Great symposium this morning at the #EASP2026 conference: “Who critiques the critique? Toward a reflexive metascience,” with presenters @ameliazein.bsky.social, @mariogollwitzer.bsky.social, @fgabarrot.bsky.social, and me!

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My article "What does it mean to understand AI?" is out now in Harvard Data Science Review! I discuss mechanistic interpretability, representation engineering, world models, and Potemkin understanding from philosophical perspectives. hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/w1tfg5lx...

Fee-waived PhD available in #Forensicpsychology supervised by my collaborator Sofia Persson at Leeds Beckett University: www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/research-deg... Start: October, Deadline: May 13th. The project is about Rape Myth Interventions. Please share with any motivated psychology students!

Really interesting post from Tom's newsletter (as always) about how AI disrupts the 'signal' of how much effort someone is putting in to communicate with you (e.g. in a job application). So, perhaps creating new signals to demonstrate you have NOT used AI is the way to make yourself stand out...

Replacing expensive human workers with AI seems like a good cost cutting measure until you realise that once you've publicly announced to the world your business is now dependent on AI you're hostage to paying whatever the AI companies want to charge you

The SCORE investigation of repeatability and credibility is a lot. There are a few ways to get your head around it. 1: The Nature collection includes 3 papers from SCORE, an amazing paper from @i4replication.bsky.social and several commentaries about the work. www.nature.com/collections/... 1/

Excited and happy to report that we (@ccmmody.bsky.social, Ewout Meijer, Marielle Prevoo, Yannis Stravrakakis, Penelope Bollini, and I) will be able to start the new project "Invisible knowledge work and the transformation and scaling of open science practices". This is a unique project --> 1/2

Enjoyed this episode of @hpspodcast.bsky.social from last year with Heather Douglas about the social contract of science. Interesting discussion about 6 'types' of science and how they should be funded, relevant to a lot of current #metascience discourse. More 'science courts'! shorturl.at/QSdJI

The School of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University where I work is recruiting new lecturers, both research-focused (shorturl.at/zexaA) and teaching focused (shorturl.at/EhHrf) I'm not involved in the recruitment but feel free to reach out to me for a chat about working here! #academicsky

Genuinely interested whether the UKRI Metascience Novelty indicators project considered "ideological opposition to AI and novelty indicators" in their risks to delivery, given the amount of hate im seeing towards it

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

At last an AI tool I can get behind “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.” antirender.com

We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”

There’s no ‘could’ about doing less research. Colleagues here being told they can’t go for bids that don’t cover overhead (ie all the charity funders)

Really enjoyed this episode of @bjkspod.bsky.social with @mbaldwin.bsky.social talking about the history (and possible future) of peer review: www.buzzsprout.com/1390924/epis... Interesting to learn just how recent the idea that "research must be peer reviewed" is (70's), and that its original...

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

Why I'm more optimistic than others about metascience (or metaresearch) (I wanted to write up some thoughts on #metascience2025 but I just don't have the time so this thread will have to do.)

This is an interesting reflection on the relationship between metascience and research culture. There’s some excellent and relevant work that gets done under the banner of “research culture”, especially around things like inclusivity, recognition, and community building and I agree...

as spectator and also participant in various metascience-informed things like prereg, github etc, I can't help but notice a parallel between metascience-as-management (rather than science) and academic-leadership-as-management (rather than academic leadership)

If a drug company funds a study showing that their product is highly effective, we would be rightly skeptical of the results; if tech companies fund #metascience into how AI can improve science should we be equally sceptical?

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Looking forward to being part of the panel at this online event this afternoon on critical Metascience, I'll be talking about the alignment between open research reforms and academic capitalism. Details in the post below 👇 #metascience

A sunny Friday afternoon so I'm in a beer garden working my way through my stack of "interesting papers to read" and thought I'd do a mini thread of the best. Today's paper (actually a book chapter) is Jochen Gläser's 2019 "how can governance change research content?" doi.org/10.4337/9781...

This is a great post and really underscores the need for metascience reforms to seriously consider the context of their implementation, and the impact this has on researchers - "Get to know your audience"

Let's have some fun. In this NYT story, we see a picture of an OpenAI billboard on a college campus, suggesting the following prompt: "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus. In two weeks. Small steps please." What happens when we actually use ChatGPT to do this? THREAD!

This is a great post and was nice to see my paper on the invisible workload of open research quoted (journal.trialanderror.org/pub/the-invi...). Imposing mandates on researchers to perform time intensive open research practices is particularly unreasonable when combined with cuts to time and budgets

🆕 COS statement on the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" Executive Order The EO names important open science principles, but their application here is counter to open science's purpose to accelerate discovery, advance treatments, & create knowledge. 📄 Read our statement: www.cos.io/about/news/c...

Just astonishing: which airport book is ‘email jobs’ from, and which 1970s fantasy about everyone being in ‘production’ is this? Just utter ‘know your place’ stuff.

Its just warm words - like all funding agencies, universities, journals ("excellence" etc)... Only the implementation & detail really matters to me. (Not taking 'a side' on this one!)

Here's a thought experiment for you all: If a seemingly sane and science-literate government (I.e., not Trump) passed a law saying that all government policy must be based on reproducible, transparent research thats open to null findings, how would everyone react? #metascience

Any researchers in the Netherlands interested in the effects of #openresearch policies/practices on academic workload or administrative burden? Please get in touch! I would love to collaborate with you on a project for this funding opportunity

There’s the weaponization of open science y’all. Basically ripped from @cos.io’s website. The ROI for leaders speaking up is the highest it will be now, and only decline over time as these policies take shape and grow teeth.

Trying to keep up with this #metascience EO debate but this seems bang-on. To everyone saying "if it wasn't the science reform mvt it would be something else to justify this"...what else could possibly exist that would support the EO so effectively than a decade of 'science in crisis' literature?

1. It's Fustilarian Friday and today's drop is the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" executive order. My read is that this is designed to (1) protect far-fringe figures such as the antvaxxers now heading our health agencies, and (2) kneecap efforts to use scientific evidence in regulatory policy.

Also the anti-pluralist stance embedded in the reform to further this reductionist narrative has from the getgo had authoritative, at times fascist tendencies. This isn't the time to talk about our good intentions; we're way past that. It's time to take responsibility, to be humble and accountable.

Again, this is not a blame issue for me but points to the fact that (as I have said many times) the seemingly apolitical nature of science reform works against the (imo) real issues of labour and collective organisation.

This paper is an interesting case study example to come along so soon after the equally viral discussion on "stop using the phrase 'scientific consensus' and start using 'convergent evidence' instead'" - see www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hello followers! I'm back on Bluesky after 6 months of work-free parental leave. What have I missed? Please share with me any interesting Open research/Metascience publications, blog posts, or juicy scandals I should catch up on! #openresearch #metasci

Very honoured to have written a little something for @aeon.co about zero, absence, and consciousness. It was a real pleasure to write, and very curious to know what people think! 0️⃣🧠 #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #consci

If you bookmarked "Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?" but did not get to read it yet, worry not, we've got you covered with a short blog post about it Bonus track: there is a video by one of our vloggers in it 🤩

this is a great piece, and I just want to propose that the *funniest* research development would be for all of the researchers involved to quit Posting at each other for 2-3 weeks, self report the effects on their mental health, and coauthor the paper

Lots of new followers (hi!) so thought I would do an overdue thread on my recent paper “Open Research Reforms and the Capitalist University: Areas of Opposition and Alignment” (doi.org/10.1525/coll...) #metasci

Hang on a minute…

The results LOOK pretty replicable? That's not how any of this works and you'd think someone who runs a reproducibility project would know that damn well. Why would Nature close an article with so foolish a comment? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some great points here. The proposals will just shift the focus of admin to grant capture 1. Grants become only source of research £ for unis 2. Grants are in many (most?) cases lotteries 3. Buy as many tickets as possible All REF staff and administration redeployed to increase grant applications

This week, the touchstone paper purporting to show that there are replicability benefits of preregistration was retracted. For me this highlights a long-running disagreement I've had with core CoS strategy. I like the idea of making things possible, easy, and rewarding.

This is fantastic persistence from Joe to keep the story around this retraction open and keep pressure on the authors to be transparent about the changes to the manuscript and focus of the study. One thing this saga does well is to illustrate the complex and non-linear nature of... 1/