Discarded. My cartoon in today's @theageaustralia.bsky.social

This is just so depressing

Blog post on new preprint by @ashleylwatts.bsky.social et al. They argue that correlations among internalizing & externalizing may not derive from comorbidity, but nomorbidity. I use an accessible simulatiom study tosupport this, & relate the preprint to prior work. eiko-fried.com/blog/psychop...

maturity lies in realizing the assist is as valuable as the dunk or the three-pointer from the logo

The real tragedy of this whole debacle is that we’re allowing people with bestseller cachet to peddle one-cause narratives when an excellent nuanced book that understands individual differences matter is *right there* (go read @peteetchells.bsky.social book)

Job alert - come and work with me at the Centre for Mental Health and Brain Sciences. Looking for a post-doc with neuroimaging experience to work on studies related to psychotic illnesses (and other matters). swinjobs.nga.net.au?jati=4482B61...

This is a super-interesting paper. It also fits with the idea that lower severity (and earlier expression of psychopathology) is more overlapping. Progression is associated with crystalising conditions, as proposed by clinical staging

Yeah … we’ll go back to oral exams 🫣

Collecting original data specifically to answer a research question is Good, Actually

This is well established at slightly earlier ages, but cause and effect are probably the other way around: people with neurological damage walk slower

Italy could be the next country to build a solar railway after Switzerland’s successful trial - Euronews

PsyMetRiC 2.0 now predicts cardiometabolic risk in young people with psychosis, and it's registered for clinical use. ⚠️ But a model is only as good as its inputs, and UK screening for this group remains patchy. buff.ly/N8BHk2d #Psychosis #PhysicalHealth

Shocker

In 1908 the Lancet called for an 18+ age limit on reading in bed for U.K. children.

We've known that socioeconomics (SES) matters for the 🧠. New & 🤯 is that SES drowns out all other brain associations, incl. IQ. If you train an algorithm to predict IQ from brain data, it's still way better at predicting SES. Science Mag: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @smarek0502.bsky.social 👀🧵👇

There's a common reactionary anti AI claim that the shift to agentic AI is because it increases token use and it's dead wrong. It's much dumber than that. If you ask an LLM what time it is, it can't tell you. If you give the LLM access to the time command that you could have run yourself, it can.

1/ I have written a series of articles this week, ‘Notes on Trust’, about where cynicism towards politicians comes from. The below chart, which I shared last year, was the thing which initially prompted me to write the piece. I just want to set out some of the key arguments here…

get rich quick scams have been incredibly effective throughout human history and we are living through their greatest golden age yet it’s never been a better time to be a charlatan

Been saying this for years: Don't submit to Frontiers. Don't peer-review for Frontiers. It's long been considered a predatory publisher by many in the field, including many who have worked as editor there.

🎉 Registration is now OPEN for the 2026 OHBM Australian Chapter Annual Meeting! 🇦🇺🧠🇦🇺 Get your ticket now! 🎟️🎟️🎟️ Registration: events.humanitix.com/ohbm-austral... 📝 Submit your abstract: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 🏆 Nominate a colleague (or yourself) for an award: ohbm-aus.github.io/awards/

This was absolutely fascinating to me Grace Tame with Yumi Stynes youtu.be/k9r7FVJhH04?...

Interesting viewpoint that starts to grapple with the low transition rates from CHR states, but doesn't engage with the original purpose of identifying these individuals - trying to prevent schizophrenia spectrum disorders. We haven't made progress there at all! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

New report out today with my friends at Verasight writing up a couple new studies I designed on AI “digital twins” in polling. The upshot is basically these tools are very inaccurate unless you have raw polling data to build on (which defeats the purpose!)

Human Rights Commission says nope, don't do this to the NDIS archive.md/uk1DG www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Love is love. #PrideMonth

Day one of a week long writing retreat. Aiming to write a grant for an Australia-Germany exchange project; draft a paper; do (complete?) data extraction for a systematic review. Over optimistic maybe?

There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists. That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

a time-honored tradition for key affiliates of disintegrating Nazi regimes

We really need to fully bed in the idea that the default position of someone wearing the Meta camera glasses is that they are a pervert

The EPISODE trial is out. Psilocybin didn't beat placebo on the 6-week primary outcome. 86% of participants correctly guessed their arm. Five people remitted on the high dose. A more honest result than the field has often allowed. buff.ly/FCsHz2z #Psilocybin #Depression

It’s certainly instructive that there’s virtually no discussion about 240000 disabled people getting pushed off the NDIS, but a media frenzy of tax changes that predominantly advantage the well off #auspol

Pretty funny. The BESS proposal requires an 18 hectare site., Gippsland, Dairy industry stocking rate here is ~0.5 lactating cows per hectare, or 1.6 steers if grazing land. So roughly the land required to support 10 dairy cows or 30 steers. Oh the horror. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05...

People who say we should make up our minds about trans rights by listening to cis people mean by that "listen to those cis people who agree with us," because with ideas as well as identity only those who are like these people are real.

This is fucking insanity www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Here's what you can look forward to from our podcast over the next year or so... Intro episode for the Björk sesaon out now! Let us know in the replies what you're looking forward to most!

current news got me thinking about this story from last year

The Woz said I will not be booed lol I also love the lull of the crowd as they’re trying to figure out where he’s going hahaha (Via: www.instagram.com/reel/DYfgIwo...)

honestly the humiliating collapse of LIV has been one of the best sports stories of the past year, it’s free schadenfreude because every single person involved in the league sucks so there’s nobody to feel bad for

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

In related vaporware news: "Approximately 590,000 people put a deposit of $100 down for the smartphone, which would ultimately sell at $499. Despite receiving an advance in the region of $59 million, Trump Mobile has yet to ship a single unit to consumers." appleinsider.com/articles/26/...

It is so shocking that the only option for many people who can no longer afford rent and cannot get help from friends or family is to live in a fucking TENT. No bathroom, no kitchen, no safety, no security, no real protection from bad weather and no public sympathy. Fucking disgraceful.

Newborn dies in childbirth, mother is homeless and living on the side of a river bank. Australia, 2026 www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05...

Welcome to the last half of the US federal fiscal year. Here is where we're at with National Science Foundation--the agency that funds basically everything other than biomedical research at American universities--grant numbers. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

Richard Dawkins becoming a "ChatGPT loves me" guy is both entirely predictable and yet has drained respect for him that I didn't realize I still had

It’s May Day so I’m allowed to tap the sign: universal benefits are fiscally responsible because they’re way way less expensive to implement. Public Policy 101, the money that’s wasted on policing targeted benefits is wasted.