TWO great jobs in History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney! Rank from Lecturer (Assistant Prof) to Assoc Prof. Particularly interested in candidates working in the areas of early modern science, or science or medicine in Asia, or Indigenous knowledge systems... #HPS #STS #histstm #histsci

Leading polisci journal clarifies that it is allowed to deviate from pre-analysis plans but deviations must be transparently disclosed. Good. P.S. This LLM-based service for tracking deviations from PAP is awesome: regcheck.app

Happy to see one of my favorite papers yet finally in an issue at the Journal of personality! Together with Graciela Muniz-Terrera, @andreasstenling.bsky.social , Sophie Potter, and Martin Hyde. A thread on the paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (1/6)

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Are personalized networks worth it? An experimental study: https://osf.io/u3vzj

Our position paper, "AI Welfare Is Bullshit" just got accepted to ICML 2026 @icmlconf.bsky.social! The AI welfare agenda has already begun to attract institutional investment at organizations such an @anthropic.com. We argue that this idea is essentially Frankfurtian Bullshit.

“The Highway Lobby spends millions to make sure we spend billions.” — Union of Concerned Scientists. Their profit, your cost. Pleased to support @ucs.org in sharing/boosting their important new article below, with our newest @urbantruth.bsky.social poster. #UrbanTruth

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

The OSF platform has become unusable. We have a function in Metacheck to help you download all files in every component of a project, which might be helpful if you decide to move things elsewhere.

This from @pardoguerra.bsky.social is right: Not every useful unit of research needs the same amount of peer review resources. We need an incentive structure to support alternatives. Not said: there is no way to get there. /1

Thrilled this is out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵 Do we have 2 kinds of beliefs? Some beliefs seem insensitive to evidence and rarely guide behavior, etc. To explain this, several theories divide belief into 2 types. I argue the explanation isn't in the *mind* but in the *world*

Classic academic's wikipedia page arc

i noticed this line on @aaronbornstein.bsky.social's website, regarding email from prospective students: "I do not respond to messages that appear to have been written by ChatGPT or similar tools." I also ignore LLM-generated student email - great idea (and courteous) to state this ahead of time !

the ability to produce clear, concise writing, rapidly, has always been a secret weapon in science — the age of LLMs will only increase its value

This website visualizes social media as a room with 100 people 3 people are producing most toxic content Most people assume 43 are producing toxic content, because these 3 are hyperactive and amplified by engagement based algorithms. The other 97 quiet voices disappear thenoisyroom.com

This is an interesting piece and connects to a convo i was having with friends yesterday, about how one of my challenges recently is persuading students that I want *their* thoughts and analysis about things, and that it coming *from them* is the entire point. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

A good cautionary tale for when someone claims that trusting data analysis done with an LLM is good because it’s “objective.” In this example, Copilot apparently decided to ignore the data it was given and just run with all the subconscious biases its (human-made) training data inevitably gave it.

This...the fetishizing of unreplicable neuroscience in order to legitimize our work is self-defeating. We don't need to know that depression is in the brain (as opposed to what???) to know it is problematic. How much money have we wasted proving something like depression is "real"?

Bingo! Do I win a prize now?

At New York University, leaders are hoping to encourage a student-led culture change in an effort to spend less time online and more time living life. They want students to have more fun in person, together. The university president’s goal: “Collective effervescence.” https://wapo.st/4nxQgN3

A new paper challenges the view that higher education liberalizes students (N = 483,885): Students political identities change during college. But there are big differences across majors: Englise/arts students move to the left, while business/engineering shift right psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

On fears that attention spans are shrinking. Yes, we do flit from task to task more quickly and that does worsen performance. But our underlying capacity to pay attention seems undiminished. Ditch distractions and we can recover focus. By David Adam | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

We now have an AI wellbeing index! "Some models are happier than others. Larger models are also consistently less happy than their smaller counterparts." www.ai-wellbeing.org #AIWelfareIsBS

We provide a set of recommendations arguing that a system of governance that can build the infrastructure to certify the welfare of machines while failing to secure the welfare of people has misplaced its moral priorities.

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

I apparently missed the release of the 42 episode on siblings for which I was interviewed, in case you missed it as well: You can now watch me sort apples, oranges and pears on television.

the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper🎈: Lessons Learned from Big Team Science Projects in Cognitive Science in @collabrapsychology.bsky.social online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... We share practical, experience-based strategies for running large-scale collaborations - from project structure to ethics, funding, & AI use.

University administrator challenge: actually find ways to support your researchers in these times rather than saying the same only tired meaningless words

I was very bearish on AI to begin with, but recently I started experimenting more with APIs and building my own agents. And wow, I did not realize how heavily subsidized all the subscriptions were: 🧵 1/6

The shit you can get away with in nutrition research is egregious. Even 24 hour food recall diaries are notoriously unreliable, but asking people what they ate in *the past year* is a joke. You can't track a 10% drop in UPF consumption if your input data is off by 80%!

“When you’re unable to drive, the flaws in our public transit system become obvious. Sidewalks that end suddenly, street crossings that feel like a sprint for your life, and bus routes perfectly timed to miss the train. When transit is your only option, these things aren’t minor inconveniences.”

Night Sky #3 Gathie Falk 1979

My article "Three-Sided Testing to Establish Practical Significance" with @jackfitzgerald.bsky.social is now published in AMPPS! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... Three-sided testing is an improved version of TOST that lets you test for equivalence, superiority and inferiority simultaneously.

#AcademicSky It's even more staggering when you see the figure (re: grant applications spiking in new AI world) Yes, yes, correlation is not causation. But let's think in terms of probabilities, and consider the context (what happened in 2022). It's reasonable to infer AI use here.

Real-world data reveal that cooperation continually falls and rebounds. Motivation to cooperate must therefore be actively renewed rather than assumed to sustain itself go.nature.com/4tvFx7I

friend: just skim & tell me if it's ready to submit me:

How we spend time alone has important consequences for well-being. Over the past year and a half, I’ve delved into the fascinating literature on solitude. Two updates related to this work: - 📚 We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on how relatively stable personal and contextual (1/3)

More striking than the moral judgments themselves are the number of people who don't see these issues as morally relevant We see this often in our research: even for so-called "moral issues," people vary widely in whether they see moral bases for their positions www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...

Level B/C (Lecturer/Senior Lecturer) continuing position, open area, available at our School of Psychology at the University of Sydney 🐨 usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E...

🚨Big opportunity to work with us at NUS, with possible extension up to 4.5 years of job security: Research Fellow (Quantitative Research) careers.nus.edu.sg/job/Research...

If you (like me!) feel uneasy about the societal consequences of big AI firms, their lock on your data, etc, you can now run an LLM locally one one beefy GPU or MacBook Pro, that’s just insanely capable (will feel close to Claude like 6-12 months ago for many tasks). qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen...

" People will stop asking 'Is this well-written?' and start asking 'Is this real?'. They will stop asking 'Is this published?' and start asking 'Is this manipulated?'. The question shifts from 'Is this convincing?' to 'Can I trust it?'. "

Out @thejop.bsky.social: measuring shocks like weather or immigrant exposure has vast researcher degrees of freedom. We (@phanxi.bsky.social) show: equally plausible measures diverge + yield spurious results. So, investigate the full set. For us, a null for climate opinion www.doi.org/10.1086/735706

Good news everyone 🥳 Our (w @vincentab.bsky.social) primer on models as prediction machines (with the marginaleffects package) is finally officially published!> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Lovely story from @carlzimmer.com follows up on Bruce the beakless kea, who first invented a new way to preen and now has invented a new way of kicking ass. Gift link.

“What I didn’t know was that measles can cause long-term complications. A child can seem fine while the virus slowly replicates in her brain… Because both Britain and the United States are confronting outbreaks, I am sharing my story. Parents should know just how dangerous this disease is.”

Transit construction costs in the US keep rising, and projects keep taking longer and longer to build. One possible explanation? Ineffective, inefficient community engagement processes, we argue @urbaninstitute.bsky.social ⏬

Our paper on 13 methods for detecting careless responding in EMA has been accepted by Psychological Methods. Grateful to have collaborated with this wonderful team of researchers🍀(final post-print: osf.io/preprints/ps...).