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Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
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20 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
This brilliant, far-too-polite article should be the go-to reference for why "follow the science" is utterly vacuous. The science of aerosol transmission was there all along. It could have stopped covid. But CDC/WHO didn't follow the science. Nor did scientists for the most part.
The party line among scientists and science communicators is that science "self corrects". Indeed it does, but on a glacial timescale with often disastrous policy consequences. Our refusal to admit this further undermines public trust in science.
See also @Zeynep's excoriation of public health agencies, including the comparison of their covid responses with the way 19th century Londoners afraid of "miasma" redirected sewers into the Thames, spreading Cholera even more nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opi…
The persistence of the "5 micron" error in the scientific consensus reminds me of a fascinating urban legend involving spinach and iron, except of course millions of people died this time.

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More from @random_walker

Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
17 May
The "tech" part of tech companies has gotten easier while understanding its social impacts has gotten much harder. This trend will only accelerate. Yet most tech co's have resisted viewing ethics as a core competency. Major changes are needed, whether from the inside or outside.
I love pithy analogies but this one breaks down quickly. The world will be better off without fossil fuels. But a world without computing technology is outside the Overton window. Like it or not, we must work to reform the tech industry.
I like it. I'd love to read a detailed take on what tech activism can learn from food and environmental activism.
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
3 May
35 million U.S. phone numbers are disconnected each year. Most get reassigned to new owners. In a new study, @kvn_l33 and I found 66% of recycled numbers we sampled were still tied to previous owners’ online accounts, possibly allowing account hijacking. recyclednumbers.cs.princeton.edu
It’s well known that number recycling is a nuisance, but we studied whether an adversary—even a relatively unskilled one—can exploit it to invade privacy and security. We present 8 attacks affecting both new and previous owners. We estimate that millions of people are affected.
Unfortunately, carriers imposed few restrictions on the adversary’s ability to browse available numbers and acquire vulnerable ones. After we disclosed the issue to them a few months ago, Verizon and T-mobile improved their documentation but have not made the attack harder.
Read 6 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
27 Apr
At Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (citp.princeton.edu) we're hiring our first ever communications manager. Public engagement is a first-rate goal for us, so we are looking for someone to work with us to maximize the public impact of our scholarship.
To explain how CITP differs from most academic groups, I'm happy to share a new case study of our (ongoing) research on dark patterns. It includes many lessons learned about conducting and communicating tech policy research effectively, and how CITP helps. cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publi…
The communications manager is a hybrid role. This includes familiar tasks such as managing a website and social media, but also close collaboration with researchers on tasks such as co-authoring an op-ed or figuring out the right analogy to explain a tricky concept.
Read 5 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
17 Feb
Were you told that successful researchers must constantly "keep up" with research in their fields? In my experience, that's both stressful and inefficient to the point of being useless. New papers may be released every day but actual knowledge doesn't accumulate at that rate.
Paying too much attention to the so-called cutting edge of research leads to a loss of perspective and results in incremental work more often than not. If you want to do foundational research, it probably doesn't rely on a preprint that was released last week.
Here's the process I've used for about 10 years. When I see a new paper, I put it in a big list organized by topic. I don't read it right away. Once in a while, I notice that a collection of papers on a topic have resulted in meaningful progress, and I read the papers together.
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
12 Jan
There are no unmoderated speech platforms. Email may be the closest, but even email at a large scale is complex enough that you have to use intermediaries. (The Princeton Election Emails Corpus confirms no Trump emails since Jan 6 electionemails2020.org/entity/59a162d…)
Of course, relatively unmoderated platforms like Parler are themselves subject to the standards of other intermediaries. It's platforms all the way down.
Some people want social media platforms to be neutral and apolitical. But a major value proposition of speech platforms is their recommender algos and moderation policies that amplify some voices and suppress others. They can’t make those decisions in a politically neutral way.
Read 4 tweets
Arvind Narayanan Profile picture
11 Jan
Professors at top universities are lottery winners, but rarely acknowledge the role of luck in their success. Be skeptical when they give you advice suggesting that the path they took is a repeatable one. If you aspire to an academic research career, have a backup plan.
Deciding to go into academia because all your professors said it worked out pretty well for them is also known as the statistical fallacy of sampling on the dependent variable.
I'm reviewing pre-doctoral, doctoral, post-doctoral, and faculty applications. I'm amazed by how much more these candidates have accomplished than I had at the corresponding stage of my career, and how many more qualified candidates there are compared to available positions.
Read 4 tweets

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