Associate professor at @GWtweets, @SMPAGWU, @GWIDDP, formerly @demjournal, @uchicago.
Washington, DC
Joined September 2009
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Fact-checks improve accuracy. But can they penalize spreaders of misinfo? At @PolBehavior, @jacobausubel, @nnikdav and I show that the answer is yes-sometimes. Unknown misinfo producers can be penalized, but well-known figures get off. Link: link.springer.com/article/10…
Ethan Porter retweeted
Some personal news:
Yesterday was my last day at Microsoft.
Today, I started a brand new job at the FAA and things are going pretty well!
Ethan Porter retweeted
We are so back, baby.
Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets reut.rs/4zuYVVD
Ethan Porter retweeted
Damn. Good on him!
Mississippi Republican Party Chair @MikeHurstMS on whether he would accept a win by Sen. candidate Scott Colom (D): "There is no election-denying going on here. If the laws are followed and the voters spoke, that is it and Mississippi Republicans will accept that."
Ethan Porter retweeted
@pitchforkmedia Looking forward to your writeup of the new @imaginedragons album
Ethan Porter retweeted
Such arguments—positing an existential crisis to which all other considerations must be subordinated—are as old as the American constitutional order. George Washington recognized their danger, and in his Farewell Address warned against "ill-founded jealousies and false alarms."
Ethan Porter retweeted
Fascinated at the idea that Gelman has to be encouraged by external forces to write a "take down piece" on bad statistical inference. He does it for free, every day, for pure love of the game.
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
Ethan Porter retweeted
Out of touch liberal elites don’t understand that for the average American the Cheesecake Factory is the nicest place they can imagine. For these people, sweatpants are like tuxedos. They think of Tweety Bird as a kind of God. Don’t you dare condescend to them.
Ethan Porter retweeted
The #stanfordprisonexperiment is now a reality show on Netflix--but there is a lot of a debate about what really happened in the original study.
For nearly a half century it has been understood to show that assigning people to a toxic role will, on its own, unlock the human capacity to treat others with cruelty.
But when we examined material in the Stanford archives, we found compellingthe evidence that, rather than guards conforming to role of their own accord, experimenters directly encouraged Guards to adopt roles and act tough in a manner consistent with tenets of identity leadership
The History Channel just did a great summary of the original experiment and some of the controversies: history.com/articles/stanfor…
You can read our re-analysis here:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3138…
Ethan Porter retweeted
The AI mathocalypse:
“It feels like something written by someone who’s on psychedelics. So much unclear and doesn’t make sense. Lots of name dropping of previous work without discussing why it can be used despite impossibility results
Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help.”
scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169
Ethan Porter retweeted
Precisely the wrong approach. We don't actually have to give up on papers! New in @chronicle
How to Assign Research Papers Again
Three ways to counter AI and restore confidence in the integrity of student writing (link below)
The head of the philosophy department at Williams College downplays the pedagogical value of writing:
“What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.”
Ethan Porter retweeted
The literacy crisis is real. A friend sent me this: this is an essay that successfully got someone admitted to Harvard.
Ethan Porter retweeted
Everyone needs to update ASAP. If you don't use AI (so you can't detect its characteristic writing patterns yourself) and you don't know about @pangram, you are probably being fooled.
Ethan Porter retweeted
I don’t care about Navier-Stokes. I want to see AI solve the Voynich manuscript.
Ethan Porter retweeted
Notice the role reversal.
Universities, whose comparative advantage is supposed to be basic research with diffuse and uncertain social returns, increasingly justify themselves through "impact," donor appeal, media visibility, and other measurable near-term social outcomes.
Meanwhile, frontier tech companies, whose comparative advantage is commercially useful innovation, spend conspicuous resources on pure intellectual prestige goods. Theorem proving, open math conjectures, fundamental science, benchmarks with obscure immediate commercial value.
Ethan Porter retweeted
This is what happens when you’re so accustomed to the benefits of modernity - sanitation, clean food & water, low infant mortality - that you forget where it all came from, how much effort it took to build, & how bad things were before. This is the literal definition of decadence
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