Chris Chapman

Chris Chapman

@cchapman.bsky.social

48

Posts

Author "Quantitative User Experience Research" (w/Kerry Rodden), "R | Python for Marketing Research and Analytics" (w/Elea Feit & Jason Schwarz). Principal UX Researcher, Amazon Lab126. Psychologist. Opinions all mine.

Blog at https://quantuxblog.com

Posts Replies Media

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I keep seeing surprised posts "Huh, I went to [insert event, conference, club, on an airplane, the Sphere] and got COVID!" Meanwhile CNN is running headlines saying "COVID-19's Back." Friends, it never, ever went away and I'm still masking in indoor spaces for your protection as well as my own.

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I'd say knocking a lot of doors canvassing here in VA over the past 20 or so years cured me of this. Huge variation in what's on people's minds, but most people think of politics very very little and also often have very weird ideas of how politics connects to their life.

I think a big mistake liberals make is constantly making up an imagined "normal voter" in their heads to triangulate their opinions around. NO! What do YOU THINK? What do THE PEOPLE YOU ACTUALLY KNOW BELIEVE?

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Why would a parent want to offload this “job?” www.cnet.com/tech/service...

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There is never any shame in using the library, and much benefit in doing so. They are the closest thing to an unmitigated social good that we have in these United States, which is why the hard right is gunning so fervently for them these days. A world without libraries and librarians is a poor one.

My book-buying budget is not what it once was, which is precisely why I’m using the library more. It also gives me the opportunity to read books that I’m not sure I want to add to the home library (not that there’s a lot of room to do that anyway).

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I just read an economics paper with only one citation in the 2.5 page introduction (and that one in a footnote to make a very simple point). It's hugely refreshing. In other sciences we need to abandon the norm of "defensive citation" wherein you cite everything by any possible reviewer.

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Shot, chaser

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No room for privacy: How Airbnb fails to protect guests from hidden cameras

How Airbnb fails to protect guests from hidden cameras | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com A CNN investigation finds Airbnb fails to protect its guests against the persistent threat within its industry.

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I allowed students to use ChatGPT in 2023 for an assignment of their choice.. The output (shared thru group discussions) infected the class. The final exam had the worst average ever, by 10 points. It’s not that students didn’t know the answers. It’s that they had “learned” things that were untrue.

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Things are pretty fucked up and the future is uncertain — probably the worst in my lifetime (perhaps excepting 1969 before I can remember). When it’s like that, I like to think about my grandparents and what they faced and got through with the Great Depression and WWII. /1

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was looking for an old photo and found this instead, helpfully

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Calm is also a form of resistance. Call your reps. Support your locals. Focus on getting out the vote. It’s not our job to fix it all, but neither can we turn away.

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The god of possibility has died

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Overturning Chevron is going to usher in an era where self-taught judicial expertise in technical areas such as chemistry, statistics, mechanical engineering, biology, geomorphology, epidemiology, mathematics, and many other fields will once more be able to shine forth as it did in the Middle Ages.

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An update to the fpp3 package for #rstats robjhyndman.com/hyndsight/fp... Lots of new data sets

fpp3 package update – Rob J Hyndmanrobjhyndman.com The fpp3 package has had its first major update since the book was published.

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The fact they think art is content tells you everything. They don't understand the need and pull to create. They think we do this for likes and money. I was 8 when I became obsessed with drawing after watching my mother recreate something on paper with just a pencil. I've been drawing ever since.

“if money was abolished would you still make content?” is the most insane AI bullshit i have ever heard in my life i was making art and drawing way before i was making money for it how fucking corrupt are these pieces of shit? money is barely part of the equation. its only there cause i NEED IT

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According to Leo Szilard's short story The Mark Gable foundation, you don't need sophons to halt the process of scientific discovery — grant funding agencies are entirely adequate. www.gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr/~pierre.como...

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I can't remember a tech campaign this relentless.

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Ted Chiang is the best science fiction writer. My respect to the PEN/Malamud award for recognizing how awesome he is.

Congratulations to our short story writing friend, Ted, the latest short story writer to receive the PEN/Malamud Award! www.penfaulkner.org/2024/06/11/t...

Ted Chiang Wins the 2024 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story | The PEN/Faulkner Foundationwww.penfaulkner.org

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PSA: All #rstats package on #cran will get an official DOI! This will facilitate bibliometrics and giving credit to R package authors. Registering all 20,000+ packages will still take a few more days. But the first couple of thousand are already live. Example:

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My June column for The Engineer looks at the stark realities of living on Mars www.theengineer.co.uk/content/opin...

Sci-Fi Eye: Making Mars habitable - The Engineerwww.theengineer.co.uk There has been a lot of talk about billionaires building bases on the moon or Mars, but how possible is this? Our resident science fiction author Gareth L. Powell takes a look at the engineering chall...

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I once said that all impressive AI feats are just secretly a low-paid human being doing it. And I am humble enough to now admit that's not true. Some of them are just completely made up.

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ahhhh this part of @kjhealy.bsky.social’s *The Ordinal Society* is fantastic

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if you look organizationally at a company like openAI, the best paid and most prestigious jobs are the people designing algorithms to operate over data sets; the COLLECTION of data sets is seen as a cost center and often outsourced. It is regarded as extrinsic or preliminary to the real work.

In order to do good machine learning, more or less, you need to do good supervised learning, and good supervised learning is expensive, difficult, and requires a set of skills that the industry doesn't select for and doesn't possess.

Supervision and truthbuttondown.email A diagram I found online about distinguishing facts and value judgments. Seems easy enough! For more than a decade the dominant training methodology in...

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Hi I’m a psych researcher. My greatest hits include: -p-values can’t tell you that -that definitely won’t replicate -ok but some humans are not US college students -you measured that with a self-report? -your brain images don’t impress me and -sorry that’s not the only plausible mechanism

Hi I'm a fact checker. My greatest hits include: - this is wrong - this is only half right - you've confused this with something else and they're both wrong - this whole entire section is wrong - this one thing is so wrong that your entire premise is now wrong - none of this is right

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You know, when someone says ‘I enjoyed a thing’ you are actually permitted not to reply with a small essay explaining why you did not.

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It’s remarkable that so little, if any, of the discourse around generative AI frames things in terms of the massive negative externalities that these systems generate for education, search, an informed electorate, national security, and even the training of future AI systems.

I wonder how many teachers and professors are going to eventually quit their jobs because the existence of ChatGPT leaches all of the remaining joy out of them.

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Man this shit is just embarrassing. Third largest "industrial greenhouse gas emitter", or, if you actually go to the link offered, third-largest emitter *within the pulp and paper industry* www.npr.org/2024/05/25/1...

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When I see stuff from a certain variety of AI defender and apologist it reminds me of that Upton Sinclair line, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”