300 paywall jumps for Robin's MainFT lunch with Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. Get one before someone else does. on.ft.com/3K7Or9T

i think it's probably right that a lot of the bluster from the state about cracking down on liberals and free expression belies a rather limited capacity to actually do so at scale, but 1. a lot of the chilling of free expression can be achieved just by the threat, making an example out of a

>"Free speech is being stifled by 'The Left' and we must ensure there is adequate debate on campus" > "We must simultaneously pursue the firing of professors, managers, and anyone else who dares exercise the freedoms provided them by the first amendment" www.ft.com/content/b1c5...

New paper! Different to my usual schtick concerning cognitive costs. We analysed differences in learning between depressed and healthy students and whether Pavlovian biases differed between them. We found mixed evidence... have a read! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Online Now: Are metabolic costs needed to explain cognitive fatigue?

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 🧵 A thread:

Out now, in case you prefer to read things (as I do) in journal format www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up https://theonion.com/guy-in-philosophy-class-needs-to-shut-the-fuck-up-1819568055/

It's true: This is the first project from our lab that has a "Merch" page! Get yours @ www.perceptionresearch.org/anagrams/mer...

I want everyone to close their eyes and imagine a world where AI is wildly successful in the next 5 years. Billions use it every day, governments build data centers as fast as they can, millions of lives are saved by its disease cures, and Sam Altman wins a Nobel. Imagine what OpenAI stock would do.

"the computational metaphor" in cognitive science is not a metaphor. computational processes are attributed to the mind/brain in the most dead-literal sense. one can disagree with it but (1) it's not as simple as discarding a metaphor and (2) boy is there a lot of data that has to be explained!

New letter by @minzlicht.bsky.social and I forthcoming in TiCS on whether neurometabolic costs are necessary to explain cognitive fatigue. While the origins of fatigue may turn out to be metabolic, we argue there isn’t yet sufficient evidence for such theories. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I spent the day with Curtis Yarvin and the "dissident right" at a garden party in Surrey and wrote quite a few words about it. My cover story for today’s FT Magazine on.ft.com/4ooXS4t [GIFT LINK! 🎁]

New preprint with @krefeldschwalb.bsky.social. We show that the smarter* people are, the greater the correlation between distinct estimates of their economic preferences.

OK, Ackman is obviously the world’s biggest bozo, but I fail to see how saying you inherited good genes is “eugenics”. Are these people saying that genes don’t impact behaviour, or that you don’t inherit genes from your parents?

Trader Joe's is sold out of cheese curds. Fair enough to call 911, right?

Overleaf is great. It only takes 2-3x as long as the same task in Word or docs, but you feel much smarter once you eventually debug it.

Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced. That's not an especially difficult or complex idea, but for the pros who cover him, it still seems to be too much. "He talked, but watch out because there is no information value in what he said" still eludes them. See below. Via @dceiver.bsky.social

@jakeembrey.bsky.social nice shoutout in the final keynote of Prof Ben Newell. Conference due to end, what a blast! @expsyanz.bsky.social

Happy Bloomsday Joyceans!

Big Five debunked

Wouldn’t mind seeing someone have a proper crack at the aphantasia literature too.

Such mixed feelings when the kids grow up and leave home 🥹 #TACO www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/b...

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

The EO has to be interpreted in light of the (decades long) Republican attack on science. This has nothing to do with improving science. They're using legitImate criticism from within science to (ironically) decrease the credibility of science. They then have no obligation to listen to scientists.

Online Now: A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making

New paper in TiCS out now. A big interdisciplinary effort on how cognitive costs arise and affect different stages of the decision-making process. I've reduced the entry-costs by sharing the paper in your feed!

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 I've been fascinated by this contradiction for years: we hate exerting effort, yet we value things more when they're difficult to achieve. Is the effort paradox real, illusory, or adaptive? Have a read! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Boston is such an academic city that Stroop tasks are part of the public transportation system

Labor landslide win inducing some serious homesickness

ok when he said "the best nation on earth" i did felt that www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05...

i love to get up to speed on a new corner of psychology. i love to read verbatim the same opening paragraph 15 times in a row

It is increasingly the case that 'mental effort' and 'cognitive costs' are used as an explanatory aether. Without a solid theory of what constitutes these costs, saying X or Y behaviour exists due to effort is essentially meaningless

Colossal Biosciences also brought back the Thylacine!!! Omg, they are amazing!

My biggest fear in life is that I'll crash out of academia and end up in a corporate role that requires me to cringepost on LinkedIn

As a rule of thumb, it's true that you should never ever want this to happen. www.ft.com/content/e025...

uh oh

Geez, I wonder why the public have lost faith in research and scientists? We've no hope when this is the sort of stuff being publicised.

Been thinking about this thread a lot the past week. Every day I’m shocked by the growing number of people who seemingly want to outsource all their mental labor. Is there a German word which describes being incensed yet also depressed?

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

I’m guessing we’re only a few weeks away from Trump legislating that the ball really does cost $0.10 in the Bat and Ball problem.

I knew America was heading down a horrible path when I learned they say "math" instead of "maths"

Forthcoming at JEP: General is some more work from my dissertation. Over three experiments we test a popular model of cognitive effort aversion—the opportunity cost model, first proposed by Kurzban et al. (2013)—and find negligible support for its primary predictions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

now that's how you write a headline www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/o...

We need a new designation for ‘undeveloping’ nations.

Coming from a country where ticket scalping is illegal, it's nice to be in the US where tickets sell out instantly and are immediately resold for 5-10x the original asking price.

Roy Baumeister called ego depletion "one of the most replicable findings in social psychology." As someone who spent 20 years studying it—and ultimately had to admit it wasn't real—I have to respectfully disagree. Here's my perspective of what went so wrong.