🎓 Assistant Professor @UniLeiden. Affiliated Researcher @LeidenDH. PhD @UofT_PolSci. 👨‍🔧Techno-optimist.

Leiden, the Netherlands
Joined September 2009
Steven Denney retweeted
New Anthropic research: How AI agents shape experts' judgment calls When experts delegate work to an agent, do they still make the key decisions? We tested this in a randomized trial with 50 professional data analysts.
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Steven Denney retweeted
For many young people whose brains have been thoroughly rotted by TikTok, Snapchat, and the like--it is quite hard, yes. And we as educators must ask them to do the hard thing rather than give them the customer what they think they want.
This is a display at Barnes & Noble. If reading books now qualifies as “doing hard things,” we are really in trouble as a society.
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Steven Denney retweeted
Out today in Nature Human Behaviour: our review of large language models in computational social science, with @xu_fengli, @yongli and colleagues at @Tsinghua_Uni, @hkust & @MSFTResearch Asia. A thread on what we found, including where the field is fooling itself. Read @ doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-0…
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Steven Denney retweeted
People in rich countries are unhappy. In the US they're truly miserable. Sentiment fell more in the US since 2019 than any other country. US sentiment at the 0th percentile of pre-COVID history, others generally around 25th percentile. And our economy doing better than most!
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It’s a shame that we’re not making better use of AI’s amazing fact-checking and argument-checking abilities. Platforms or third parties should build better tools that identify BS immediately and saliently.
Replying to @littmath
Tbh a lot of commentators on here are also basically cranks. You can even check this yourself by asking a strong model about their comments around math/physics.
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Steven Denney retweeted
Replying to @giannis_daras
Everything at the end will look like a Nature/PNAS paper: a quick 6-pager for humans, and a humongous 150-page supplement with all possible experiments and analyses (mainly for the machines to read and review). Together with an automatic verification/reproducibility package that ensures that whatever the paper says is verifiable. And at the end everything will seem like before, but underneath everything will have changed.
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Steven Denney retweeted
We benchmarked 17 open OCR models on OmniParseBench, our new OCR benchmark that builds on AllenAI's olmOCR-bench.
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Steven Denney retweeted
Everyone: "Vibe coding is causing all these security bugs" Reality: PHP, Node, Linux kernel, GitLab. All hand-written code by humans, some of it 20 years old. AI isn't creating the slop. It's finding it đź« 
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Stop with the sensationalism. It’s not “over”. Good grief.
It's over. The higher ed dam has broken: Clemson is offering a voluntary separation program (VSP) to 452 eligible faculty and staff. Eligible employees who accept the offer will receive a lump-sum payment equal to nine months of their base pay.
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Steven Denney retweeted
This paper is what I have been yelling about for a few years now: the true danger in empirical social sciences is more often "researchers degrees of freedom" in design, data curation, measurement, choice of method. The big threat is not outright fraud or p-hacking (although these are problems) or even biases against publishing null results. Its those hundreds of small choices researchers make when preparing their papers -- none of which are sins of omission or commission. They're good faith human decisions with no malice. Yet, two equally good faith moves can generate different results. This apparently forthcoming paper in Journal of Economic Literature asked 146 research teams to estimate the same causal effect using the same underlying data. In unconstrained setups, they arrived at massively different results. Even in more constrained setups (with more directives), they showed differences. All of which came from picking the design and curating the data (cleaning). Huge! I would reformulate the problem as unexamined researcher degrees of freedom, rather than methodological freedom itself! Indeed, what we need is a strong contestability (and good faith) to point out what could be happening.
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Steven Denney retweeted
as a founder of @RefineDotInk, discussion around this new paper is v. interesting! The results confirm that AI reviews are incredible for detailed, actionable feedback to improve a manuscript. If AI is better, should AI replace human review? Quick view from the trenches 1/
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Steven Denney retweeted
AI is the most transformative technology of our era. That opens up an exciting set of Research opportunities. @professor_ajay, @akorinek and I lay out nine grand challenges for economists in this new essay.
Transformative AI's potential impact demands new approaches to research on work, growth, inequality, and more. @erikbryn, @professor_ajay, and @akorinek outline nine "grand challenges" in a new piece for @CACMmag. Read their full agenda here: cacm.acm.org/research/a-rese…
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Steven Denney retweeted
We should rethink the role of human judgment in the review process. Human expert should have a role, but it's no longer about writing 1,500-word essays to summarize findings, check proofs, and so on. On top of that, any journal that forbids AI usage in the review process should reconsider their position.
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Many measures of AI exposure ask what AI can do. This paper asks a different question: where could AI make the remaining human work more valuable? This is an important distinction. The same task can become a bottleneck in one occupation and not another. Looking inside jobs may tell us much more than assigning an exposure score to the occupation as a whole. This is something my team is working on and I love seeing other studies working on it as well.
Very happy to share a new paper, “Technology Bottlenecks: Measuring Where AI Could Raise the Value of Work It Cannot Yet Do.” AI exposure measures ask about the work AI is capable of doing. We ask instead where the marginal value of work AI cannot yet do may rise as AI speeds up the rest of the job. To do so, we employ 288 million U.S. job postings mapped line by line to their closest O*NET tasks and GPT-4 feasibility ratings from Eloundou et al. (2024) to construct a measure, “bottleneck pressure,” for each task in each occupation that posts it. Using a simple task-based framework, we derive this pressure at the task level, showing that for an AI-infeasible task it is the exposure of the occupation that posts it, so the same task can face very different bottleneck pressure in different jobs. Reporting bottleneck pressure alongside AI exposure shows both the scope for AI to perform work and where improving the work it cannot do may pay off more as capabilities expand.
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Steven Denney retweeted
In reality the "crisis" is people staying home and convincing themselves of this, when in the real world nothing is more affordable than going over to your friend's house and hanging out. slowboring.com/p/americans-n…
We CANNOT even afford hobbies. We CANNOT afford to go out with friends. We CANNOT afford to exist anywhere outside our homes. They then call it a mental health crisis. It's not. It's an affordability crisis.
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Here is what all fields look like for PhD production based on Survey of Earned Doctorates. Since 2015 (shaded part), humanities and arts are down, but so are business, education, social sciences (non-psych). On the whole, PhD production continues to rise.
The number of people writing dissertations in the humanities has collapses, now the same thing is happening in the social sciences. I'd wager that we will see a similar trend in psychology and other fields before long. Cuts in funding, the tight academic job market, and AI are rapidly changing the university and cratering graduate programs.
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Steven Denney retweeted
It also gets more energy from sunlight w/o the atmospheric interference. It’s actually a huge technical challenge for the chips to not overheat, survive the trip to orbit, etc. I watched a talk about how the team did it—there needs to be a movie made about the effort. What a trip.
Why is Google putting AI chips in orbit? Because up there, a solar panel almost never sees night. Our latest drop lets you design the satellite’s orbit yourself, and race a ground panel against one in space. Try Tromsø in December. Built with @Lovable drops.mts.now/suncatcher/
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Steven Denney retweeted
We gave GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 open-ended AI research questions from unpublished papers, with a $10,000 budget each, and had the original authors grade the papers they produced. Compared to our first tests with Claude Opus 4.8 in July, we saw meaningful improvements in experimental design and resource management, but persistent limitations in creative problem solving, judgment, calibration, and communication; both papers were rejected by our experts. cruxevals.com/research-notes…
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Steven Denney retweeted
My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live & work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you. (And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's website: co-existence.ai/)
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