I’m launching a new newsletter. Welcome!
This post will be a short one, given that it’s just an introduction.
Who am I?
I’m an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, where I split my time between the Cognitive Science department and the Computational Social Sciences program.
What is this for?
I love writing about topics that are both interesting (at least to me) and useful (defined broadly). In this newsletter, I’ll aim to write essays that lie in the intersection of those properties.
You can expect posts on topics that I have a fair degree of familiarity or expertise in, such as:
Language and cognition
Statistics and scientific practice
Artificial Intelligence and society
But there’ll be some more speculative topics thrown in the mix as well.
Additionally, posts will come in one of several flavors:
Research Reviews: a summary of recent research on a topic––usually something in the realm of Cognitive Science (e.g., language evolution, psycholinguistics, etc.).
Speculative Columns: as the name implies, these posts will go beyond what’s known already and try to make speculations about the future––likely something about how technology can or will shape society.
Statistics Explainers and Opinions: descriptions of particular statistical methods (e.g., here), with an emphasis on the implications for scientific practice (e.g., here).
Why Substack?
Before this, I was writing semi-regular posts in Markdown and publishing them here on GitHub. This worked pretty well, but Substack has a couple key benefits over that approach:
The text editor is much cleaner. Markdown is fine, but I admittedly made many more typos than I would’ve liked––and writing essays in Sublime is just not as nice as the Substack editor.
Everyone is doing it. I like that Substack offers a ready-made network of other writers (and readers), and tools for tracking readership and so on.