Interesting read - 'Conspiracists are about to get a dose of reality' www.thetimes.com/article/b3bb...

“Measles vaccination alone is responsible for half a percent of all US income this year, $76.4 billion. That is just from the reduced disease burden, it doesn’t include reduced medical costs.” Via @emollick.bsky.social www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

New paper. With a big group of colleagues from Moldova and the Netherlands, we ran the first representative mental health survey of the adult population in Moldova. Local interviewer teams went door-to-door in 2022 to include 1826 adults in the study. 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is not business as usual. It’s not just a change in funding priorities going forward; it is the reneging on funding agreements and is profoundly disruptive for even those grants that will be found to be compliant. Meanwhile, trainees who often live paycheck to paycheck are going unpaid.

I wrote about how it feels to be a UnitedHealthcare customer. New research confirms my hunch: broken trust isn't just frustrating, it's a health hazard. 🧪 jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/the-hidden...

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.

NSF grantees - people who have already received their grants based on a previously funded and approved research proposal - are being told to stop any activities related to DEI and accessibility. Call this what it is: government censorship of ongoing research projects. www.opm.gov/policy-data-...

The silence from Dems is deafening. We’re exhausted—looking for leadership and starting to feel desperate. Everything feels like it’s slipping away & electeds aren’t acknowledging it, let alone speaking on it. @dougjones.bsky.social sounds like someone who’s actually read the room. More of this!

Now that the leader of the free world has put his boot on the garden hose of knowledge, some might be wondering why we spend our money on research anyway. At the risk of stating the obvious, here are a few examples: 🧪

Voor de Nederlandse volgers: een hilarisch accurate beschrijving van het ondergaan van een MRI-scan 😁🧪

Shame on the @washingtonpost.com, which at one time was beacon of the free press. anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-qui...

Happy new year my fellow scientific travelers! May 2025 bring you much inspiration, growth, and fun. 🧪

Shocked by the blatant corruption and greed in UnitedHealthCare’s Medicare Advantage scheme. You won’t believe the bonuses offered to practitioners… Excellent research by @wsj.com. Hope they lift the paywall. For those without access I will blog about this soon. 🧪 www.wsj.com/health/healt...

Goede recensie van Omtzigt bij WNL, al mist dat het storend is dat de interviewer en recensent hier ook door elkaar liepen (Nieman dus). www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/...

Has anyone been trying PaperQA2 for automated document/literature review? I would like to exchange notes on how to set it up & evaluate results. 🧪 github.com/Future-House...

Many of the ‘systems’ scientists care about, from minds to ecosystems, are so complex that you can’t capture them with deterministic models. How do we deal with this ‘modeling gap’? Perhaps we can learn something from a cautionary fish tale. 🧪🐠 jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/a-fish-tal...

A new view on the gut microbiome and the social contagion of health 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily... via @jeroenvanbaar.nl

As a scientist, I used the Mendeley reference manager nearly every day for the last 12.5 years. Today, finally driven mad by their terrible redesign, I made the switch to Zotero. Migrating took less than an hour and the experience is already endlessly better. AMA 😎

This is a huge insight, very exciting!

What a chart. www.economist.com/interactive/...

Does money make you happy? In a new post, I reviewed the adversarial collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth that attempted to answer this age-old question. Had a lot of fun writing this! jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/data-dispa...

❗ 27% of American adults are "most days so stressed they can't function" (representative APA survey from 2022). 🧠 But 100 years ago, legendary economist John Maynard Keynes predicted we would all live a life of leisure. 🤔 What happened? I wrote a post about it, link in bio

I wrote a Christmas-inspired newsletter this week, full of fascinating insights about the placebo effect. Read on: jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/the-perple... Happy holidays!

This is my favourite vampire cartoon from Science Saves Lives…

Trying to find median household income per month for Moldova, but lack the training... Using World Bank Poverty & Inequality Platform, I found survey median consumption at $10.6 per day (2017 PPP). Does this translate to 30*10.6 = $318 per month? 🤔 Help! #EconSky pip.worldbank.org/poverty-calc...

A surprising number of American parents are giving their children melatonin for sleeping. 😴 This fits in a larger trend of modern life: a counterproductive need for control, which leaves us less resilient to adversity and change. 🧠 Read more ==> jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/what-the-u...

In the last ~5 years of doing research, I've seen repeated signs of uncertainty affecting human functioning in politics, mental health, and more. I thought this could be relevant for others so I started collecting my thoughts here: jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/are-we-liv...

One of the best conferences I have ever been to: the Global Mental Health conference 2023 at NIMH last week. Here are my main takeaways. jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/three-key-...

This week I dove into the trends on loneliness in the US and what they mean for mental health. It's not pretty, and we're not solving the problem in a productive way. Let me know what you think at jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/data-dispa...

Ice skating in Holland, olive oil production in Spain, skiing in France: all customs that are waning due to #climatechange. But the Dutch, Spanish, and French have not changed how they see themselves--and this "sticky self-concept" may hinder climate action jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/the-world-...

This looks like an excellent idea: sharing the best solutions for complex problems between cities. philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/bloombe...

Wondering what you see in this picture? I dove into the most important scientific concept you’ve never heard of — wet-bulb temperature — and was shocked to discover what it means for climate change #hiscisky open.substack.com/pub/jeroenva...

I asked DALL-E 2 to draw itself, and this is what it gave me. Creepy! (Prompt: "a photorealistic image of DALL-E")

To navigate the polycrisis we need a new, participatory social science. One that aims at application, embraces complexity, and capitalizes on the curiosity of the community. Follow An Educated Guess here and help this take off: jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/why-im-mov...

Trying out proto-AI therapist ELIZA from the 1960s. It got pretty philosophical pretty quickly web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/el...

It's unbelievable what weight loss fads were popular in the 1500s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of...

Experimenting with posts about data visualizations (enjoying them + thinking critically) -- lmk what you think! jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/data-dispa... #AcademicSky

@gdezecache.bsky.social Hey Guillaume, where do you work now? What's IRD?

What to do about the looming #mentalhealth crisis? We need to refocus on #prevention to address mental illness. My two cents leading up to #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek jeroenvanbaar.substack.com/p/the-mental...

Hello world! 😀 Here to talk #science and #society, #psychology and #brain, #writing & public speaking. Neuroscience PhD on the move. Based in Amsterdam and Washington, DC. Find me on Substack: jeroenvanbaar.substack.com #HiSciSky