thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

Been listening a lot to Ella Jenkins the last couple of days. What wonderful music and performance!

Within the past two weeks I deleted apps for media companies owned by 67% of the world’s richest billionaires, and it felt great!

Results of high stakes elections that happen only once every four years offer remarkable opportunities for overfitting theories of the electorate

It's my book's release day! The Patterns of Comics is now officially published, featuring an extended data-driven analysis of the structures used in 350+ comics from Asia, Europe, and North America analyzing diversity, regularity, and change over time www.visuallanguagelab.com/poc

GOOD MORNING BLUESKY! Very excited about this new paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300671120 Key Q: what predicts how much young kids (👶)talk? How much 🗣 kids heard predicted how much 👶talked, but other factors, e.g. mom’s education, didn’t. #PsychSci #DevPsy 🗣💬 INCOMING SUMMARY🧵ALERT 1/14

#linguistics Bluesky: what are the best available quantitative measures of dialect/language mutual intelligibility? The more fine-grained, the better: I'm hoping to vividly illustrate at least one specific dialect continuum (e.g., the Romance languages of the Mediterranean coast)

Today in linguists are NOT KIDDING when we say that your capacity for language enables you to understand sentences that have never before been uttered in human history.

New postdoc opportunity to work jointly with @cantlonlab.bsky.social and me to understand cognition across species, age, and culture! cmu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CMU/job/Pitt...

Absolutely, the Nature EiC has it completely backwards. Checking for errors and quality of data (and of math, code, and argumentation) is the most important work that reviewers can do.

The quotes from Nature EiC Magdalena Skipper about whether journals should be checking for errors/data quality as part of peer review are quite surprising to me. https://www.wsj.com/science/whats-wrong-with-peer-review-e5d2d428?st=dhrnljoa74fujcv&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I am delighted to announce that the Department of Biology at the University of Washington is advertising for a tenure-track assistant professor position on the quantitative understanding of collective behavior. I will be chairing the search; details are here: apply.interfolio.com/130336

I think it’s amazing that Cognitive Science gives recent PhDs $10K in UNRESTRICTED CASH…right when folks are broke, exhausted, moving town…and need it most. It’s almost Glushko season! cognitivesciencesociety.org/glushko-diss...

First post and big news - I am starting as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Georgia Tech in Jan 2024! www.language-intelligence-thought.net

In a new TiCS article, @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social and I review a growing body of behavioral, neural, and computational evidence that social interactions are automatically extracted by the human visual system: tinyurl.com/nhh2dhxt #PsychSciSky #NeuroSkyence

While the world has its eyes on the Middle East, democratic conditions in Indonesia are looking grim. The Supreme Court has overruled the Constitution in order to allow the sitting president's son to stand as Vice Presidential candidate with a disgraced general with a stained human rights record

I am reading PhD applications this year, with a special interest in students who would like to work on the topic of perceived danger. But open to all applicants who share some of my interests. Visit www.liulaboratory.org to see papers, lab values, and tips for application writing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is hiring a section chief for the psych/”behavioral” section and I'd love to see some CogSci representation in there! My brother works there (trained as an economist) and it's an incredible gig doing research in the public interest.

Santa Fe Institute now has a Blue Sky account: @sfiscience.bsky.social

A new cross-linguistic study on demonstratives by a team of psychologists and linguists: "Commonalities and differences across languages in spatial communication can be understood in terms of universal constraints on action shaping spatial language and cognition." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out! "Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments" #CulturalEvolution #cssky 🧪 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

new work just dropped, see @stephan-meylan.bsky.social's "thread" below:) #DevPsych #CogPsych #PsychSciSky #CogSciSky

Thrilled at publication of @stephan-meylan.bsky.social's "How adults understand what young children say", featuring Bayesian noisy-channel inference, LLMs, & child speech datasets! TL;DR: prior expectations of what kids *want to say* is crucial. (Knowing how kids mispronounce words is too.)

Prompting is *not a substitute* for probability measurements in large language models – the amazing @jennhu.bsky.social's EMNLP paper now available camera-ready! TL;DR: direct probability measurements show LLMs' linguistic generalizations are better than suggested by prompt-based tests.

Each week I'm posting the first page of a chapter of my book. Here's the first page of chapter 5, "Language and Land" (seven weeks to publication of "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California", mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547093/).

I think I have like one STEM follower on bsky but if I’m wrong, I hope my second will give this open letter a look and slap their name on it.

I was going to submit a manuscript to eLife this week. Just signed this open letter and wrote to my co-authors about submitting our paper somewhere else

This is a very precisely written letter, and as a result, I think, a very strong letter, in support of Eisen — I'm happy to be able to sign on. Please consider adding your support, even if anonymously.

There already seems to have been one resignation from the editorial board over this:

Profoundly disappointing if true. Whether or not Michael's post was in good taste, he retweeted a mainstream satirical site to his personal social media account. As an eLife editor I have no interest in monitoring my social media activity to ensure everything I post represents the journal.

Mostly not here for politics. But, at the science/politics intersection: @elife.bsky.social Editor-in-Chief Michael Eisen is apparently being ousted for tweet-referencing a satire conveying the tragedy of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Concerned about this form of censure? Sign this open letter.

We are happy to share our new commentary on why using language inclusively for transgender people is perfectly appropriate biologically, socially, and scientifically. A 🧵 on the commentary by @andyperfors.bsky.social, @spiantado.bsky.social, & me

Haven't posted on here yet— We're hiring a junior faculty member in computational linguistics at Georgetown! 🎓😎 There's a tremendous amount of talent in the field right now, so I can't wait to read the applications. Apply by Nov. 1. DMs/email open for questions. #NLProc #CompLing

My department (MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences) is hiring a tenure-track faculty! We're especially interested in researchers who span multiple levels of analysis. Candidates from underrepresented backgrounds strongly encouraged to apply. Apply by November 1! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25916

Full sequence of the annular solar eclipse at Shiprock, New Mexico. This was a dream composition of mine. So much time, energy, and money went into making it happen. I'm forever grateful to the Navajo for letting me shoot it from sacred ground. An experience I'll never forget.

I don't know if introductions are done here like Mastodon, but whatevs. I'm new and need something to pin. :) I'm a prof in computational cogsci at UniMelb. I use behavioural experiments and mathematical models to study how people learn and reason. /1

Introducing COLM (colmweb.org) the Conference on Language Modeling. A new research venue dedicated to the theory, practice, and applications of language models. Submissions: March 15 (it's pronounced "collum" )

I’m absolutely thrilled to see science Twiiter 🧪 and academic Twitter more generally moving here to bluesky. Twitter was obviously untenable. That said, we need to be mindful of new inequities that may be inadvertently created by moving the conversation to a currently restricted closed platform.

This might be flying under the radar (so please RT!), but the US Copyright Office is soliciting comments for its decisions on training ML/NLP/AI systems on copyrighted material (even *non*-generative AI). They need to hear from researchers, so please comment! Deadline Oct 30. www.copyright.gov/ai/

🚀 We've officially landed on Bluesky! Excited to join this vibrant new platform and (re)connect with all of you! 🗣️💬 Help us spread the word by retweeting and following.

I should acknowledge, this piece is coming under very heavy fire from people who feel it fails to acknowledge that this capacity was latent in word embeddings and has been long understood. See e.g. twitter.com/Dorialexande... #lingsky #MLSky

Yi Ting Huang and I have an opening for a postdoctoral researcher on an NSF-funded project, "Syntactic processing across socioeconomic status: Linking input to comprehension". Apply by Nov 15; start Jul 1, 2024 with flexibility. Please disseminate widely! ejobs.umd.edu/postings/114...

Hi Bluesky! I'm recruiting graduate students and postdocs to launch the Visual Learning Lab with me at UC San Diego in Summer/Fall 2024! The lab will focus on how we learn to derive visual meaning, integrating methods from developmental psychology, machine learning, & vision science.

Anyone have trust game data on a U.S. sample they are willing to share? Polisky Econsky Sociology

New paper, out in Open Mind We find that in reading, the brain uses 2 strategies to control the eyes Reading times (fixation durations) depend on linguistic processing, but skipping (fix. location) mostly depends on low-level oculomotor processing #CogSci 🧠🤖 🧠📈 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

On 9/28, I had the opportunity to speak at a virtual roundtable convened by Congressman Bobby Scott on “AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge?”. The roundtable was a closed meeting, but sharing our opening remarks is allowed. Mine are here: medium.com/@emilymenonb...

I had a brief indirect collaboration with Francesca Gino when I was at Harvard. She had an idea that giving people feedback on how equally everyone was contributing to a conversation might lead to better problem solving outcomes. She wanted an AI system to track this and give realtime feedback. /n

Another victim of the culture of non-criticism. She left academia. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

(1st post!) The McPherson Auditory Perception Lab is coming to Purdue Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences in Fall 2024, & I'm recruiting graduate students and postdocs! If you are interested in studying how people perceive and remember complex sounds, please reach out. hhs.purdue.edu/directory/ma...