Joe Bak-Coleman
Research Scientist at the University of Washington based in Brooklyn. Also: SFI External Applied Fellow, Harvard BKC affiliate. Collective Behavior, Statistics, etc..
- It's interesting to see so many academics take the position they "only learned later" what Epstein had done. Do people not google funders? As early as August 4th, 2006, his wikipedia page included discussion of the charges, and they've been a fixture since. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
- "Steven hawking was in a wheelchair and we thought he was pretty smart" is a wild argument to make in a scientific article. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- There's something truly absurd about a paper blaming science itself for gaps in trust, led by an author whose work was retracted for failing to follow the exact recommendations in the piece. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Comment dit-on “get his ass” en Francais? www.bbc.com/news/article...
- It’s somehow a breath of fresh air to see the obvious stated… peer review requires peers!
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- The guy who vibe coded a crypto rug pull scientific error detection and got coverage in Nature is back with a vibe coded ai social media network, with similarly crypto intentions… getting coverage from major outlets. www.404media.co/exposed-molt...
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- With the deluge of LLM science, it's sooner or later that we have to move to a model of evaluating scientists for promotion and funding on a finite number of papers per year.
- On the bright side, latex generated this way will probably be easier to filter from places like @arxiv.bsky.social
- OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com
- Fantastic morning read. "This leads us to ask whether delegating judgment to LLMs ...transforms it into what we call epistemia... producing the illusion of knowledge when surface plausibility substitutes for evidence-based reasoning." www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
- Home vibe science is killing paper mills. www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/27/1...
- These latex errors feel enough like human generated science to convince me LLMs are sentient.

- SCOOP: Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti WIRED obtained Slack conversations + an updated internal Palantir wiki defending the company's work for ICE to outraged workers. More here: www.wired.com/story/palant...
- I haven't played with this much, but it looks like sort of a "one-quick trick" to ensure computational reproducibility. We could probably skip a couple of decades of science reform re: reproducibility if we could get broader uptake of existing tools like Lix/Nix/etc... lix.systems
- How many LLMs can be persuasive paper are gonna be published in top journals before we remember that yes, people can be persuaded by text? And where was this thinking amidst all the hot takes that social media and misinfo has no causal effects?
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- This is a good step, and I’ve always felt these endorsement mechanisms provide an interesting opportunity for networked sanctions—e.g. you ban the account, suspend their endorser for a bit and withdrawal their endorsement capacity.