Cleaning up my Twitter – Erik Gahner Larsen

More than a year ago, I decided to stop using Twitter. In brief, the Musk takeover made it a worse social media. A worse social media due to amplification of far-right voices (something Charlie Warzel already wrote about back in May 2023). A worse social media due to product changes (especially to features such as TweetDeck).

I had (re)tweeted more than 60,000 tweets over the years. I have now decided to delete a lot of them, i.e., do a bit of house cleaning on a platform I once loved but now detest. I am now down to ~54,000 tweets, and I will continue to clean my account till I reach 0. In this post, I will share some links to a lot of material from tweets I have now deleted from my Twitter, but have not previously shared on the blog.

Links

– Joins 13 Ways: A great overview of the different ways to think about inner joins in databases.
– Prose, Psychopaths and Persistence: Personal Perspectives on Publishing
– Actual Progress: Another funny xkcd comic on progress in research/debugging.
– Who killed Google Reader?
– Carnival Scam Science (and how to WIN)
– Advanced macOS Command-Line Tools: See also macOS Tips & Tricks.
– My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes: A good essay by Paul Ford on life and data.
– The Definitive Ranking of Every Single Wes Anderson Character
– The Ultimate MythBusters Summary
– The NC-17 Films You Should See
– How to study philosophy as an amateur
– 50 years after release, Disney’s Robin Hood is still a life-changing furry phenomenon: A piece on one of the best Disney movies ever made.
– Mental Health: A data-based overview from Our World on mental health, including some great articles.
– The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”
– Invalid techniques of proof
– Where does coffee come from?
– Up or down? A male economist’s manifesto on the toilet seat etiquette
– Garfield Alone
– Quantum computing could break the internet. This is how
– Everything you don’t actually need to know about the economics of Succession
– I don’t want to log in to your website
– 6 Ways Mario Kart Tour Triggers You Into Gambling Your Money

Tweets

While I do not want to provide any URLs to Twitter (as they will not direct to twitter.com), here are some funny/great tweets:

Some of my own tweets

2022

2022-12-03: Instead of listening to any interviews with Ye or the like, watch the new Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust. Highly recommended.
2022-09-01: Memory rule: When you use ggplot2::margin(), the input is t r b l (pronounced ‘trouble’).
2022-04-19: Can we please go back to not using word clouds? Thanks!

2021

2021-12-30: 2021. Best movie: ‘Flee’. Best book: ‘The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion’ by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Best TV episode: ‘Scenes from a Marriage: The Illiterates’. Best album: ‘Elephant in the Room’ by Mick Jenkins.
2021-07-11: It’s coming Rome!
2021-05-18: In retrospect, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ should also have been titled ‘Noise’.
2021-05-18: A quick guide on how to read Twitter profiles: Tweets: Super-ego. Tweets and replies: Ego. Likes: Id.
2021-01-17: In order to demonstrate the relevance of irrelevant events for incumbency support, some researchers really jumped the shark

2020

2020-12-28: 2020. Best movie: ‘Soul’. Best book: ‘Apropos of Nothing’ by Woody Allen. Best TV episode: ‘BoJack Horseman: Nice While It Lasted’. Best album: ‘Spirit World Field Guide’ by Aesop Rock.
2020-11-09: Trump could have used some Pfizer news last week.
2020-05-03: The Rise and Fall of Nate Silver: Software used in 2012: Stata. Software used in 2020: Stata.
2020-03-31: Your new paper is not novel just because the coronavirus is.
2020-03-17: Following the British trajectory, and in particular the government response, is a trip down memory lane of what other European countries have already done a long time ago (in relative terms). Or, in other words, it looks like a trainwreck in slow motion.
2020-03-15: Medium is a platform with a professional appearance where the author credentials are tucked away. For that reason, it’s the perfect place for non-experts (“epistemic trespassers”) to write about the COVID-19.
2020-01-30: If you have to look up a certain line of code all the time, write a blog post about the function of the code and you will most likely not have to google the specific line of code ever again.

2019

2019-12-29: 2019. Best movie: ‘Marriage Story’. Best book: ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ by Caroline Criado-Pérez. Best TV episode: ‘Succession: This Is Not for Tears’. Best album: ‘The Lost Boy’ by YBN Cordae.
2019-08-26: The ‘a growing body of literature’ argument used to signal relevance is less compelling when you take the positive growth rate of most (if not all) bodies of literature into account.
2019-07-30: It’s ironic that the more the UK fights to leave the EU, the more the GBP approaches the EUR.
2019-06-18: We settled the ‘R vs. Stata’ debate by moving on to the ‘R vs. Python’ debate.
2019-06-06: Personally, I am huge fan of the “I found three studies on Google Scholar and I am now ready to make concluding inferences about a multicausal phenomenon” genre.
2019-03-09: Difference-indifference #StatisticsNihilism
2019-02-20: ‘The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas’. Scientific article or new track from People Under the Stairs?
2019-01-01: 2018. Best movie: ‘Roma’. Best book: ‘Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup’ by John Carreyrou. Best TV episode: ‘BoJack Horseman: Free Churro’. Best album: ‘Nightconcert’ by Erroll Garner.

2018

2018-08-20: My favourite books of 2018 (so far): 1) Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup 2) The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect 3) How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future 4) Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World

2017

2017-11-08: A life skill I have developed to perfection: eyeballing whether a text is within 140 characters.
2017-10-31: The most nightmarish/tiresome part of Halloween is the annual recurrence of the p=0.51 pumpkin and the paranormal distribution.
2017-10-22: New rule: Articles should only say “we predicted” when the study was actually preregistered.
2017-10-12: I installed SPSS today. Talk about regression.
2017-08-13: no notes > footnotes > endnotes
2017-05-25: New rule: don’t do three-way interactions.

2016

2016-11-09: I got some good news and some bad news. The good news is: the election is over.
2016-05-05: Heuristic for social science research: R2 > .5 => endogeneity issues and/or low statistical power
2015-12-17: I got 99 problems … and they are all somewhat related to endogeneity.

In Danish

2022-11-02: Det første jeg vil gøre hvis rød blok får 87 mandater er at lave popcorn og gense Lars Løkkes tale.
2022-11-02: Min hypotese er at Moderaterne kommer til at lide samme skæbne som Ny Alliance – eneste forskel er hvilken side af et folketingsvalg, derouten kommer til at foregå på.
2016-11-10: Stop nu med at tale om relevansen af, at Hillary Clinton fik flere stemmer. Hvis det var målet, ville Trump nok have ført en anden valgkamp.
2012-08-20: R workshop med Peter Dalgaard. Cool mand. Iført “I <3 R!" t-shirt.
2012-08-19: Dagen er brugt på at chille i solen. Håber du har gjort det samme.
2012-08-18: Er igang med Kaare R. Skous “Land at lede”. Utroligt som han i hans gennemgang af 1800-tallet kan levere stikpiller til nutidens højrefløj.
2012-08-18: Når man har sovet det meste af dagen og så drukket espresso med @khvilsted efter kl. 24, er man ikke rigtig træt.
2011-10-05: Der er en der har fundet min hjemmeside gennem søgningen “hvem er erik gahner”. Den side giver dog næppe noget fyldestgørende svar.
2011-03-02: Min ‘film fra 2010’-top5: 1) The King’s Speech 2) Shutter Island 3) Toy Story 3 4) 127 Hours 5) Biutiful
2011-03-02: Min ‘film fra 2009’-top5: 1) Inglourious Basterds 2) Das weiße Band 3) (500) Days of Summer 4) The Cove 5) Mary and Max
2011-03-01: Min ‘film fra 2008’-top5: 1) The Dark Knight 2) The Hurt Locker 3) Gran Torino 4) Burn After Reading 5) Changeling
2011-02-28: Min ‘film fra 2007’-top5: 1) No Country for Old Men 2) Le scaphandre et le papillon 3) There Will Be Blood 4) The King of Kong 5) Hot Fuzz
2011-02-28: Min ‘film fra 2006’-top5: 1) The Prestige 2) V for Vendetta 3) Lucky Number Slevin 4) Das Leben der Anderen 5) The Departed
2011-02-25: Min ‘film fra 2006’-top10 part2: 6) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 7) Nordkraft 8) Jarhead 9) Madagascar 10) Brokeback Mountain
2011-02-25: Min ‘film fra 2005’-top5: 1) Sin City 2) Lord of War 3) Thank You for Smoking 4) C.R.A.Z.Y. 5) Batman Begins
2011-02-24: Min ‘film fra 2004’-top5: 1) Team America: World Police 2) Hotel Rwanda 3) Sideways 4) Der Untergang 5) The Butterfly Effect
2011-02-24: Min ‘film fra 2003’-top5: 1) Goodbye Lenin! 2) Kontroll 3) Ondskan 4) Lost in Translation 5) Mystic River
2011-02-22: Min ‘film fra 2002’-top5: 1) Adaptation 2) The Pianist 3) Cidade de Deus 4) The Bourne Identity 5) Irreversible
2011-02-20: Min ‘film fra 2001’-top5: 1) Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain 2) The Others 3) La pianiste 4) Mulholland Drive 5) Blow
2011-02-19: Min ‘film fra 2000’-top5: 1) American Psycho 2) Memento 3) Love Is a Bitch 4) Requiem for a Dream 5) Snatch.
2011-02-19: Min ‘film fra 1999’-top5: 1) Fight Club 2) South Park: Større, længere & ucensureret 3) The Ninth Gate 4) American Beauty 5) Toy Story 2
2011-02-18: Min ‘film fra 1998’-top5: 1) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 2) Rounders 3) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 4)
Lola rennt 5) Happiness
2011-02-17: Min ‘film fra 1997’-top5: 1) Funny Games 2) Livet er smukt 3) Good Will Hunting 4) L.A. Confidential 5) Donnie Brasco
2011-02-16: Min ‘film fra 1996’-top5: 1) Breaking the Waves 2) Trainspotting 3) Head Above Water 4) Fargo 5) Hybridmanden
2011-02-16: Min ‘film fra 1995’-top5: 1) The Usual Suspects 2) Casino 3) Se7en 4) Twelve Monkeys 5) Heat
2011-02-15: Min ‘film fra 1994’-top5: 1) Pulp Fiction 2) Forrest Gump 3) En verden udenfor 4) Dum og dummere 5) Léon
2010-12-31: genså The Apartment (1960) i går – stadig en fremragende film!
2010-12-07: når jeg får børn kan jeg sige, at engang afsluttede de nyhederne i december med CO2-brændende, overflødige julelys en mass på alm. huse
2010-12-02: ah det tager lang tid at rette opgaver! men det er spændende læsning og en god kop kaffe er guld værd :-)
2010-12-07: så står den på uddrag fra Marx og Engels’ kommunistiske manifest for gud-ved-hvilken gang (bare rolig, denne gang får jeg penge for at læse)
2010-11-29: jeg vil specielt huske Leslie Nielsen fra Naked Gun, Airplane! og så hans optrædener i Columbo…. en fantastisk skuespiller!
2010-10-15: min tandlæge siger jeg skal holde lidt igen med min sorte energidrik.. eller putte mælk i! eller børste tænderne bedre!
2010-08-25: Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004) er en MEGET dårlig film, men om den fortjener at ligge #1 på IMDbs bottom 100, ved jeg nu ikke!