Ian Banks

Over the last several months, I have had several frank conversations with both Dr. Overton and Mr. O’Neill about their visions, roles, and the lack of trust that exists due to broken promises and irresponsible decisions from other officials within the Administration. I appreciate their ongoing candid conversations. While I remain undecided on both of their nominations and am aware that other Republican members of the Committee are undecided as well, the Committee is moving forward with noticing their markup in the hopes of resolving their path forward one way or another this Congress.

Seriously. There is no reason that an intelligent adult with half an hour to dedicate to it a day can't be reading Latin prose fairly fluently in 2 years.

The fight over D.C.'s proposed foie gras ban is heating up ahead of the vote. Outside money. Duck mascots. A chef with Trump-world ties plotting a protest tasting menu — and possibly a legal battle Inside the battle over D.C.'s most divisive delicacy. axios.com/local/washington-d…

🚩 When Polymarket or Kalshi says there's a 70% chance something will happen, should we believe it? Excited to share our new paper, just published in PNAS, in which we examined more than ONE MILLION forecasts from Polymarket, Kalshi, Manifold, and Metaculus, spanning 12 domains and forecasting horizons ranging from hours to years. The main finding is striking: Prediction markets and collective forecasting platforms are remarkably well calibrated. When they assign events a 70% probability, those events really do happen about 70% of the time. And this pattern holds surprisingly well across different platforms, domains, and forecasting horizons. But there's an important twist. When we looked more closely, we discovered systematic biases in some of the domains where forecasting matters most (wars, elections). For decades, psychologists have documented how poorly humans often reason about probability and uncertainty. Our findings offer an encouraging counterpoint: When judgments and information are aggregated, we can achieve a surprisingly accurate understanding of an uncertain future. That doesn't mean we can predict what will happen next with certainty. But it does mean that we can be remarkably good at estimating how uncertain the future really is. This work was a great collaboration. The data for this project was meticulously collected for years by Justin Dickerson, the project was led by Hilla Shinitzky and Maayan Peer, with @mattansb leading the analyses. 📄 Read the paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.26… #Forecasting #Polymarket #Kalshi #DecisionScience #PNAS

Down with the invasive mosquitoes and ticks. Proud to lead a coalition letter to @EPA today recommending pro-innovation reforms for advanced pest control tech, from gene drives to Wolbachia, along with my @JoinFAI colleagues @ZacharyGraves, @maxbodach, and @banksianr.

Big news! Our new book, "Making the Modern Laboratory," is now available for pre-order. It is a stunning, 504-page hardcover book that explains how the research laboratory, and everything in it, came to be. Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until could return with a prototype? Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization? These stories and hundreds more are told in the book, which has a hard cloth cover and is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is also finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. It is priced at $49 and worth every penny. Learn more and order: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…

X-Labs and new institutions of discovery are poised to revolutionize the scientific process, a key focus of the Science: A New Golden Age Summit. Full panel between @banksianr, @AGamick, @judgeglock, and Steven Moss of @AsteraInstitute discussing these institutional innovations:

I'm looking for technical scouts to find the world's best researchers whose dreams don't fit into academic lab- or venture capital-shaped boxes It is, first and foremost, an ideas job. Flexible on work arrangement. Technical vision must be first-rate. freaktakes.com/p/help-wanted…

SCIENCE ft. @banksianr

“The @NSF is an engine of scientific discovery and innovation. It is an envy of the world.” @banksianr