As we come to the end of 2025 I wanted to share the best kid quote of the year: Uber Eats guy at the door handing a bag to my 4yo: It's Uber Eats My 4yo giving it to his big sister: It's ovaries

Good news @lastpositivist.bsky.social - no seppuku required this year

It’s letter-of-recommendation season again, when universities ask me to rate a 21 year old student’s ability to “see the big picture of life” while I eat leftover pasta in a Tupperware…

We’ve seen research showing LLM chatbots can reduce belief in conspiracy theories in experimental settings: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e... But in the wild, it seems that these tools likely contribute to strengthening belief in conspiracy theories for many.

Now is a good time to share that in 2008 while biking in Cambridge i saw Larry Summers and looked at him too long since he looked familiar but I’d never seen him in person. He stopped walking and stared back at me and we made aggressive eye contact until I almost crashed my bike

The most horrifying AI slop of ICE raids you can possibly imagine is wildly viral on Facebook, collectively totaling tens of millions of views from a single account. First spotted by @chadloder.bsky.social www.404media.co/ai-generated...

Good morning to all those people who wasted the last decade saying, "there's no point tackling climate change in the UK, because China." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Amazing talk by Sally Haslanger @shaslang.bsky.social on "Social systems & their micro, meso, & macro interactions'' @ucisocsci.bsky.social & dinner afterwards with Ari Koslow, Tori Cotton @wittgencism.bsky.social, Cailin O’Connor @cailinmeister.bsky.social & Kate Ritchie @kateritch.bsky.social !!!

This thicc 71-chapter book (academic.oup.com/edited-volum...) arrived just in time to use as the textbook for my new "Cultural Evolution" class I've just started teaching! Featuring this chapter from @cailinmeister.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social & Jingyi Wu as well as much more including...

I couldn't be more on board with this. Focusing on corruption/fraud/misconduct at the level of individual scientist appears to be misguided and counterproductive when systemic forces and selection biases are at play. This appears to be true even beyond the context of industry manipulation.

We should start having this conversation explicitly in criminology. These distortion mechanisms and perverse incentives are absolutely relevant for crime data. inquest.org/our-evidence...

Going to go ahead and put this at the top of my reading list.

"Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men... Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, increase for women presenters"

Who today is influencing science a la Big Tobacco or Oil and Gas? In our new preprint we show how tech companies like Meta are capturing research on their product, using mechanisms that subtly (or not so subtly) shape what science gets produced

I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

Thank you google AI

Congrats to all involved in the production of the massive Oxford Handbook of cultural evolution. You can read our paper The Cultural Evolution Of Science here: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/u...

You’re talking to a mover and shaker in the Orange County Irish dance scene. Ask your self if this is an enemy that you want to make, friend.

New @ucirvine.bsky.social Center for Socially Engaged Philosophy aims to address real world problems | Research center is led by @cailinmeister.bsky.social, logic & philosophy of science Chancellor’s Professor, and housed in the School of Social Sciences

Hello! I just started at new center at UCI! Some main foci will be misinformation, metascience, and equity! www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/n...

How do false beliefs arise and spread? In the latest episode of IGCC's Talking Policy podcast, @ucirvine.bsky.social philosophy professor Cailin O'Connor (@cailinmeister.bsky.social) joins us to discuss the origins of misinformation and how it might be combated. Listen here: bit.ly/468bSIz

Did the @ucigcc.bsky.social podcast about why false beliefs are bad, why we hold them, and how technology contributes. But listen dum dums, I'm getting sick of talking about this, so let's wrap this misinformation thing up ucigcc.org/podcast/a-ph...

In tenure letters the last few years I've been forcibly struck by how much service the women I'm reviewing are doing compared to the men. (Actual evidence backs this anecdote up - see below.) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Just discovered this very nice review of my "Modeling Scientific Communities" by Ignacio Ojea Quinana! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Image from my memorial talk for Helen, taken by my student Arlene.

This was immediately responded to by a bunch of scammers and I must say I really walked right into that one

Looking for a web developer to update my website, but I'd rather hire, like, a nice student freelancer rather than a big company. Does anyone have advice about how to go about this? The internet seems to be mostly a morass of scammers.

Why was this accepted 3.5 years ago and only published now? Our crack team @lastpositivist.bsky.social @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social @nathan-gabriel.bsky.social never turned in the final MS! For your viewing pleasure: On the Stability of Racial Capitalism! journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

Have you ever wanted to visualize how belief polarization might occur in scientific communities? Then check out this simulator, based on the model developed by @cailinmeister.bsky.social and @jamesowenweatherall.com in their (2018) paper on polarization #philsci #philsky #metasci

Congrats to my student Matthew Coates for defending his dissertation! He used network models to study dissent in science and prosociality. More here! matthewncoates.github.io

Congrats congrats to my student Ben Genta on finishing his dissertation! He worked with @laurennross.bsky.social and I on reasoning in the social sciences- more below!

What I so admired and loved about Helen De Cruz was her fearlessness. She wasn't held back by expectations or disciplinary boundaries or the rules of philosophy. She brought things into the world in a bountiful and shameless way. What she created was authentic and beautiful. RIP my friend.

My Facebook account just got suspended for sharing this slide for my talk on Friday in Salzburg #martyr4PPE @lastpositivist.bsky.social @ryanmuldoon.bsky.social @cailinmeister.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com

@bostonreview.bsky.social just published a Forum on a recent (critical) post-mortem of US COVID policy, with responses from me and @cailinmeister.bsky.social, along with @adamjkucharski.bsky.social, Adam Gaffney, and @jonathanpjwhite.bsky.social. V. interesting! www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-di...

[email protected] has a forum asking "How Did We Fare on COVID-19", centered on Macedo & Lee's critique of our pandemic response — with responses from @cailinmeister.bsky.social & James Owen, @adamjkucharski.bsky.social, @jonathanpjwhite.bsky.social, and myself. Interesting discussion...

So delighted for my student Matthew Coates who will be teaching PPE next year at Bowling Green State U!! More on his work, and the many birds he has photographed, here: matthewncoates.github.io

A thousand congrats to my student Ben Genta who will be a Sloan foundation postdoctoral fellow working on metascience and AI for the next two years!! He'll be at NYU philosophy, so be sure to say hi and check out his work here: benjamingenta.com

Help needed! Do people have suggestions for good single episode podcasts on 1) fatphobia and 2) the idea of neurodiversity and/or social background beliefs about autism? Wanted for a class where I need to intro these topics.

Congrats to LPSer Adam Chin who has accepted a TT position at MiraCosta Community College!!! See more here for his work on religion and science and his infamous seafood themed baked goods: www.adamjchin.org

Thanks philpeople, for creating a profile I don't want, and randomly giving me my husband's last name

Probably the best example of a collapse in the uptake of carbon dioxide on land (LULUCF) is in Finland. A significant and sustained carbon sink turned into a source in 10 years. robbieandrew.github.io/country/?cou... 1/

NEW: A federal judge raised alarm Friday that the Trump administration appeared to have deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with "no meaningful process" — even as her father was fighting to keep her in the country. Details w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

My painting TIDAL WETLANDS

“is my calculator horny?“ our tech columnist asks. “i entered 5318008 into it and turned it upside down. what i saw surprised me”

My postdoc funding & salary were eliminated, and my work broadly fell into the category of "misinformation." My research had nothing to do with censoring anyone or targeting political beliefs. I designed & tested a game that taught users how to identify hoaxes, scams, and misleading headlines.

The oil industry buys off Congress. No action on climate. The NRA buys off Congress. No action on guns. Insurance companies buy off Congress. No action on health care. The list goes on and on. Money in politics is the root of our dysfunction.