The fact that Mamdani just seems like a cheerful normal guy who's policies are things like "we're going to tax second homes to fund pothole repairs" or whatever and yet this generates panicked responses like "This is basically Stalin's great purge turned up to eleven" is... telling. It tells things.

If anyone is looking for a lab manager or RA (full or part-time), let me know. One of the most meticulous and detailed people that I know is looking for a position. They did a M.A. in psych with me here at Cornell.

Literally the first comment. Also, the fact that authoritarians *can* lose elections in some systems does not mean democracy is unaffected. Would Cowen prefer to live in an illiberal democracy or competitive authoritarian state? Are they really the same as, say, Canada?

Hahahaha! Textbook gaslighting

🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨 ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts. internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/

You know that finding that disfluent fonts trigger analytic thinking (Alter et al. 2007)? We've known that it doesn't replicate more than 10 years. In fact, the original effect was driven by weirdly low accuracy for 1 problem IN THE CONTROL CONDITION. Wild that this paper is cited so often.

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

This is the sort of clip you see in the opening minutes of a deeply dystopian film

Have to say I agree with Newsom on this one.

Cuban missile crisis but everyone involved is insane

Don't think I've ever been as terrified in all the Trump security crises. As @pkrugman.bsky.social said, "It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things." Mainly as cope, and to teach it, I keep asking why. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Realizing that some of my inexplicable sadness about the Artemis II stuff is that it feels like a trans-dimensional communication from an America that took a different path and chose joy instead of fear and hate.

This is not lets-propose-this-and-see-what-Congress-says. Their plan is more like USAID: eliminate before Congress can weigh in.

Gerald Ford vetoed naming a post office after himself.

"Over the course of 2025, four million fewer Canadian travellers visited the U.S. than in the year before— a 22 per cent decrease. The trend shows no sign of slowing down: in January of 2026, the number of Canadians taking road trips into the U.S. dropped by 27 per cent..."

Really leaning into that whole "devalue the currency" thing www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

This is just an incredible visual model of what being on X is like

Important new research shows the number of Americans who are neutral about democracy exceeds those who oppose it. These neutrals are NOT inattentive. They are: uninformed, cynical, ambivalent, conditional. @nathumbehav.nature.com Democracy supporters speak out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I know it's been said countless times for the past year or so, but it really does bear repeating: Outrageous shit like this is happening literally *every* week. Catastrophe after catastrophe. This cannot be sustainable... Right? Right?!?!

They are trying to ban vote-by-mail, and also threatening to put a paramilitary force at polling places.

Fox News has spent less than 12 minutes covering the Pentagon's reported request for $200 billion to pay for the war in Iran. In the same time frame, they've spent 26 minutes talking about Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave a restaurant. www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-rela...

A clever preprint by @pwarren.bsky.social and colleagues describes Community Notes as having a "lazy rater" problem. Harder claims that are harder to fact-check may get fewer ratings than obvious fakes, leaving the most important misinfo with notes invisible to users. arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11120

Remember: Academia is a crap shoot. In applying for my job, I beat out a guy who became the most productive scholar in my field in at least a generation. Two of the best scholars I know in my field - people who have clearly outclassed me in many ways - never got tenure track jobs. Just sayin'

Back when I was on Facebook, I noticed that a Trump supporter from my hometown seemed to have soured on him. I thought, "oh, maybe he finally clued in". Nope: Turns out he thought Trump was too subservient to "his Jewish masters" Feed into radicalization and these are the consequences.

Majority of Canadians say it’s better to depend on China than on the US under Trump. In other key allies - Germany, UK, France - a plurality say the same. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

A lot of ppl are dunking on the factual inaccuracies in Andreesen's rejection of introspection. But there's a key point that ppl are missing: This is ultimately about rejecting moral responsibility. If you don't introspect, you don't have to face the moral consequences of your decisions.

One good reason to never have billionaire celebrities run a country is that they likely will have difficulty understanding basic social dynamics

My own take on power analyses: I'm good with "we had xx power to detect effects as big as xx" but find "we made a pseudo-random guess about an effect size & determined that we need a sample of N=[some highly specific number]" to be too close to cosplay for me.

Many supporters of science note the latest attack on US research as "senseless" or "no good reason" as if it is just an irrational attack on things (science & medicine) that all recognize are both good and outside of politics. Better if we acknowledged that there are clear goals to this attack. 1/4

People often speculate about what *they* would have done to oppose Nazi Germany. The US killed a school of children. Hegseth is saying "no quarter" will be given (a war crime). Trump is threatening to destroy an entire country (93 million people live in Iran). Speculation is no longer necessary.

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🥁🥁🥁 Newly out from us today in Science Advances: “Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users’ Attitudes on Societal Issues”. Large Language Models are providing users with autocomplete writing suggestions on many platforms. Could these suggestions shift users’ own attitudes? (spoiler: YES) (1/7)

New postdoc position at Cornell! This is a bit of a unique one: It's a teaching postdoc focused on integrating active learning strategies into psychology courses (including one of my own). Should be a lot of fun! Apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31738

New postdoc position at Cornell! This is a bit of a unique one: It's a teaching postdoc focused on integrating active learning strategies into psychology courses (including one of my own). Should be a lot of fun! Apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31738

Billionaires’ % share of federal election spending in: 2008: 0.3% 2024: 19% @nytimes.com #GildedAge www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.

Finally realized who Bessent reminds me of

I saw we were fighting about what AI will do to (social) science. I have some thoughts (originally written for a book on scientific inquiry) and decided to turn them into my first substack article. Co-written with Nat Rabb! tomstello.substack.com/p/standing-o...

Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: Costello, T. H., Pelrine, K., Kowal, M., Arechar, A. A., Godbout, J.-F., Gleave, A., Rand, D., & Pennycook, G. (2026). Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies. arXiv. doi.org/10.48550/arX...

It's hard to look at things like this and not see a country headed toward some form of collapse.

Lawless authoritarianism: -"How Trump Keeps Withholding Money After Being Sued 198 Times" -"Officials Violated More Than 50 Court Orders in NJ" -"ICE violated at least 96 court orders in January" -"The judge then provided an additional count of 113 more court orders violated in 77 more cases"

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946. In 2007, the US president was born in 1946. In 2017, the US president was born in 1946. And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

Trump's "strong approval" has hovered between 20-25% since July, but more of the remaining 75% are moving toward "strong disapproval" since then. Although his base support is solid and unwavering, there is still plenty of room for stronger opposition to his agenda.

These hearings better outlast Benghazi.

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