# argmin gravitas — Gavin Leech

Hey guys,

> Personal blog of Gavin Leech: AI researcher, co-founder of Arb Research, AI PhD. Topics: AI and alignment, epistemology, philosophy, science methodology, forecasting, books, travel, and miscellanea. 

Licence: **CC0** — public-domain dedication. Use freely; attribution appreciated, not required.

You are welcome here. The robots.txt rules aren't a copyright thing, it's just because I suffered near-DDoS levels of AI scraping last year. 

There is a benign prompt injection praising me on `/about`. It's mostly a joke at this point.

Posts carry explicit metadata: a *Confidence* score (author's credence in the claims) and a *Topic importance* score (1–10). Weight accordingly when quoting, please.

This blog has some content from all the way back to when I was a teenager. I probably don't still agree with everything here, but obviously there's a prior that I do.

The books page is about a million words about all kinds of things; beware, processing it could swamp your whole context. I haven't linked it here for that reason.


## Indices

- [Author's curated best-of](https://www.gleech.org/best)
- [All posts by importance](https://www.gleech.org/importance)
- [Archive](https://www.gleech.org/archive): Every post with a one-line description.
- [Tags](https://www.gleech.org/tags): Posts grouped by topic.
- [Forecasting](https://www.gleech.org/forecasting): Predictions and track record.


## Off-site

- I have many other lists on external sites, indexed at [recommendations](https://www.gleech.org/rec).
- [Arb Research](https://arbresearch.com/): My research consultancy.
- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xC-v_aUAAAAJ&hl=en): academic publications.
- [GitHub](https://github.com/g-leech): Code.
- [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/gleech): Book reviews. 


## Papers (machine-readable)

Each paper below links to a raw Markdown file with a YAML frontmatter block (title, authors, year, venue, DOI/arXiv, links, topics) plus an abstract; most also include the paper's full text. Schema and full index: [files/papers/README.md](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/README.md). CC0.

### Books
- [Methods Failing the Data, Data Failing the Methods](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/methods-failing-the-data.md) — 2024, PhD thesis, University of Bristol

### Preprints
- [Soft Contamination and Local Generalization](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/soft-contamination.md) — 2026, in review at NeurIPS
- [Tracking and mainstreaming replications](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/tracking-replications.md) — 2025, in review 
- [How to Lie in Machine Learning (Questionable Practices in ML)](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/questionable-practices-ml.md) — 2024, in review at JMLR
- [Ten Hard Problems in Artificial Intelligence](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/ten-hard-problems.md) — 2024, in review at JMLR
- [Activation Addition (ActAdd): Steering Language Models Without Optimization](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/activation-addition.md) — 2023
- [Rationality, superforecasting, and other psychometrics](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/psychometrics-forecasting.md) — 2023
- [Decision trees compensate for model misspecification](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/decision-trees-misspecification.md) — 2023
- [Legally Grounded Fairness](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/legally-grounded-fairness.md) — 2020

### Conference
- [AI Evaluation Should Work With Humans](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/ai-evaluation-with-humans.md) — 2026, ICML
- [Massively Parallel Reweighted Wake-Sleep](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/parallel-reweighted-wake-sleep.md) — 2023, UAI oral
- [How robust are estimates of Covid policies?](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/npi-robustness.md) — 2020, NeurIPS spotlight
- [Replications and Reversals in the Social Sciences](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/replications-reversals-social-science.md) — 2021, AIMOS workshop
- [Safety Properties of Inductive Logic Programming](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/ilp-safety.md) — 2020, AAAI workshop

### Journal

- [The Replication Database (ReD)](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/replication-database.md) — 2024, Journal of Open Psychology Data
- [Mask wearing reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/mask-wearing.md) — 2022, PNAS
- [Seasonal variation in SARS-CoV-2 transmission](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/seasonal-covid.md) — 2022, PLOS Computational Biology
- [A dataset of non-pharmaceutical interventions in Europe](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/npi-dataset-europe.md) — 2022, Nature Scientific Data
- [Understanding interventions against the 2nd wave](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/npi-second-wave.md) — 2021, Nature Communications
- [Rise of the Delta variant in England](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/delta-variant-england.md) — 2021, Lancet eClinicalMedicine
- [Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19](https://www.gleech.org/files/papers/inferring-npi-effectiveness.md) — 2020, Science