Zach Griffen

Sociologist studying expertise, quantification processes, social policy @nyulangone

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

I wrote for @TIME about quantifying life, the history of health economics, and the partisan divide in relying on expertise to inform policy https://t.co/qVobfItpot

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

This is crazy. xAI asked offered $420 to employees who were willing to donate their tax returns to the company for training data (interesting trend here of companies using employees for their own training). But it hasn't paid the employees who did so https://t.co/2r2w0UczM4

[Eric Adams @ericadamsfornyc]

Farm fresh has a whole different meaning in the Middle East. Picking out vegetables for my smoothie that just arrived at the market by horse, straight from the farm.

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

@MatthewSitman Genuinely think I’d rather have just one generic dem incumbent option, trying to parse which one of these guys I’d prefer seems impossible

[Harvard Business Review @HarvardBiz]

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that “psychological debt”—a cluster of six negative effects including cognitive offloading, reduced autonomy, diminished competence, weakened social connection, credibility loss, and identity threat—can materially suppress adoption and erode ROI.

In a survey of 1,200 employees across sectors, higher psychological debt was strongly associated with lower AI usage, less sophisticated application, and greater avoidance—even when employees acknowledged AI’s value. Early-career workers were especially affected, suggesting that AI may be undermining skill development at precisely the stage when it matters most. https://t.co/oyU9uRFUJX

[Trip Gabriel @tripgabriel]

The EPA's independent science arm did groundbreaking research to save lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change etc etc

In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled

Of 1500 scientists, only 124 remain

https://t.co/05bluCvI2c

[Alex Jacquez @AlexSJacquez]

Every day someone will propose a different microdemographic to exempt from taxes until there’s just one brave W-2 employee left

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

@rcobooth speaking of books i'm about to email you a million comments

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

@rcobooth "quality" strikes again lol

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

@gabrielwinant Never forget https://t.co/FlVb4UL5xW

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Breaking news: Multiple scientists who serve on an independent board established to guide the nation’s nearly $9 billion basic science funding agency were terminated from their positions Friday by President Trump. https://t.co/mDTvgns6N8

[Zach Griffen @runzach]

@lint_ax Does he think it costs money to sit on the subway

[Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins @daniel_dsj2110]

“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two people familiar with the initiative.”:
https://t.co/ZIuQblL1qA

[Max Kozlov @maxdkozlov]

If Trump's proposed $6B cut to NIH were enacted in FY27, the NIH estimates that the number of new research grants would drop **47%**

https://t.co/46m9y8jexy

[Arin Dube @arindube]

I see people making jokes about Hampshire college, but if you really think AI is going to push human labor into artisanal task that are hard to automate, you may wish we had more experimental colleges that offered the kind of experience Hampshire College provides.

[Hugo Guerra @HugoCGuerra]

I finally discovered why they are doing this! The new Kindle devices have ads in them, which you have to pay extra to remove them. I’m assuming they couldn’t put ads on the old Kindles. Sooner or later the ads will play every other page! We live in corporate hell now!

[Neil Renic @NC_Renic]

A reminder that in the 2009 movie “Knowing”, Nicholas Cage flashes an MIT badge that simply reads “Academic.”

[Max Kozlov @maxdkozlov]

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is closing its social sciences directorate. Staff will be transferred elsewhere in NSF, and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be kept.

W/ @dangaristo for @Nature

https://t.co/Lakcl0oLYa

[Film at Lincoln Center @FilmLinc]

We're thrilled to announce The Grandmaster: Tony Leung, a 13-film retrospective (taking place April 29-May 7) celebrating one of cinema’s most iconic actors.

View the lineup: https://t.co/MqlfpOyk3i

🎟️ will go on sale on Monday, April 6 at noon, with an early access period for FLC Members beginning on Friday, April 3 at noon.

[Erik Baker @erikmbaker]

First piece from the new issue is a great one – a landmark retheorization of welfare fraud

[Natasha Jaques @natashajaques]

The paper I’ve been most obsessed with lately is finally out: https://t.co/KgdWKknCJK! Check out this beautiful plot: it shows how much LLMs distort human writing when making edits, compared to how humans would revise the same content.

We take a dataset of human-written essays from 2021, before the release of ChatGPT. We compare how people revise draft v1 -> v2 given expert feedback, with how an LLM revises the same v1 given the same feedback. This enables a counterfactual comparison: how much does the LLM alter the essay compared to what the human was originally intending to write? We find LLMs consistently induce massive distortions, even changing the actual meaning and conclusions argued for.