“The articles that I've seen that are important to me that I've done are way better on @Grokipedia.
“I did a lot of COVID reporting, COVID origin, the lab leak stuff.
“If you go to the Wikipedia article, it's gonna say the word conspiracy theory dozens of times.
“Then you go to Grokipedia, it treats it as a a serious topic that is not being polarized, that's not being stigmatized through this terminology.”
(@AshleyRindsberg // @TheFP)
You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts.
My short story “Ender's Game” was rejected by Ben Bova at Analog back when that was the top market for a sci-fi story. Ben gave me feedback. He thought the title should be “Professional Soldier” and he said to “cut it in half.”
But I knew he was wrong on both points and submitted it to Jim Baen at Galaxy. He sat on it for a year, and responded to my query with a rejection. There was some kind of explanation, but I don't remember what it was. I concluded at the time that Baen's comments showed that he had barely glanced at the story.
So … I got feedback both times, but it was not helpful. I looked at Ben's rejection again. What was it about the story that made him think it should, let alone COULD, be cut in half?
Apparently it FELT long. What made it feel long? Now, post-Harry Potter, I would call it the quidditch problem. I had too many battles in which the details became tedious. So I cut two battles entirely, merely reporting the outcomes, and shortened another. In retyping the whole manuscript (pre-word-processor, that was the only way to get a clean manuscript), I added new point-of-view material to the point that I had cut only one page in length. So much for “in half.”
But I already knew that my manuscripts did not need cutting — if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there in the first place. Even the battles were still there, but instead of showing them, I merely told what happened (so much for the usually asinine advice “show don't tell”), which kept the pace going.
Those changes made, I sent it to Ben again. I did not remind him of what he had advised me to do. I merely told him I liked my title, and said, “I have addressed your other concerns,” which was true. I figured he wouldn't remember what his exact words had been. My answer was a check. That revised story was the basis for my winning the Campbell Award for best new writer.
Did Ben's feedback help? Yes — but his specific advice was not right, and I knew it. On my next two submissions, Ben hated my endings, and I revised as suggested. The fourth submission he rejected outright, and the fifth, and I thought, Am I a one-story writer? I went back to Ender's Game and tried to analyze why it worked. Then, deliberately imitating myself, I wrote “Mikal's Songbird.” Ben bought it, and it received favorable mentions. I was afraid then that I had consigned myself to writing stories about children in jeopardy. But in fact I was writing character stories rather than idea stories. And THAT was how I built a career, not by self-imitation, and not by following editorial suggestions.
I did get wise counsel from David Hartwell on my novel Wyrms, but that was on a book that was already under contract, and it was story feedback, not style. I got wise counsel from Beth Meacham, too, on various books over the years — but again, only on books that were under contract. I also received appallingly stupid advice from the editor of my novel Saints, which temporarily destroyed the book's marketability; after that, I was allowed to go back to my original structure and save the book — now it's one of my best.
Editors don't know more than you about your story. They especially don't know why they decide to accept or reject stories. YOU have to know what your story needs to be, and take only advice that you believe in.
Your best counselor on a story nobody bought is TIME. Let some time pass and then reread the story. Don't even think about why it Didn't Work. Instead, think about what DOES work, and then write it again, a complete rewrite, keeping nothing from the previous draft. Find the right protagonist and begin at the beginning — the point where the protagonist first gets involved with the events of the story. Be inventive — the failed first draft no longer exists, so you're not bound by any of your earlier decisions. THAT is how you resurrect a good idea you did not succeed with on your first try.
Progress in science starts with one simple act:
telling the truth about what isn’t working.
There has been a lot of talk about UBI and UHI (universal basic/high income), but very little guidance on how to implement UHI assuming the world takes the abundance AI branch. Here is the above the fold answer:
Universal Trump Accounts
Details:
First, what is a Trump account? A Trump account is an individual investment account funded by the government (or by philanthropists), and invested in a broad based index of US companies. Right now, any child under 18 can get a Trump account created for them. Children born between 2025 and 2028 get a $1,000 seed contribution from the US government. The idea was to make sure every child has a “stake” in the success of US capitalism and prosperity.
Universal Trump Accounts vs. Government checks
People seem to think it is a good idea for the government to just start sending out big UHI checks. I think this is a terrible idea.
First of all, if the government starts sending out UHI checks, it will never stop. It never does. It will be just like Social Security: A pay-as-you-go system that becomes a political football that all politicians will be incentivized to sweeten, and never be able to reduce (no matter how beneficial it would be for the country).
Second, this puts even more power in the hands of the government. A larger and larger fraction of the population will be dependent on a government check. A huge fraction of the nation’s wealth will be essentially laundered through the government. Not only will this give bureaucrats enormous power, but it will also have an efficiency cost. What is the efficiency loss for money going from the people to the government then back to the people? 20%? 30%?
Finally, consider how a typical recipient will perceive the situation. Greedy corporations used AI to eliminate their job. Corporations got rich, they got laid off. Along comes the government to save them. The government taxes the bad guys (greedy corporations), to support the little guy (yeah government!). If you want to see a swing from capitalism to socialism, go with this route…
Compare that to Universal Trump Accounts (UTA). Now suppose AI eliminated your job, but you have $1,000,000 in a UTA. Because you are unemployed, you can access 5% of your UTA. That is $50,000. (See below for details on potential UTA funding and withdrawal rules). Now it feels terrible to lose your job, but do I want the system to collapse? Hell, no! If the S&P 500 goes up 40% next year, my UHI check from my UTA goes up 40% to $70,000. I can hear it now: Hey, hey, ho, ho, the S&P has got to go (up!)
Funding:
The end state is everyone has a well-funded UTA account that can support them if they lose their job, but how can you get there? If you believe in the abundance hypothesis, then you believe the economy is going to grow like never before. In fact, Elon Musk guessed that the economy would 10x over the next 10 years. That would be an average of about 26% GDP growth *per year* compared to 2-3% historically. This will create enormous tax revenue (think how California has boom tax years when capital gains realizations go crazy). We may have to tax things a little differently (robot tax?), but there will be a lot of tax surplus to go around. The critical thing is for the government to use the tax receipts to FUND UTAs! If the growth happens slowly, then funding UTAs will happen slowly, but then again, unemployment problems are probably happening slowly. Likewise, UTA funding is fast if GDP growth and tax receipts are historic.
Withdrawals:
How might withdrawals work? Well, the end state is easy, UHI comes as a 5% distribution from your UTA. One way this could work is for the government to define UHI as a certain level of income. If your UTA provides that income or more, congrats, you have a fully funded UTA. If your income is less than the UHI target, the government provides most or all of the difference (probably most to keep people wanting their accounts to go up).
As time goes by, most people will have a fully funded UTA; however, people that are not yet fully funded would continue to receive automatic government contributions to their UTA*. Unemployed individuals could withdraw up to 5% of their UTA account annually. This would likely encourage some people to retire early, although that is probably a feature not a bug.
*As a side note, it the stock market tanks, people might go from fully funded to partially funded, triggering government contributions again. This would be the typical government response to increase spending during poor economic times.
Steady income:
At some age, say 70, a large portion of the UTA could be turned into steady retirement income. This would probably be limited to something like 80% of the account, so you still have skin in the game, but we would have years to figure out how this should work.
Key insight:
UTA accounts align the UHI population to want the engine of our prosperity (i.e. companies) to succeed. This would be far superior to just having the government write big checks.
@elonmusk Elon, think about this and maybe suggest this route if you are asked again about UHI.
@altcap Brad, any gotchas in expanding out Trump accounts to everyone?
@DrJBhattacharya Jay, you are the only person I know in government…put in a good word if you get the chance!
The goal of science is not agreement. It is getting closer to the truth.
The NIH principal deputy director, Matt Memoli, took a brave stance against the federal vaccine mandate during the pandemic. He was then a lab scientist in Tony Fauci's NIAID. He is a gifted and courageous leader.
NEW: The NIH's principal deputy director feared losing his job after declining to take a COVID-19 vaccine, according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times.
The Libary of Congress should "lock in," on a scheduled basis, inviolable benchmark collections of classic & significant works. The point is to establish cultural baselines so that retroactive editing can't disfigure, misrepresent, or ideologically warp our cultural history.
"Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm..."
https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/
Flowers cited the amicus brief I wrote with @DrJBhattacharya and @andrewbostom during SCOTUS argument in the vaccine mandate case, so I love this.
EXCLUSIVE: Washington Post reporter Lena Sun can't do a science and explain that test negative design studies are garbage.
When does Big Pharma give her a journalism award?
Commenters argue that fentanyl overdoses are actually caused by housing prices, racism, inequality, neoliberalism, Republicans, and trauma.
But the only common factor in every single fentanyl death is fentanyl. Deal with it. Please.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/san-francisco-drugs-decriminalization-fentanyl.html#commentsContainer
Some academics who denounced the idea of objectivity and declared themselves activists are for some reason shocked that policymakers and the public now view them not as trusted, objective scientists but as...activists.
🚨BREAKING: FOR THE SECOND STRAIGHT WEEK, A NEW FREE SPEECH WIN
NCLA and our clients @realDailyWire @FDRLST have reached a victorious settlement in The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Texas v. State Dep’t against State Department-funded censorship!
Under the settlement, the State Department agrees that it will not use, finance, or promote technology that suppresses or fact-checks the constitutionally protected speech of Americans and domestic media outlets.
It also bars the State Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs—formally or informally—for those purposes.
The State Department acknowledges that our clients engaged in constitutionally protected speech.
Find out more ⬇️
I put together this video on the settlement over Biden administration censorship, b/c the NY Times, NPR, and other Democratic Party aligned media are doing a hard ignore.
Fake disinformation academic Renee DiResta seems very distressed about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsKd0jQpz5w
So many people are still completely unaware that the Biden Administration literally pressured social media companies to censor Americans…and that Kamala and Walz actively supported similar censorship.
I brought the receipts.👇🏼
Appreciate the @wapo Editorial Board’s commentary on our win in Missouri v. Biden. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/25/social-media-censorship-consent-murthy-missouri-doj/
WHO DECIDES what’s “misinformation”?
In Murthy v. Missouri, that question was at the center of the case.
NCLA attorneys John Vecchione @VecchTweets and Zhonette Brown discuss what this means going forward.
“This Is An Epochal Moment”
Science writer and Lord peer Matt Ridley joins me to discuss the collapse of the post war consensus and the growing crisis of trust in global institutions.
We discuss the failures of organisations like the WHO and the United Nations, the politicisation of science from Covid to climate, and why expertise is increasingly seen as serving power rather than truth.
A challenging conversation about science, energy, and whether the systems that shaped the modern world are now losing public trust.
Podcast out now on all platforms | Links in replies
This week, the government agreed to a MAJOR SETTLEMENT in Murthy v. Missouri.
Now hear directly from two of the NCLA lawyers who represented plaintiffs in the case. John Vecchione @VecchTweets and Zhonette Brown explain what the lawsuit uncovered, what the courts decided, and what the new consent decree means.
The settlement is a huge victory for the First Amendment, and as John points out, “Modern technology does not alter the government's obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment.”
Listen now to the new episode of @NCLALegal ‘s “Unwritten Law” podcast.
Link to the episode is in the comments. ⬇️
My dream for automated, replicable research: "papers" become open repos that anyone---agent or human---can fork and build on. But I have a funny story that suggests we've got some way to go to get there.
In their fantastic paper, @xuyiqing and @YangYang_Leo show that my dream is approaching feasibility. For papers in journals with sufficiently strong data/code requirements, AI can now automatically replicate almost all of them. This is super exciting!
But here's my story...
In January, I released my Claude Code vote-by-mail paper, which got a lot of attention. As part of that release, I shared a public repo with the data and code (https://github.com/andybhall/vbm-replication-extension).
Recently, I discovered to my great joy that the repo had 70 forks. Maybe my dream of open research was coming true??
So today I fired up Claude Code and asked it to analyze the 70 forks, so I could see what new insights we're learning.
Here's Claude's summary: “Based on what I just investigated, the answer is simple: virtually none of them do anything.”
It turns out, none of the 70 forks do any new research whatsoever. LOL.
It seems like the tech is getting close---now we need to solve the incentive problem. We need to make it exciting and valuable from a career perspective for people to fork and build on projects. Then we can get real knowledge aggregation moving and really leverage AI's ability to let us do continuous, automatically replicable empirical work.
We need to find a way to reward people for productive repo forks as a means to encouraging new and better research. Would love to figure out how best to do this!
In my lecture at @NIH, at the invitation of @NIHDirector_Jay, I explained why I changed my mind from thinking the lab leak theory of covid origins was unlikely to thinking it was almost certainly true.
Please watch and assess the evidence yourself.
https://videocast.nih.gov/watch/244438a5-0e6b-11f1-9f14-124f0a52e769
One line in the consent decree that isn't getting enough attention:
"The Parties agree that modern technology does not alter the Government's obligation to abide by the strictures of the First Amendment."
Translation: "It's the internet" is not a valid excuse for censorship.
They put that in writing. Permanently.
Full breakdown: http://rationalground.com/p/breaking-the-government-just-admitted
Huzzah! The consent decree in Missouri v. Biden is a historic victory for free speech in the US. Though I had to switch to the government side in the case after I became NIH director, I've never been more pleased by "losing" in my life. A huge win for all Americans.
Thank you to Lord @mattwridley for kicking off NIH’s Scientific Freedom Lecture Series. Open, respectful dialogue is at the heart of science.
I appreciated the engaging discussion with our staff on the origins of COVID-19.
There are tens of thousands of cities in China,
And tens of thousands of food markets,
But Covid started close to the lab with the world's biggest collection of sarbecoviruses,
And the most active program of manipulating them
That alone is reason for investigating the lab.
Science becomes fragile the moment it fears questions.
Chuck Norris could derive an ought from an is.
🚨Join us TOMORROW at 2:30pm ET for the inaugural talk in our NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series, titled “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19” featuring a conversation with Matt Ridley, D.Phil.
Watch online via the NIH videocast page: http://bit.ly/3PsHAu5
The “NIH is no longer functioning” narrative was always dramatically overstated.
A delayed apportionment coming after a prolonged government shutdown was framed as institutional collapse rather than what it likely was: a lag in funding flow tied to broader delays in federal operations.
That context was largely ignored.
Instead, a handful of social influencers amplified by outlets like Science and Nature pushed a doomsday storyline that was far more dramatic than the underlying reality.
I'm sad to hear that Prof. Takeshi Amemiya of @Stanford has passed. He was a brilliant econometrician and gifted teacher. As a student, I took several classes with him.
My favorite memory: Whenever a student would ask him a hard question, he would stop short and stare straight up at the ceiling in awkward silence. Suddenly, when the answer came to him, a look of glee would appear on his face. "Ahh!" he'd say and meticulously write out a fully worked-out proof on the chalkboard.
He had such a clean way of thinking about probability, statistics, and econometrics. I will always be grateful for everything he taught me.
I wish all comfort to his family and to all who knew and loved him.
Pleased to share the program of our upcoming conference “Care, Control, and Biopolitics: Reckoning with the Covid Governance”, which will take place at the University of Graz on 28–30 April 2026. The meeting will bring together scholars from different disciplines to reflect on how the Covid era reshaped governance, public debate, and the relationship between care and control in contemporary societies.
I am particularly delighted that @toby00green will deliver the keynote lecture. As is well known here on Twitter, Toby has been instrumental in opening serious historical and intellectual debate about the wider significance of the pandemic, not least through his pioneering work on Covid as a world-historical crisis.
Toby is also convening a major conference at the British Academy in London this July, which continues and expands this emerging conversation from another perspective – so I am pleased to share that program, too! 😊
https://murielblaive.substack.com/p/program-of-graz-conference-28-30
Don't miss @mattwridley give the inaugural lecture in @nih's Scientific Freedom lecture series. He will be speaking on March 20th about the origins of covid. Registration to watch is free at the link!
https://videocast.nih.gov/watch/244438a5-0e6b-11f1-9f14-124f0a52e769
P-hacking is bad because you're giving a positive signal to something that is almost certainly false. You're actively polluting the scientific literature with mirages.
A null result isn't a failed experiment. An experiment is never a failure if it is designed and executed well. Publishing null results actively helps the scientific community by narrowing the pool of plausible alternatives to test. It makes discovering what's actually true easier.
It doesn't take much censorship to create a culture of self-censorship. And self-censorship is the most dangerous form of censorship because it looks exactly like freedom.
People have asked about today’s Reuters article.
Coverage of the IACC highlights the difficulty of conveying nuance in complex scientific and policy discussions.
The reporter received thoughtful, detailed responses about autism research priorities and the committee’s role, yet the article largely reduces the discussion to controversy and insinuation.
Families deserve better than click-driven narratives.
In the interest of transparency, I’m sharing the written responses I provided. I welcome your observations comparing them with the tenor of the article.
Apologies in advance for the length. 🧵
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/kennedys-new-us-autism-panel-examine-potential-causes-2026-03-05/
Great conversation with @DrJBhattacharya @CDCgov @NIH @HHSGov: https://koacolorado.iheart.com/featured/ross-kaminsky/content/2026-03-05-dr-jay-bhattacharya-acting-director-of-the-cdc-and-the-nih/
(PODCAST) After Hours with NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Head of NIH and Acting CDC Director, tells about reform of a broken system, and how he’s launching a vaccine injury effort.
R to @DrJBhattacharya: Scientific journals like Lancet and Nature, which endorsed Joe Biden for president, are not trustworthy sources to comment on reforms in public health. They traded science for politics, and have not altered course since.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10202798/