Travels
I will be in London from Tuesday (15 July) through the 19th1, and then in Liverpool for ISMB/ECCB2025 and stop at University of Warwick on the 25th before heading back home. Please come say Hi if you
Links
The Medical Evidence Project. For background, “The DECREASE were a family of trials published by a university in the Netherlands [Erasmus University]. They reported that giving patients undergoing major surgery died a lot less (note: a lot less) if they were given beta-blockers. […] Unfortunately, this was also ‘negligent’ and ‘scientifically incorrect’. As the DECREASE trials, but particularly the first one - DECREASE I - were included in a meta-analysis of all of the studies available, the European Society of Cardiology did not explicitly recommend against their use for several years. This killed a lot of people.”
The anti-memorization drive is another classical example of 2nd generation literalism: too much schooling was based on memorization, but we have since taken the critiques of that too far in the other direction. This is a good article on why memorization is important.
A randomised trial shows that using AI makes programmers about 20% slower even while they think they are about 20% faster! A lot of quibbles in the discussion, but it is important that the authors included some pre-registered predictions of this result and neither economists not AI experts got it right. My current views is that LLMs are great, but it’s vital to learn to recognise the tasks where they will perform very well and those where they won’t.2
Tweets
Photo
I will be visiting a few institutions, but a quick Googling didn’t find a public ad for my talks, so I won’t post it here either.