William Orchard

PhD student | Causality, ML, comp bio @Cambridge_Uni | ex-Applied Scientist Intern @AmazonScience | ex-Visiting researcher @HelmholtzMunich | opinions my own

[Sam Greene @samagreene]

In case anyone forgot: Russia went to war in 2014 to prevent Ukraine from signing a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU.

[Yuchen Zhu @_zhuyuchen]

Long shot but does anyone still need Airbnb for #ICML2025 ? I have booked everything to go but just got diagnosed with an acute disease that now I can't go 😭😭 since not going, the funding body might not reimburse the costs. high appreciate retweeting or contacting re Airbnb 🙏🏻

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@PAHoyeck ...for our observations. When replaced by laws of gravitation, nothing of our observations changed in anyway, we observe epicycles in the same way we always have, but their explanatory power had vanished.

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@PAHoyeck ...any "special" character. For example, that free will as a phenomenon is any different from the decisions made by a preprogrammed piece of computer software. That's all I am trying to illustrate with epicycles: when first proposed, they had special explanatory power...

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@PAHoyeck I think incompatibilists often are saying something similar. They do not deny free will in the sense you describe. They are simply saying that free will can be reduced to causal determinism - as epicycles can be reduced to laws of gravitation. There isn't an "extra" thing on top.

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@PAHoyeck Motion is relative, and a trajectory is simply the path traced by an object in motion. Relative to a stationary Earth, planets do travel on epicycles! The "illusion" follows from our theory of gravity explaining epicycles, but epicycles not explaining other gravitational motion.

[Lena Morrill @MorrillLena]

Featured today by @MSKLibrary: A Dirichlet-multinomial mixed model for determining differential abundance of mutational signatures https://t.co/GyhGplxeto

[Mikhail Spivakov @mikhailspivakov]

❤️‍🔥 Passionate about gene regulation research, wet/dry lab?
🎡 Excited about London's vibrant research and social scene?
🔬 Looking for a funded postdoc position (+ ideally, have the CV & drive to apply for a fellowship in your 1st year)?

Please DM/email me to discuss!

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@freganmitts @WhatsApp I realise you probably already know this, but this troy chap is surely a scam. Five (probable) bots all recommending him within minutes of you tweeting is fishy 🙃

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

Small clip from of me talking about some work I did at @AmazonScience on Root Cause Analysis! I was really happy to have a chance to briefly chat to @AleksanderMolak about this! (and mercifully he's edited out my terrible rambling - so do please check it out!)

[Aylwyn Scally @aylwyn_scally]

This is excellent and well worth reading for an informed opinion on the genetics of intelligence. Other kinds of opinion being abundant on this site.

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@helenarambles Whenever I'm in Oxford I visit this painting. It's really special.

[Zhijing Jin @ZhijingJin]

We will organize a "Causality for LLMs" Tutorial #NeurIPS2024 @NeurIPSConf. Happy to contribute to our community an intro of meaningful topics in Causal LLMs. And super excited for our panel w/ Yoshua, @bschoelkopf @LukeZettlemoyer @_jasonwei @Swarooprm7 @tom4everitt. Stay tuned!

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@AleksanderMolak This is a hint for the real (Pearl) fans 👏

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@predict_addict @SteffPy @lemmein4rds To tell you I'm not willing to debate? Reason enough I think. Hope that helps!

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@SteffPy @lemmein4rds @predict_addict My list was non-exhaustive. Very much has been written over decades on the philosophical questions posed by Pearlian models of causality. It's not simply a matter of "define it however you prefer", there are deep reasons to preferring it over Granger causality.

[William Orchard @williamrorchard]

@SteffPy @lemmein4rds @predict_addict Honestly I am not willing to debate about it here on X. You write "true causality does not exist" as if its trivial what "true causality" is even meant to mean, and then spout off about "mistakes" in a wiki page as if you're the first person to think about it.