RE: https://flipboard.com/@wsj/business-b1985f4jz/-/a-T6_YAnIFSTSuzZdNlac-EA%3Aa%3A248213600-%2F0

“Instead of paying humans to join focus groups and complete surveys, #Auru uses thousands of #AI agents, or bots, to simulate human responses. It feeds #demographic and psychographic information into its models to create human profiles that match clients’ needs, and the results those bots spit out are being used for product #development, #pricing, identifying new customers and political #polling.”

Researchers have warned about the inaccuracies of treating #LLMs as human proxies (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-025-11297-5), but I wouldn’t be surprised #languageModels beat #qualitative interpretation of non-representative focus groups.

#marketing #psychometrics #statistics #quantMethods #philSci #metascience #business

📯How can contradiction, ambiguity & missingness enrich historical interpretation? Join us at #DigitalHistoryOFK as Claire Lemercier (CNRS) presents "In Defence of Dirty Data. Standardization, Source Criticism, and Digital/Quantitative History". A reflection on source criticism and DIY quantitative history.

📅 17 Dec., 4.15–5.45pm (CET)
ℹ️ Details:

#DigitalHistory #4memory #QuantMethods #DataCriticism
@historikerinnen @histodons @digitalhumanities

Can #video surveys better test whether conventional surveys measured what we thought?

A #philosophy YouTuber presented thought experiments and viewers responded in a survey. The presenter emphasized the key points. Only 3-15% of participants didn’t comprehend as intended (and were excluded from #dataAnalysis).

Comprehenders’ data suggest that conventional survey results weren't “the mere product of a comprehension error.”

https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2299755

#xPhi #QuantMethods #psychology #video #ethics

How should #education and #science adapt in the #AI boom? My latest thoughts 👇

https://medium.com/authority-magazine/dr-nick-byrd-of-stevens-institute-of-technology-how-ai-is-disrupting-our-industry-and-what-we-can-7e087e90d15d

It started as a grumpy list of #academic misconceptions about #LLMs. That list largely survived, but — thanks to questions from #AuthorityMagazine — I considered broader and more productive points as well, like the academic job market.

More topics:
#Logic
#Psychology
#QuantMethods
#higherEd
#teaching
#writing
#argumentMapping
#jobMarket
#ethics
#risk
#quotes
[more]

The bad news: research typically visualizes *either* statistical test uncertainty (e.g., confidence intervals) *or* data variability (e.g., the distribution of data), but medical professionals, data scientists, and tenure track faculty reliably misinterpreted those.

The good news: Visualizing *both* more or less eliminated experts’ misunderstanding of the visualization.

#OpenAccess in PNAS: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302491120

#decisionScience #dataViz #metascience #QuantMethods #PhilSci #Epistemology

I've updated my SADI repository of #Stata code for life-course sequence analysis to cope with Stata 18.

No major changes, but if you are using Stata 18 it is worth updating:

. net from https://teaching.sociology.ul.ie/sadi
. net install sadi
. net get sadi

Then run distances.do to test.

#lifecourse #quantmethods #datascience #sequenceanalysis #sociology

I've updated my #Stata cluster utilities

These utilities add to Stata's cluster capabilities, particularly when clustering from a distance matrix, rather than variables. Stata's "cluster stop" commands do not work in the manner you might expect with distance matrices.

The updates are mainly minor changes to keep up with newer versions of Stata. #clusteranalysis #sociology #quantmethods #datascience

Install:
. net from https://teaching.sociology.ul.ie/statacode
. net install clutils