They have made enormous headway. The central issue is that driving isn't _really_ a rule-based process; the rules are codifications of social mores but fundamentally driving around other people is about theory of mind and social negotiation, which ML is largely hopeless at; here's a thing I wrote.

“I get the sense from my students that A.I. feels like the sour icing on an already bitter cake. Adults need to step up and set parameters so that it’s not on these kids to self-regulate.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

The sequel to this story should be about those in civic institutions-partners at law firms, journalists & editors, university presidents & others-who simply have just gone along. The ease with which these figures chose collaboration is stunning & they should be held accountable for their actions.

NEW: 9 ex-DOJ lawyers who resigned from antisemitism investigations into UCLA and other UC campuses say they were pressured to find UC guilty of violations in a rushed and politically motivated process. One called it a "fraudulent and sham investigation." www.latimes.com/california/s...

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

New preprint: Empathy, Thick and Thin papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... It is perhaps foolhardy to attempt to say something new about a topic as widely studied as empathy. I tried anyway! 1/

Alternative take: Universities (and all institutions really) are terrible at predicting job market changes over a timescale of 5 to 10 years. Thus, turning them into clout chasing vocational training centers is a stupid bet when the original Humboldtian mission showed surprising resilience.

are better-performing face recognition models more human-like? turns out: NO in terms of how we see/treat different faces as similar/different to each other, there seems to be tradeoff: better models are LESS human-like so they already work in some 'alien' ways... osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠📈🧠🤖🧠💻

When we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵

New paper in Psych Review on a model of false recognition in Deese-Roediger-McDermott DRM task. Not just recognition responses, but also associated RTs! And not just the semantic task, but also the structural task - where words overlap in orthography/phonology! A thread!

"In the violations findings letter, Hermalin compared “the visible physical toll” of Kao’s hunger strike and the “adverse consequences it may have had” on his ability to teach, to a professor who might wear a political T-shirt." www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation. hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Many, many unpaid labour-hours will be required for the ICLR authors and organizers to sort this mess out, and the conference will be worse for it. A perfect case study on why AI productivity gains are largely a mirage.

This is one advantage of having the historical memory of authoritarianism, as I have from Brazil: you know that, when the regime is gone, the people who collaborated and acquiesced look terrible in retrospect. It may look reasonable and justifiable now, but believe me, it will age like milk.

given how unpopular Trump is, it’s insane that civil society/universities/law firms are still asking themselves “how do I stay on Trump’s good side” rather than “how do I avoid facing consequences for complying with Trump’s illegal demands”

The aim should be for individual, not institutional, accountability. Did a university obviously violate the first amendment rights of its faculty to suck up to Trump? Don't seek to fine the university, *seek to jail its president and trustees.* People make decisions, people bear consequences.

Contextual unfamiliarity during drug intake induces AMPA receptors linked to relapse vulnerability https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.24.690243v1

Out now in Translational Psychiatry! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very happy that this is out www.nature.com/articles/s44.... Together with @stefankiebel.bsky.social we show that decision biases in context-dependent decision making, previously attributed to different forms of value normalization, are very well explained by habit-like action repetition.

Begging PhD programs to agree on a common app with only letters of rec that writers upload once. These inane likert scales when students are applying to 15-20 programs is destroying my soul

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

My first, first-author paper on model-based planning in structured foraging environments is out now in Cognition!

"Another attention-grabbing aspect was the promotion of lobotomy as a solution for crime." In a new essay from the Legacies of Eugenics series, Oliver Rollins explores how the new biology of crime opens a backdoor to eugenics. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/murderous-genes-and-criminal-brains/

So, if an institute or center decided not to fund any grant from University X or on Topic Y, then there would be no documentation in the official grant files about these applications. 2/2

🗣️ With the support of the @danafoundation.bsky.social, we are very excited to announce the Philosophy & Neuroscience Collaborative Mentorship Program! 🧠 For more details & submission requirements, visit: philandneuro.com/mentorship (This is 1/2 announcements we will make over the next 1-2 weeks.)

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Thrilled to see this reviewed preprint by grad student extraordinaire (but bsky-less) Euan Prentis posted on @elife.bsky.social! doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Thank you to the reviewers and editors for encouraging, insightful and helpful comments. We will be revising the paper, stay tuned!

I really hate it when scientists keep saying that “we need to rebuild trust in science,” because it implies that scientists are to blame for the mistrust rather than the millions of dollars of dark money that have funded political attacks on science in order to advance a far right agenda.

WE JUST KEEP WINNING. (UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program RESTORED!!!!)

gooood morning #SfN2025! i’m presenting this poster at board CC11 *today* from 8am-noon stop by to chat learning, memory, (perceptual) decision making, and normative modeling that bridges cross-species and cross-task findings 🧠🐒 w/ @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @aaronbornstein.bsky.social

#SfN2025 Poster 3 of 6 TODAY! Tuesday 11/18 8a-12p @khoudary.bsky.social PSTR291.11 / CC11 Precision-weighted integration explains dynamic effects of expectations on perceptual decisions, with @aaronbornstein.bsky.social www.abstractsonline....#SfN2025

“This narrative that faculty are indoctrinating students is a manufactured crisis,” she said. “You can trace it back to a network of right-wing think tanks, but it seems the university is treating it as if it is real”—our chapter president Karma Chavez www.texastribune.org/2025/11/17/u...

My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN

Heard an established successful neuroscientist dismissing junior scientists as "people at the bottom" 🤦‍♀️ You folks with lots of research funds & power: young scientists more than ever need our respect and support even if you don't agree with their ideas and approaches #sfn2025

Good morning from San Diego. Come see my poster (UU7) on splitting and merging latent states in non-Markovian environments, at #Sfn2025 right now !

For those coming to SfN, I’ll be giving a talk showing evidence of hippocampal neuronal replay 🎞️🔁 in HUMANS as part of the “Representation of Time in the Brain” minisymposium (Wednesday morning) Our stellar group of speakers also wrote a preview of the session in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #sfn2025 🧠

#SfN2025 Poster 2 of 6 Today! Sunday 11/16 8a-12p @khoudary.bsky.social TKP05.05SU / WW13 Philosophical tools for evaluating computational models of cognition, with @aaronbornstein.bsky.social www.abstractsonline....

me & my Theme K poster are finally at #SfN25! stop by board WW13 anytime between now & tomorrow evening to learn more about how philosophy can help navigate meta-scientific questions about models in neuroscience 🧠 w/ @meganakpeters.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social

Can I quietly ask we stop talking about what "AI" *could* do in education and identify instead what's actually happening with AI in education? I'll start...

Congrats and thanks to @aaup.org —this is a big victory that will help protect universities across the country.

The best advocates for universities are not administrators! The best advocates for the university are THE WORKERS!

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.