quoting another. Inner post has a video of RFK Jr., some person I don't recognize (Tylenol and autism guy, maybe?), Marco Rubio (I think), and Trump. Post text: "RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: 'It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof." Outer post text: "We're doing studies to prove it (* not how studies work)"
October 10, 2025 at 2:22 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
The people (me) have spoken and they demand (don't have a problem with) Jasper content (taking bad pictures when he's trying to sleep)
A very extreme close up of a cat's face, like from two inches away
October 8, 2025 at 12:09 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Continually blown away by the students in the intro course this semester #philsci #sts
Screenshot of a Google Slide with the title "From Tuesday's exit tickets" and the following four questions: 1. If scientists only report data, who should be responsible for addressing the ethical issues of scientific research and findings? 2. Would we trust scientists more or less if they openly talked about risks or moral questions/concerns? 3. Should scientists in certain fields be required to know ELSI? [Should students in your major be required to take this particular class?] 4. When it comes to the ethics of something, which it is not so obvious that it is unethical [or not,] who gets to [decide]?
October 7, 2025 at 7:27 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Happy Monday love Jasper
A big white cat is all sprawled out in/on a blue cat bed. His head is hanging off of one side, one leg is stretched out beyond the other, and his belly is glorious and fuzzy
October 6, 2025 at 8:22 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Repost with alt text
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Senate STATEMENT FROM THE UC ACADEMIC COUNCIL REGARDING ANY POTENTIAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT With unanimous resolve, the Academic Council makes the following statement regarding the demand letter issued to UCLA by the federal government. We understand that the UC Office of the President has expressed a willingness to engage the federal government in discussion. Ostensibly prompted by alleged Title VI violations, the government's investigation and actions against UCLA must now be understood as part of a systematic and unprecedented campaign to align universities with the politics and perspectives of the Trump administration. At stake is not only our institutional autonomy but the integrity of higher education itself. Press reports-and the examples of the Brown and Columbia agreements-suggest that the federal government is seeking sweeping concessions from UCLA and the UC that could cede control of core university functions to the Trump administration. There can be no clearer attack on academic freedom than an attempt to dictate curricular content, research priorities, hiring decisions, and admissions standards. While the financial penalties threatened by the federal government would in effect radically curtail UC's future, acquiescing in the idea that academic freedom, governance, and mission are negotiable would be equally ruinous. The Academic Council therefore calls on the Office of the President and the UC Board of Regents to unequivocally reject governmental demands that compromise institutional autonomy and academic freedom. The Academic Council further calls on the Office of the President and the UC Board of Regents to formally include the Senate in discussions concerning the terms and parameters of any proposed settlement agreement. [Last couple sentences cut off due to the alt text limit.]
October 4, 2025 at 1:16 AM
danhicks.bsky.social
Second, psychology and behavior genetics have been slower than other human sciences to address their role in scientific racism. Scientists, like everyone else, have a moral obligation to prevent their actions from causing harm. These fields might adopt a restorative justice approach. 13/13
How should psychologists exercise these responsibilities? We believe restorative or repar- ative justice provides a useful model (van Wormer, 2013; Wenzel, Okimoto et al., 2008). Unlike retributive justice (used by almost all criminal justice systems today), the aim of restor- ative justice is to repair the damaged relationships between victims and perpetrators of injus- tice. Typically, restorative justice requires perpetrators to not only acknowledge their actions and the harms that these actions had on victims, but also to work with victims to identify concrete actions that perpetrators can take to redress or mitigate these harms. From this per- spective, explicit apologies for contributions to scientific racism are essential as a first step (American Psychological Association, 2021; Fuentes et al., 2019; Jackson, Turner et al., 2023), but not fully sufficient on their own.
October 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
First, agnotology research often focuses on the circulation of disinformation to or among the public, policymakers, and other extra-scientific groups. But race science was (and arguably still is) circulated *within* scientific communities. 12/13
Screenshot of article text: Understanding the public circulation of race science—its translation into scientific racism—is essential. But our findings suggest that the circulation of race science within the scientific community warrants further investigation. Using the set of race science dis- course articles identified in this project as a starting point, future research might examine patterns of citations or—perhaps by applying large language models (LLMs)—the appearance of certain modes of argument or types of evidence. For example, to what extent have race science discourse articles been cited within nonrace science articles? Do race science dis- course articles appeal to distinctive kinds of evidence, or deploy distinctive modes of interpretation?
October 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
The field of behavior genetics is often associated with race science. And white supremacists have appropriated some human genetics research as scientific racism. So we were surprised to find that the *journal* Behavior Genetics was not an significant venue for either form of race science. 10/13
Screenshot of article text: However, the topic model analysis suggests that, by the 1990s, behavior genetics may have distanced itself somewhat from race science, albeit without directly repudiating it. This interpretation was supported by a supplemental analysis that focused on BG specifically; see Section A.5. For example, the 1995 BGA presidential address by Glayde Whitney—in which he criticized the “Marxist-Lysenkoist denial of genetics” and proposed that differences in murder rates between countries and cities were caused by racial genetic differences in intelligence, empathy, aggression, and impulsivity—was published in MQ rather than BG. Behavior genetics may have been prominent in promoting race science in the past, but appears to have been less receptive to such ideas in more recent history. Instead, our results suggest that other subdisciplines of psychology—perhaps especially cognitive psychology—have provided the primary venue for mainstreaming race science.
October 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Then we used topic modeling, a text mining technique, to classify these 35,000 articles. This allowed us to identify two distinct kinds of race science, and to distinguish it from "mainstream" psychology research. 6/13
Screenshot of a complex, multipanel figure. Caption: Figure 2. Silge plots (Silge & Robinson, 2017) and smoothed time series for three focal topics from the medium vocabulary, k = 40 model. Topics 07 and 24 are examples of the two distinct types of race science discourse, while topic 22 is “mainstream” or nonrace science intel- ligence research. Top row: top 15 terms by β (term-topic distribution) for each topic; text version in Table A2. Bottom row: count of articles associated with each topic, by journal and year. Article counts use a threshold approach, with γ (topic-document distribution) greater than 0.5. Thin lines give annual values, thick lines give 5-year running averages. Because Behavior Genetics and Behavioral and Brain Sciences are not prominent in any panel, neither is given a direct label. Content description: The figure has a grid six panels, two rows of three. The rows of the grid correspond to two different kinds of plots and the columns correspond to topics in the topic model. The upper plots show lists of words with "beta" scores, showing the top 15 terms for each of the three topics. Topic V07 has terms like africa, religion, races, whites, and negroes. Topic V22 has terms like general intelligence, Jensen, confirmatory factor analysis, and fluid intelligence. And topic V24 has terms like whites, blacks, IQ, Jensen, and Lynn. The second row has time series plots, with the number of articles published each year by journal. For topic V07, the only line worth mentioning is Mankind Quarterly, which starts up above 60 papers per year around 1960 and drops down to 15 or so by 1990. For topic V22, mainstream intelligence research, the three major lines are for Personality and Individual Differences, Intelligence, and to a lesser degree Psychological Reports. Topic V24, race-and-intelligence, is also prominent in these same three journals.
October 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM
danhicks.bsky.social
Going further, we downloaded almost 35,000 articles from Mankind Quarterly and 5 mainstream journals in psychology, behavior genetics, and cognitive science 5/13
Screenshot of table A1: Document counts, by journal, and years included in the corpus. Table contents: journal n start end Behavior Genetics 2268 1970 2010 Intelligence 1237 1977 2010 Mankind Quarterly 1821 1960 2004 Personality and Individual Differences 7274 1980 2010 Psychological Reports 21398 1960 2010 Behavioral and Brain Sciences 898 1978 2010
October 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM