senior lecturer in statistics @penn

New York & Philadelphia
Joined July 2019
Replying to @karlrohe
"Statistics is too important to be left entirely to statisticians" stat.berkeley.edu/~winston/w…
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Winston Lin retweeted
as a founder of @RefineDotInk, discussion around this new paper is v. interesting! The results confirm that AI reviews are incredible for detailed, actionable feedback to improve a manuscript. If AI is better, should AI replace human review? Quick view from the trenches 1/
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Winston Lin retweeted
And the "right" way to do automated reviewing is to do it centrally, at the journal level. Editors can use it for e.g. desk reject choices. If the editors want reviewers to reflect on the AI review, then they can pass it to them and if they want to preserve more variation across humans then they ask the humans to not use AI (but tell the reviewers that AI said parts x,y,z in the article was fine). Having human reviews use AI on their own probably makes the reviews silently correlated in ways that editor may not understand and this is bad.
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Winston Lin retweeted
The fundamental issue with academic publishing is that 1) it takes a long time, 2) it wastes a lot of human effort in review process, 3) there are still a ton of errors, 4) it is not easy to build on knowledge. All of this is fixable for the first time, ergo we should do it! 2/2
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#statstab #643 Use change scores or control for pre-treatment outcomes? Depends on the true data generating process Thoughts: Holds for unobserved stable confounding #ancova #changescore #baseline #covariates #confounding #DiD #observational #experiment declaredesign.org/blog/posts…
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Peter Diamond: "there is no doubt that following my advice greatly reduced Bob [Hall]’s nevertheless very high citation level" economics.mit.edu/sites/defa…
Bob Hall proved Ricardian equivalence but didn't publish it because he learned from Peter Diamond it "was both well known and wrong" (footnote 5) economics.mit.edu/files/6139
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this is a very generous hypothetical! prizes are few, writers & poets are many, & many deserving -- but-- we are wise to understand: "many are called, few are chosen."
Replying to @dantherriault
Great writers have always been pilloried. I feel that Joyce Carol Oates deserves the prize, and could deal with any hollering from the peanut gallery.
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New in Science: we randomized phone-free classrooms for 16,000+ students across 10 institutions in Odisha, India. Students deposited phones in a box at the start of each class, for a full semester.
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Thinking more seriously about the design of exploratory studies: A manifesto statmodeling.stat.columbia.e…
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Our new preprint discusses how to interpret P-values and CIs as measures of compatibility between data and hypotheses given the chosen method and its assumptions; it also briefly presents the corresponding Bayesian perspective. Real examples are provided osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/6…
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Winston Lin retweeted
My latest investigation: Inside Google's AI Push Into American Schools "It Slowed My Thinking Down." Students are becoming academically and emotionally dependent on AI, in large part thanks to Google's push in schools. Gift link: wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai-ge…
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Winston Lin retweeted
AI-voice is fine if your reader has a reasonable expectation to think they are reading an AI description of your ideas. If they don't have that expectation, you are tricking them into reading something more closely than they would otherwise. 3/
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Winston Lin retweeted
It's important to learn math not because you may need to do long division as an adult, but because it promotes rigorous thinking. IMO, history and causal inference are among the most important subjects a young person can study — math being central to the second. A significant problem in public discourse right now is people's inability to critically evaluate causal claims (e.g., vaccines cause autism, deporting immigrants will solve the housing crisis, etc.). The less able people are to critically evaluate causal claims, the worse our democracy functions because people can be preyed upon for votes. You should promote anything that improves rigorous thinking, even if it doesn't have market value. In fact, we should stop thinking of education only in the context of what improves the economy. IMO, this is distinct from knowing your own address (which Huang can avoid because he's wealthy). Memorizing facts like this may or may not be important, but it's distinct from rigorous thinking.
HUANG: “.. Try getting a kid to do long division right now. Multiplication tables are starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. .. .. Does it matter? .. I don’t think it does.” @ezraklein @JensenHuang
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Winston Lin retweeted
Pretty much at every academic event I went to in the last year, I end up talking to others about how to change teaching in response to AI. Since I keep repeating myself, I figured I might just as well write down what we have been doing: thelastsoftwareengineer.subs…
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Students sometimes tell me they’re applying to PhD programs as a backup in case they don’t get a job as a software engineer or whatever. I get that the job market is rough but this is like saying you’ll start a company if you don’t find a job. Like starting a company, a PhD is the far *more* risky path and requires incredible grit over a long period. It isn’t just that you might realize after a couple of years that a PhD isn’t for you. The bigger risk is that you complete a PhD but end up overqualified on a niche topic after having spent 5-7 years on it. The research world, like acting, sports, music, or book publishing, is set up as a tournament, with lots of extremely competent people competing for a small number of highly desirable slots. We can talk about whether that’s fair and whether it’s inherent or can be changed, but as a professor I feel the least I can do is loudly and repeatedly warn people about what they’re getting into.
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Columbia has prohibited the use of electronic devices in all Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization sections starting this fall, 12 syllabi for the courses reviewed by Spectator show and a Columbia College spokesperson confirmed. columbiaspectator.com/news/2…
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In class two years ago, I said "once you prove one direction" but the auto-generated caption says "once you choose One Direction" :)
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Replying to @stuartbuck1
I tried, with perhaps modest success, to discuss this problem here, a decade ago. My thinking really hasn’t changed. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2710…
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Winston Lin retweeted
"AI has driven a dagger through our scientific profession." Enjoyed reading this column from Po-Ling Loh on mathematical statistics research in the age of AI.
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The whole new retweets tab thing is such a profound misunderstanding of the retweet itself. When I retweet a post, it’s because I love it as if it were my own.
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Apropos of nothing, I really like Chris Harshaw's comment "Why are RCTs the Gold Standard? The Epistemological Difference Between Randomized Experiments and Observational Studies" in @ObservStudies (2025) muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/…
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