Trial Lawyer. Causation, statistical inference, risk and their use in law. "Dose is the measure of risk and risk is the measure of duty."
Texas
Joined February 2018
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David A. Oliver retweeted
Version 8.2 of the #rstats rms package is now on CRAN. This is a milestone release due to major improvements and extensions of the general-purpose semiparametric modeling function orm, including improved computational accuracy and two types of random effects. Details at hbiostat.org/r/rms #Statistics
David A. Oliver retweeted
The most remarkable thing about a patient I saw today is how unremarkable her life has become.
She's in her late thirties, works as a lawyer, full days in court and in the office. She takes a tablet every morning with breakfast. That's her cancer treatment.
She has a GIST, a rare tumor of the gut. 25 years ago that diagnosis was close to a death sentence once it spread, because chemotherapy did essentially nothing to it.
Then imatinib arrived, built to block the exact faulty switch driving those tumors. One of the first true targeted therapies ever made, and it rewrote the disease almost overnight.
She has some side effects like fatigue, some swollen joints or eyelids and occasionally diarrhea, but we manage and she keeps going.
She travels and argues cases, and most importantly she has a life that has a cancer in it, rather than a life that is about cancer.
David A. Oliver retweeted
Could not agree more with this post by @drjohnm
The Problem of Cheerleading in Medical Science open.substack.com/pub/sensib…
David A. Oliver retweeted
BREAKING: Two helicopters operated by Fishtail Air and Dynasty Air collided while landing at Pheriche helipad in Solukhumbu. Authorities said the helicopters’ rotor blades struck each other during the landing process. Further details about the incident are awaited.
Video ©: Webcam Nepal.
David A. Oliver retweeted
Yes I am very critical
Of chronic pain/disease being diagnosed by checklists. Most people score positive on them. Fatigue, anxiety, fog, depression, non-restorative sleep, etc. I constantly see people misdiagnosed from lack of work up or more often told they have a diagnosis with non cure based on that checklist with no disease or imaging or lab findings.
The checklist experts have empty pubmed searches with no published work showing efficacy, cure or improvement quality of life.
This next post was a brilliant Winnipeg who noted the international sport concussion guidelines only required to check off depressed to be diagnosed as post concussion syndrome
This is pretty cool.
@ResearchHub can you design a small, fundable study comparing handwriting with normal two-handed typing on delayed recall, with matched learning time and material?
David A. Oliver retweeted
My take on Greg Clark's too-hot-for-academic-publishing new book, about why social status runs in families: city-journal.org/article/gre…
David A. Oliver retweeted
Here's an astonishing stat: Just over half of all visas granted to care workers in 2023 were sponsored by employers that have since lost their licences, mostly due to fraud or abuse. That’s ~200,000 people once you include dependants. None of them have had their visas revoked.
David A. Oliver retweeted
The unintended consequences of academic leniency marginalrevolution.com/margi…
David A. Oliver retweeted
A strong contender for most unsettlingly insightful tweet of the year
People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.
David A. Oliver retweeted
🫀 Can coronary atherosclerosis actually regress?
Our new randomized FLOWPROMOTE trial analysis, published TODAY in JAMA Cardiology, shows remarkable coronary plaque regression with intensive LDL-C lowering!
Atherosclerosis is not necessarily a one-way process.
📄 JAMA Cardiology:
doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2…
#Atherosclerosis #LDL #Cardiology #CCTA
David A. Oliver retweeted
Another court this week reiterating that lawyers can't just run a brief through some AI tool for cite-checking and call it a day.
"You have to read the stuff you rely on," i.e., do the very barest minimum of the job description, should not be a controversial take, but I guess that concept makes me a luddite to some.
Today I got an email from an AI business who built a tool to check briefs for hallucinated cites.
In other words, this business is "solving" cite-checking, the easiest part of the job, and the part that takes just minutes to do manually.
To prove their worth, they offered to have me send them two draft briefs before they get filed, and they will give me results within two business days.
So the pitch is "please violate client confidentiality rules and our AI cite checker will get back to you in two days."
Just amazing how out of touch some of these people are.
David A. Oliver retweeted
Unpopular opinion: homeschooling is going to keep growing because a lot of parents are realizing school doesn’t automatically equal education.
If a child can learn faster, sleep more, avoid hours of busywork, and spend more time actually living… why is sitting in a classroom 7 hours a day treated as the only “normal” option?
And before someone says “socialization” — have you met homeschool kids lately?
Convince me traditional school is still the better default.
David A. Oliver retweeted
I have received reports that yesterday's Royal Society meeting, "Mathematics in the Age of AI", was heavy on concerns about "equity" and anti-capitalist sentiment; few speakers had a clear and positive vision of the future.
The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence's recommendation against designating mathematicians for AI Output Releases rests largely on concerns about "delayed or unequal access" within the mathematics community to new results and "biased selection" of experts by AI companies.
Meanwhile, the Association for Human Mathematicians' homepage blathers on about the AI industry's "grave societal, environmental, and economic impacts".
***
One reason why discourse around AI in mathematics has been so poor is academia's lack of political diversity. As has been widely documented, academics are overwhelmingly left-wing. It was not always so, but over the past five decades, the imbalance has grown dramatically.
In my view, these discussions around AI in mathematics, or AI in general, would vastly improve if there were more people in the community who prioritised abundance and freedom over "equity" and inclusion.
Capitalism is a wonderful thing — the greatest engine of prosperity and progress humanity has devised. Yet just as AI companies are spearheading a revolution, anti-capitalist ideology is leading many mathematicians to lose sight of what mathematics is about and why it matters. It is also leading to incoherence from many: railing against inequality in one breath, and against outsiders solving mathematical problems in the next.
I don't think everyone should turn into a classical liberal. I do think that the overwhelming dominance of left-wing progressive ideology in academia has fostered groupthink in policies and public statements for years. Now it is leading to something far worse: an epistemic collapse in parts of the mathematical community.
During the woke years, critical social justice and broader pro-DEI ideals largely left mathematical research itself untouched, even as they did serious damage to the processes around hiring and admissions. But now the prevalence of these illiberal beliefs, particularly among the young, threatens the discipline itself.
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However, I think there is hope. The AI revolution is so profound that it is likely to sweep away much of what now seems entrenched.
Every revolution changes the nature of a calling and whom it calls. As Hodgell wrote, "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
Those who enter mathematics today, and those who choose to stay, will increasingly be those who embrace the revolution and learn to thrive in it.
This may well lead to a natural renewal of the community. Those drawn to mathematics by its new possibilities, together with those who remain, may build something better.
David A. Oliver retweeted
Here, along with Ian Richardson and Ronald Lacey, is a 29 year old Patrick Stewart as Hamlet's Horatio in Clark's 'Civilisation' series (1969). He already looked 55 but still had hair. RIP.
