Why we are defunding liberal arts? Read this: everyone is "incentivized to reinforce acceleration of early performance years...starting in a discipline early, focusing exclusively on that discipline...[leading to] early, but not long-term, exceptional performance" 🔥 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Apply for my old job as Lecturer in HCI at Bristol. It's a lovely group and a good place to work. I only left because my wife lived in a different country. www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Researchgate interface for "request document" is so frustrating. V easy to click through by accident because it's barely distinguished from the interaction flow to download an available paper. Once a month I "request" a doc for which there's an arxiv link.

Are you a philosopher of biology or physics interested in interdisciplinary research? Do questions about life (evolved & artificial), self-organization and #development fascinate you? If so, we have an exciting postdoctoral opportunity for you! Please help us spread the word! #HPbio #philsci #ALife

There is one overriding political problem, from which all others follow. Until it is addressed, every policy advanced by governments is window dressing. www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...

Alan Watts on Zhuangzi: antiquity's greatest shitposter youtu.be/y9DWzIcjIDY?...

“Positivism Creep” “The subtle, often unacknowledged infiltration of positivist or post-positivist assumptions into methodologies where they do not naturally, philosophically, practically, or epistemologically belong.” By @thomasgraves.bsky.social @maddipow.bsky.social @annayahprosser.bsky.social

Xabier Barandiaran on agency and creativity with generative AI www.youtube.com/live/PkcUrHL...

1. Some good news at last. This week’s column is about the amazing thing a couple of us stumbled into three years ago, which we’ve now developed into a global research programme. It doesn’t change everything, of course, but it could help change quite a lot. + 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Do I have mutuals who have crowdfunded game development and would like to talk to me about how that went/what they learned?

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you've seen: 1. Cornford & Farmer 2. Rie Nakajima eliciting tears by arranging tiny motors & cups 3. Spem in Alium 4. Burkhard Schlothauer string quartet in a scout hut, beautifully disrupted by the slow passing of a party boat 5. Shirley Collins

As always in the 2020s TS Eliot's The Rock has it down: They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

" I don't think there will be ... apps ... the phone will just display what it anticipates you would most like to receive" An amazing illustration of the pervasive, problematic error in understanding human motivation that I've been going after in recent papers.

Disappointed that the phrase "bot girl summer" only just occurred to me, so late into the LLM companion epidemic. Simultaneously looking forward to the CHI 2026 paper "Bot Girl Summer: Understanding keyword term through the lens of methodology". Hope you got R&R.

The opening of this has the most incredible vintage science programming vibes I have seen outside of parody. Even if you could care less about complexity, cybernetics and the rest, the vintage aesthetics are immaculate. Academics, what's stopping you looking like this?

You're not asking trans people. You're asking all people. This affects us all. Anyone could be barred from services based on appearance. Since, surprisingly we all have a fecking appearance www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

non-brits and young folk: don't sleep on this. Arena was an incredible documentary series on arts and culture. Hard to imagine how it could exist today. If you know Paris is Burning, that was an Arena doc. So was the Wisconsin Death Trip film. So much gold here.

The UK is considering a policy that would effectively segregate trans people from society. It would bar trans people from "single sex spaces" even when they use the facility of their sex assigned at birth. This is a full on policy of segregation without even the benefit of separate facilities.

📢 #INEQUALITY GRAPH OF THE WEEK (No.2) ✅ Reducing #inequality is key to a more sustainable future. ✅ Scandinavia leads the way. ❌ #Unequal US and UK are failing (again…). Source: Profs Wilkinson & Pickett and The Equality Trust ♥️. For full details ➡️ equalitytrust.org.uk/evidence-bas...

This is as bad as anything proposed by Reform. Leaving refugees in permanent limbo and unable to build a new life in the UK would be a complete abdication of our humanitarian responsibilities www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

H. R. Giger website in 1996 in Netscape Navigator 2.0 #WebDesignHistory

Dad at Bristol University swimming pool laughing and correcting his 9-ish year old's pronunciation of the name of 18th C Swiss physicist and graph theorist Euler "oiler not yooler!". Kids do say the darndest things.

cool thread on memory and embodiment

I really like the cogsci thinking and music in this paper. Happy that it's finally out! Thanks @omriraccah.bsky.social and Michael Seltenreich for leading this project. Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Big up Ben Wheatley, who has been creating and building a giant YouTube playlist of all the various BBC Arena documentaries from back in the day. It’s now featuring over 100 films. Loads of gold in here. youtube.com/playlist?lis...

A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea: "Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD" Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...

one degree down, one degree to go. every little bit helps. doomerism is collaboration. only big social majorities can get it done.

I think this is one of the better philosophy of Dark Souls type takes I've seen. youtu.be/MQT5YVHoBRU?...

@sethcooke.bsky.social @clivehenry.bsky.social Dressed like his dad.

Hot take: reviewers should not just say a paper is "too long". Sure: "section X is repetitive", "y is not needed", "too much detail in z", but anything less specific is just vibes and very unhelpful. I see reviewers level this even at papers that would be hard to trim and gain little from it.

you can just go ask crows stuff instead of asking chatgpt

Brisol CS is now in Bsky

A reminder that the original Hallowe'en jack o' lanterns date back to 18th century Ireland if not earlier, were based on a shady boozy blacksmith called Stingy Jack who cheated the devil & was trapped between 2 worlds, were carved from turnips and looked like this:

Admitting non-ergodicity is the "Wile E Coyote looking down" of behavioural science research, human or AI.

Brook Ziporyn is the dude. Early daoism via Spinoza and Bataille. Exactly the comparative philosophy I'm here for. youtu.be/X4XZZR5yrM4?...

Parents, please check your kids’ candy this Halloween. I’ve just found an ancient metal whistle with the inscription “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT" inside a Snickers bar. I blew it and heard a note of infinite distance, and now I’m haunted by a figure in pale, fluttering draperies. Be safe.

Excited to release Mark Fell’s ‘Psychic Resynthesis’ today. This feels like a landmark album for Mark, a perfect realisation of his unique methods of cross-discipline collaboration, which ties up many threads of his musical history in one enigmatic statement. frozenreeds.bandcamp.com/album/psychi...

Lots of your favorite philosophers are assholes. dailynous.com/2025/09/19/p...

Why does Western Paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often use abbreviations? Our new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices using cognitive science experiments. A thread 1/n onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

this is a good thread but I might actually take it further -- I don't think manosphere shit is actually about getting laid, I think it's literally about male loneliness, by which I mean, men addressing their loneliness via homosocial bonding through misogyny

* Active inference meets uncertainty and attentive absorption in games * Using PCG for Metastudies (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...) * Reward cues/juicy feedback across games and gambling

Imperial opened its President’s PhD Scholarships (first deadline Nov 3): bit.ly/3JW2xuW Ping me to apply for a scholarship on: * Competence/empowerment/learning progress in games: models and DDA * The appeal of aleatoric uncertainty in games: models and tests ...

“不知道，不知道，不知道，不知道 。。。” youtu.be/hrE-SIdXqQE?...

Loving and Knowing is one of my favourite philosophy papers of recent years. Listen to the pod then read the paper. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🎙the Core of Loving & Knowing with @participha.bsky.social Philosopher Hanne De Jaegher discusses life experiences and how they led to her academic journey in cognitive science and the scholarship behind ‘participatory sense-making’ #psm #phil #embodied #sensemaking #varela #loveandphilosophy

Posted without comment

/8 I think there is a temptation, if you talk and write and debate for a living, to say that talking and writing and debating is inherently morally praiseworthy. I'm not sure it is. But that reflects a general philosophical split that I have with many people who talk about free speech: