- an article on GPT-4 (and open-weight models) predicting the outcomes of 70 preregistered US survey experiments, 469 effects and 119,330 participants in total. The predicted treatment effects are highly correlated with the observed ones, about as well as pooled human forecasters do, including studies published after the training cutoff. But the predicted effect sizes are systematically too large, which is not a minor detail for a field still recovering from its replication crisis! Plus a survey of 460 social scientists about using LLMs for pilot testing, and a web app to “forecast” your own experiment’s effect before running it. (I wonder what a prior elicited this way would look like.)
- a paper on membership inference attacks on medical AI models, showing that patients who differ from the majority are the easiest to identify as part of the training data, which I already discussed here. This fits the long-known issue with differential privacy and outliers.
- a story on the four 2026 Fields Medals, announced at the ICM in Philadelphia, in fields far, far away:
- Yu Deng (Chicago), for his work on PDEs, including a rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics (with Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma), wave kinetic equations, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrödinger equations.
- John Pardon (Stony Brook), for symplectic topology and enumerative geometry. He started as an undergraduate by answering a question of Gromov on knot distortion.
- Jacob Tsimerman (Toronto), for extending techniques within arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry and solving conjectures in this field.
- Hong Wang (NYU and IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, almost a colleague!), for Fourier restriction, progress on Falconer’s conjecture and, with Joshua Zahl, the resolution of the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions.
- a feature on the scientific papers most cited in patents.
- a news item on a Science paper by Blasi, Hamilton, Gray and Bowern, estimating that humanity may have spoken tens of thousands of languages between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. The paper suggests a shift away from nomadic life triggered this diversity before it collapsed. I wonder at how deep the statistical linguistics inferring this rich past from the surviving sample goes. In a sense, the finding is not that surprising, given how isolated small prehistoric communities were, and how quickly a language drifts apart without contact. (I would also like to check how much the estimate depends on the assumed birth-and-death rates of languages, since the lost ones leave no trace to calibrate against…)
- an editorial on the White House’s “new golden age for science” plan. It argues that such a golden age needs open borders and funding for the social sciences, public health and the humanities, not only AI and engineering. Alas, the now usual Trump.2.0 fare, with an AI funding roll-out in the news pages.
- an emergency call by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on why the WHO has never been more needed, and news that the first volunteer received an Ebola vaccine three months into the current outbreak.
- a forecast that the coming El Niño should be the largest (by a mind-blowing margin) on record, pushing 2027 temperatures to new highs. And already having severe impact on tropical weather.
- a scary comment on the risks of nuclear-powered merchant ships, in the very issue dated on the anniversary of Hiroshima…
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