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West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)
observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com
Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
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- 5,987 from 7 Mar 2009 to 30 Oct 2026
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- about daily (263 in the last year)
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Latest
October 2026
- Multi-media Friday -- three videos and a podcast
- The downside of getting hundreds of millions from Elon Musk is that it comes from Elon Musk -- part 3
- Probably the only Herbie Popnecker/aerospace history post you'll read all week
- The downside of getting hundreds of millions from Elon Musk is that it comes from Elon Musk -- part 2
- A bad time to be a prognosticator
- The downside of getting hundreds of millions from Elon Musk is that it comes from Elon Musk
- To be honest, I'm mainly running this one because of the cartoon
- XKCD's Randall Munroe on Data Quality
- Supreme Court Expansion
- Remember what we were saying about a "flying car-shaped object"?
- I think it's fair to say that concern over the AI bubble is no longer a fringe position
- Being able to run for at most fifteen seconds at a time may limit the range a bit.
- I read the Financial Times because of its insightful commentary, in-depth reporting, and because their writers have names like Robin Wigglesworth
- Canaries
- Tom Scott invents the anti-clickbait title
- A Different Level of Consensus
- Monday Tweets
- Weighing in on the latest school debate
- This type of flowchart could be useful for analyzing a wide variety of news stories
- Revenge of the Nerds
- Perhaps unfairly, I decided not to include really knowing Harry Potter plots as relevant expertise
- Sexy Apocalypse
- A Useful Taxonomy of AI Doomers, Accelerationists, and Skeptics
- The Bond Sell-off and the AI Bubble
September 2026
- LLMs may be capable of recursive improvement, but the self part still has a ways to go
- Can we finally put a stake in the heart of the climate benefits of the AI bubble argument?
- The Wall Street Journal sounds a bit concerned.
- Maybe AI getting too smart too quickly is not our most immediate concern.
- Making the case for Ed Zitron as the last of the great bloggers.
- A rationalist, a cynic and an anthropologist walk into a bar...
- That was ugly
- The most important thing to remember about the incident where OpenAI agents went rogue is that it never happened.
- Friday Tweets
- Computer scientist Cal Newport adds some clarity to the AI debate
- Maybe we could just try going back to the old fashioned notion of enforcing laws.
- The timing of Sam Altman's principled stand is a bit suspicious
- Sanewashing Revisited
- Nothing untoward going on here
- It turned out that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella actually could overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse
- It's like something from a science fiction story. (No, it's literally* something from a science fiction novel)
- Coming soon to a theater near you...
- It's Labor Day, so we're taking time off and running a repost
- "An analyst at JP Morgan described the approach as being like paying your mortgage with your credit card, which is unkind, but it's also basically what it is."
- Elites in America
- Will Fusion Fizzle?
- Fusion hype has a familiar ring to it
August 2026
- It is notable that the illustration for the FT article is a literal Pie in the Sky (but given that we're talking about Brits here, it's probably filled with eels or blackbirds or something weird like that)
- Apparently they don't get MeTV in Florida
- Which is weirder, the fact that the president just suggested he might use a military intervention to stabilize the bond market, or the fact that almost no one seemed to notice?
- All roads lead to Cushing*
- Saying something nice about Claude
- October 28, 2016, was arguably the pivotal moment in the career of Elon Musk
- Friday video/podcast recommendations -- Carl Brown edition
- It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
- "I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." --- James Carville (with the mandatory AI angle, of course)
- Cory Doctorow on why centaurs like AI
- Commemorating thirteen years since Elon Musk revolutionized transportation with the hyperloop.
- Sure it's a rerun, but it's got a Frazetta cover.
- LLMs are not nothing.
- Great video but keep your finger over the mute button. Aschenbrenner's laugh will haunt your dreams.
- Not another Cushing post, but Cushing-relevant
- The Ides (ish) of March -- checking in on the Ellison Media Empire
- Not Enron, but not good either.
- Is it a bad sign when people start making Enron comparisons? It seems like a bad sign.
- Why would some of the most profitable companies in the world feel the need to load up on debt? Why would some of the most creditworthy companies in the world borrow money at a higher interest rate?
- “Today is August 4, 2026”
- One of the great things about living in the 2020s is all of the fascinating ethical problems to discuss
July 2026
- Carl Brown explains why being an AI developer is the best job in the whole wide world.
- OpenAI, SoftBank, and Nvidia
- Yesterday's Alarmism is Tomorrow's Consensus
- As always, the important thing is we won't have to cancel HBO Max for at least another month.
- It's not a fear of “AI communism”; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism.
- It's Friday. There's a heatwave. I'm feeling lazy. I'm just going to post some tweets.
- Three video recommendations for the weekend (assuming you're taking Friday off).
- OpenAI needs to capture 1,852% of the total addressable market
- Even less of a done deal—back on the Paramount/Warner beat.
- "The media is important for many, many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that scrutiny is what keeps capital in check, for the benefit of humanity and at times the companies themselves."
- If things get really bad, Ellison can always sell that island back to Hawaii
- We haven't heard much about oil reserves lately. I'm sure everyting's fine.
- As previously mentioned, sometimes it's less about the facts and more about who's saying them.
- A fun little video from science writer and YouTuber Kyle Hill
- A not-so-done deal
- A lack of qualifications is not a qualification and other thoughts on Platner
- A concession to Mark about outsider candidates
- I probably should have worked in a Matrix reference
- The idea of approaching tech narratives as folklore actually works better than it did eight years ago.
- AI doomsters and Dial F for Frankenstein
- Patrick Boyle on the anniversary of Brexit
- Peter Thiel's moments of honesty are largely limited to him saying bitchy things about Elon Musk
- “It really seems like anyone with some renders and a white paper written by someone being gassed up by an overly agreeable AI can get VC funding these days,”
June 2026
- Precarious Times
- If only we had effective, efficient technology to deal with these crises
- Another one of those stories that we really need Patrick Boyle for.
- NBC Blue was known for playing the uncensored version of Fibber McGee and Molly*
- I've been waiting years for a good feral pig story so I would have an excuse to use these two quotes.
- Newport is also the guy who suggested that Anthropic deserved the Nobel Prize in marketing for the Anthropic launch
- The original Cushing oil boom was started in 1912 by a man actually named Tom Slick. Not relevant to the post but I had to mention it.
- Parting shots -- following up on some recent threads
- 1999 AD
- Question for the MBAs in the audience, is losiing $21 billion a year bad?
- If you're going to do a post on index funds...
- Paul Krugman has the perfect metaphor for the career of Elon Musk
- A repost to commemorate Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire
- It turns out that dumb money isn't an unlimited resource...
- Ferguson and the deconstruction of late night
- Admittedly not as entertaining as the George Santos prediction market scandal, but arguably more disturbing.
- It's been ten years.
- "Every fool aspired to be a knave"
- If you had a writers' room brainstorming prediction market stories, someone would pitch this in the first ten minutes. UPDATED
- More feel-good analysis from Patrick Boyle.
- CBS, Byron Allen, and the business of bad television
- I voted this weekend because...
May 2026
- Exponential growth in demand is one of the sustaining assumptions of the AI bubble. This looks like something else
- Apparently insider trading is now illegal
- Hello Goodbye
- Remember that company that everyone with a NASDAQ index fund is about to be forced to buy?
- Memorial Day Repost
- Since ed reform mania died down, we haven't had much call to mention Goodhart's Law
- Nancarrow and McLaren
- More irrational than the shoe company example but admittedly not as embarrassing
- "Tomorrow's just a future yesterday." TV edition
- AI growth and tokenmaxxing
- Only slightly more absurd than some real-life cases
- A great Charles Bronson story.
- A tale told in tweets (Make sure to use the Muppet announcer voice when you read the word "space")
- It's amazing the mileage I get out of some posts
- We laughed at her at the time, but in the age of AI bubble circular financing, Peg Bundy feels like a true visionary.
- ChatGPT still has trouble trouble with rise-over-run
- Remembering the world before the hyperloop -- a continuing series
- The Organization Mad -- Parody as historical snapshot.
- Meta, Microsoft, and other tech giants are losing billions on AI. Can Apple catch up?
- Sixteen years ago at the blog: I'm not wasting time reading old paperbacks; I'm conducting serious research into Cold War political attitudes
- What we're talking about when we talk about the AI bubble
- Generational fairness
April 2026
- I apologize for calling AI a bubble. It is actually a bouncy house, and right now everybody's listening to the blowers.
- Anthropic's Mythos: One moderate step forward for white-hat hacking; one giant leap forward for journalists' credulity
- More context from Devereaux
- Not one of Boyle's funny ones, but we do get the unlikely pairing of Zippy Duvall and (not the) Pablo Escobar.
- I'm sure someone at the studio at some point described this project as Colossus meets Rosemary's Baby
- Ten years ago at the blog when we still considered Watergate the pinnacle of political corruption
- More thoughts on predictive markets
- Patrick Boyle explains why it's illegal to bet on the price of onions but it's OK to bet on the Dodgers' double header
- We need to talk about this clip.
- ET reads the NYT
- Still looks a little bubbly to me.
- Sixteen years ago at the blog: That brief hopeful time when we thought we'd seen the last of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sequels
- Smart people commenting on important things
- We can all agree: spaceflight is cool.
- You thought I was joking about the Iran War going so badly that Trump would start bringing up Epstein as a distraction.
- If podcasts are your thing and you have any interest in the business of AI...
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