Welcome

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It’s been five long years, and I’m now free: free to write blog posts instead of articles for peer-reviewed publication. In an ideal world, not much would change because the ways of exchanging information among scientists would not be dramatically different from the ways that we do so outside of academia. However, we do not yet live in that world, and instead, you can expect the following adjustments:

• I can communicate, format, and order my ideas in ways that are intuitive and optimized for my audience to understand them (with bullet points and links) rather than exclusively through a 15 page document with 5 figures, 40 references, and an introduction section of which 90% is a crude, mandated paraphrasing of prior literature.

• I can disseminate my ideas without going through a fairly arbitrary and counter-productive review process where these ideas are subject to the whims of 2 to 4 experts, selected by an editor with five minutes of thought, all of whom should be assumed to have ulterior motives.

• I can write about whatever I want, express varying degrees of confidence and uncertainty in my ideas, and use methods from other disciplines. I will not be limited to a small subfield of research, siloed off from its academic neighbors.

• I can put two spaces after my period like G*d intended. (Correction: perhaps I cannot… when I copy/paste content from Google Docs into Substack, it automatically removes the second space… *sigh*)

Thus, you should expect a large volume of garbage-quality hot takes that I am extremely unqualified to make. Also maybe a crossword puzzle as a treat every so often.

My first two posts, which should go out over the next couple weeks, will be about the PlasticList initiative and a forecasting competition that I ran last year in my department. I’m still settling on a name for my blog, so right now it’s called “The BS Detector,” BS being my initials of course.

-Ben