New post: Modernity In Rhythm A multimedia origins story for the lindy hop. Migration, technology and a special form of togetherness. thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/modernity-...

Why does Sally’s apartment have so many penguins?

Adding @plosone.org to my personal blacklist of journals

For any of my followers who are interested in football: Libero is the best football podcast out there, imo. Intelligent and analytical in ways others are not

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

Very few Nobelists are eligible, I’m afraid. go.bsky.app/H61xswq

Does anyone know of articles, or collections of articles, worrying about what the advent of the electronic calculator (especially the pocket calculator) might mean for citizens’ arithmetic and mathematical abilities? Were such articles written? I assume so but I want to see what they said

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸 How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data. www.science.org/content/arti...

Went to see One Battle After Another yesterday at Corvin Mozi in Budapest. So we saw it with Hungarian subtitles Funny detail: “Christmas Adventurer’s Club” translates into Hungarian as “Karácsonyi Kalandorok Klubja”, which has the initials KKK. So even more apt than the English name

The older I get and the more I listen to jazz, the closer my philosophy of science gets to Feyerabend. Anything goes The only thing that ever holds it all together is scientists’ individual commitment to uncovering truths

The older I get and the more I listen to jazz, the closer my philosophy of science gets to Feyerabend. Anything goes The only thing that ever holds it all together is scientists’ individual commitment to uncovering truths

I am not a golf fan at all, but once every two years it gives us a team representing Europe, which is cool And this year it highlights a stark difference between European and US cultural attitudes to wealth. I think this contrast goes much deeper than golf www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/s...

Theoretical precision isn't everything and there's a lot of room for mistaking it for rigor in general. Regardless, a modicum of appreciation for precision is necessary to avoid the trap of abusing ambiguity to claim unearned epistemic status for methodological claims

The Poznań #Linguistics Meeting 2025 Grand Debate: "Human #Language: is it unique?" feat. Wolfgang Dressler, Magdalena Wrembel, Raymond Hickey, Nikki Ritt, @thematzing.bsky.social and @neilcohn.bsky.social

The thing with universities is that you cannot have professional staff trained to do one thing and then try and have institutions do something else entirely

Saw The Conversation last night. The 'small' film that Coppola made in between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II And its brilliant. I'm amazed it's not better known www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFgi...

Mel speaks for me. And many others too, no doubt

A perfect example. We all live in bespoke realities now The end of mass media is a transformational moment

The FT has, among the media, the best incentives to be sensitive to reality.

I poke around Reddit a fair bit, including topics on Psychology. Every other week a high schooler or undergrad is asking for a primer on the discipline. There is no, agreed-upon, singular 'go to' book. Psychology really needs an accessible history, with simple take-aways and frames-of-reference.

Possibly unpopular opinion: One reason students use chatgpt to give them summaries of assigned readings may be that the assigned readings are often boring and/or poorly written. It's not the only issue, of course, but I suspect it's more of an issue than we like to imagine

Although it's rarely expressed in outright terms, people often use a very simple heuristic when solving fashion problems: they wish to look rich, which is often disguised as "respectable." I will show you why this rarely leads to good outfits. 🧵

Great content starting at 29m30s, where @jonawils.bsky.social explains how football tactics are presently at a moment akin to the 19th century / Victorian crisis of faith, with connections to Nietzsche and Darwin among others. And I think he's right

Was great to appear on evolutionary psychology: the podcast. “Real evolutionary psychology by real evolutionary psychologists”, as the tagline puts it. Was a fun conversation for sure. Dave and David know their stuff.

Awesome, hope this is the beginning of a bunch of guests from the Paris School. I listen to every episode *at least* twice and read NotebookLM reports of the YouTube videos.

All grants should be on a rolling-deadline, reviewed quarterly. This is the only humane solution.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful" — George Box As I read this, it's a way of saying that models aren't empirical claims, they're tools. Right? Or in other words: models are telescopes not theories

Jesus. This rings true and is utterly terrifying

Want some film recommendations Priorities are quality screenwriting, classy/classic in style (unknown is fine, it’s the vibe I’m after) and cerebral in some way or another Three examples that meet all of these criteria but are otherwise very different: Chinatown; When Harry Met Sally; Parasite

It's another dimension of the Rozin point: in a rush to establish itself as a ‘proper’ science, psychology has been too fast to adopt the trappings and appearance of an old and mature discipline www2.psych.ubc.ca/~schaller/52...

An outstanding metaphor

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

🚨JOB ALERT! 🚨 The Department of Anthropology, Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy in Wrocław, Poland is looking for a Postdoc in the project "The human white sclera: the role of colouration and contrast in perceiving the eyes of others." Please Share!

Call for papers for Evolang 2026 is now posted! evolang2026.org. Workshop proposals due Sept 22nd. Paper submissions October 26th. Evolang is interdisciplinarity at its best. We hope to see you in Plovdiv!!

Happy to see my paper on mind-reading & ownership with @heintz-c.bsky.social out in Cognitive Science! 🧵

Reminiscent of Schelling's model of segregation. Individuals' acting in own interests produce group dynamics that are bad for all

The advent of writing outsourced key aspects of the cognitive task of memory. This changed human worlds. The advent of AI is currently outsourcing key aspects of the cognitive task of attention I find this a very perceptive framing of what is happening today jacmullen.substack.com/p/attention-...

Is mind-reading involved in ownership judgments? By @rekablazsek.bsky.social & @heintz-c.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

With the immediate caveat that there defo are clear and important exceptions: I really dislike the way many analytical philosophers write. Without skill, the analytical method easily slides into patronising the reader

Lot of sense here

It's funny to think that my preference for urban living in areas with dense, mixed-used, walkable neighborhoods, multi-family housing, small businesses, and diversity probably stems from Sesame Street. Like an early education in Jane Jacob's urbanist theories.

I think the whole norm of letter writing is a sector wide moral failure. Aside from being inefficient, it actively creates imbalances of power and absolves decision makers of responsibility In every other sector recruitment is based on institutions’ own assessment process

About podcasts. Many have 1-to-1 interviews with thinkers, writers, creators, etc. But why do they rarely have >1 such guest at the same time? In Our Time does it, but that is a BBC production that started decades ago. Is the format much more expensive and time consuming than the typical podcast?

“I’m not angry, just very disappointed” - Every parent to their teenager, at least once I am not the parent of modern institutions of science, but I feel very much the same. I thought they would be much more conscientious than they have turned out to be

"Instructed in assembly line procedures" is a good description that applies to all science (& philo). Teaching research design as a creative act rather than a cookbook is hard. Most grad students & ECRs want to be accepted into a club/identity. That means learning its norms, not free thinking.

ABOUT SCALARS: Ira Noveck and I published in 2007 "The why and the how of experimental pragmatics: The case of scalar inferences" in _Advances in Pragmatics_ (N Burton-Roberts ed.), republished in D. Wilson & D. Sperber _Meaning and Relevance_ 2012, as ch 14.

There is a consensus in the academic literature that the problem with misinformation is *not* that people are gullible and are too quick to believe falsehoods and fake news; it's that they are slow to trust good authority and true news @sachaltay.bsky.social‬ is my go-to expert on this

A great thought for the day.

“Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house” — Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) Artwork by Ursus Wehrli / Keith Haring