I hope you’re having a better day than me. I just learned my own cognition is intractable…

There are only two reasonable reactions to the invention of a tool that lets you build arbitrary mathematical bridges between language and other mediums: "Neat!" and "Uh oh..."

There's a very smart book by our own Chris Knight which unravels the puzzles and paradoxes of Chomsky's politics and science. Quite differently from his usual critics, Chris was coming from the LEFT of Chomsky. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decodin...

Bookmark this post as a 12/2025 snapshot of what's wrong with the AI discourse on this site. @edouardmachery.bsky.social

This is so important. One way to have more realizations like this is to time travel. Another is to just travel travel. And also talk to people from different places. Oh, and to have lots of immigrants in your society.

Want to have holiday lunches with our social faculty for years to come? That chair could be yours! Tatum Jolink will also be joining the department in the fall of '26. Check out our job posting: shorturl.at/4Vc1T @spspnews.bsky.social @affectscience.bsky.social

What is this timeline?! www.wired.com/story/people...

My commentary on @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social excellent forthcoming BBS paper "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models". arxiv.org/abs/2512.12447 Have a read. It's 🌶️

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We're hiring at the Associate Professor level in Social Psychology! Join us in our vibrant and wonderful department and area. Contact Markus Brauer, search committee chair, for details ([email protected]). Job ad here: shorturl.at/nnvv8

Too many people see this as a personal activism platform and not a microblogging website where you get to talk about the stuff you like and your lunch as well. Treating it as a misery pipeline just makes you miserable to be around. Go post a photo of your pet and a song you wanna talk about.

Oof!

"It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing....It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." Tom Stoppard, on complexity theory, in Arcadia. One of the world's best playwrights. RIP. www.bbc.com/news/article...

🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI. We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods. paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu #VisionScience #NeuroSkyence

Looking forward to future projects with this crew! Was a joy to work on this admittedly difficult paper! Very proud of the final product. Have a look!

Andy Conway and I are honored to serve as inaugural co-Editors of this new Psychonomics journal, focused on the rigorous study of individual differences in cognition. Please spread the word to potentially interested colleagues; we hope that you will send us your best relevant work!

I have been writing critically about twin studies of behavior for many years. Here is a brief overview article I published online last year. www.madinamerica.com/2024/09/the-...

Really appreciated this panel discussion session at #psychonomics2025 on threats to psychological science and what we can do about it. It was organized by @lkfazio.bsky.social. I walked out feeling positive and optimistic. Fight disinformation by giving psychology away. Let’s do this!

oh so grok is *fucked* fucked

I’m recruiting PhD students at NYU (start Sept 2026). Focus: cultural evolution, innovation & cooperation, AI & society, progress studies & development. Deadline to apply is Dec 1- very soon. I’ll share more about the move & new work soon. Please share with students & retweet!

If you're looking for a fun Tuesday night, tune in to my talk for the Emergentism, Ecosystem, and Expertise series: "The Role of Language in Human and Machine Intelligence" Tonight @ 9pm Eastern. Registration: polyu.zoom.us/.../register....

Looking forward to SIDIC! If anyone's up for a dinner on Wednesday, ping me! #SIDIC #psychonomics

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

"Professors' inboxes are like kids' lunchboxes - they require constant viligance and lots of things fester when they inevitably go unattended. In other words, when professors don't respond, it's rarely personal. They probably forgot or got too busy. Email again"

Haha, this from the New Yorker is getting passed around the math dork community. I did a comic about this kind of thought a few years ago: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/commut...

Wisconsin ❤️

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

The big article on data centers in the New Yorker is pretty good, which I wasn’t expecting given the reaction on X. Lots of talk of the good and bad of AI, and it covers both bubble & non-bubble arguments. It also featured the best version of “I spoke to a local farmer about a data center”

The deadline for EvoLang 2026 has been extended to Nov 3rd. Evolang is truly special (I've been to each one since 2002!) - an amazing community doing top-notch interdisciplinary work. Submit your work and hope to see you in Plovdiv, Bulgaria! sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/e...

You know when Terry Pratchett said 'It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works'? Yeah, he meant this.

A 14-word replacement for most op-eds, substacks, etc about this moment. The GOP could stop ALL of this, right now—if a handful of Sens or Reps could step outside the cult. It would take four in the Senate, four (maybe five) in the House, to change history. Until then, they're all to blame.

The @chicago.suntimes.com photographer who risked their personal health and safety to take this photograph is Anthony Vazquez. Please credit photographers and media outlets. In this age of misinformation, a photo with no context could be anything at all.

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

If you have a syllabus for a psych grad methods course that covers both experimental and non-experimental methods, I'd love to take a peek! 👀

Same. #AlsoTiredOfWaitingForTheEPSTEIN_Files

As if irony isn’t already dead, the Hatch Act violation on the DOJ website, which blames Democrats for the shutdown, appears on the page advising DOJ employees they are subject to the Hatch Act. joycevance.substack.com/p/a-note-abo...

A wild exchange with Gemini Pro 2.5. In preparing some examples for my seminar (cogsci-llms.netlify.app) I remembered @randomwalker.bsky.social old tweet about playing Rock paper scissors with LLMs. Decided to see what it's like now ....

if you join @jorge-morales.bsky.social's lab in this position, you also get to work with me and my group! 2 communities for the price of one, what a deal! seriously though, Jorge is an outstanding mentor, scientist, and thinker, and you'll learn a lot from working with him!

Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued. Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially. Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.

A writeup to go w/ our CogSci 2025 symposium arxiv.org/abs/2509.15560 (in print hopefully soon). We argue that it is not a coincidence that neural net breakthroughs came from training on natural language, and there are important lessons here for understanding human intelligence.

My quote of the day Masha Gessen

This is Hollywood's McCarthy Moment. This is the litmus test. Learn from history. Who will step up and fight? Who will bend the knee and be complicit? History will remember.

Psychologists, apply! Apparently we've mainly gotten CS applicants so far. I'd (selfishly) love to have a psychologist. Interests in AI in relation to e.g., implicit bias; cultural influences; fairness; perception; learning & memory; decision making etc. would be a good fit!

Come be my colleague! UW-Madison Psychology is hiring! Computational Neuroscience and/or Cognitive Science, with an AI emphasis. jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

⬇️ www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Yes, quite.

::slowly stands while clapping::

My main observation from the last few hours of monitoring US social media is that Democrats are universally denouncing political violence and calling for calm while MAGA are escalating language and openly lusting for retribution against broad categories of people they identity as their enemies.

Political violence is bad. It usually begets more political violence. Celebrating political violence is bad. It usually encourages more political violence, against various targets. Campus shootings are bad. They make everyone on campus less safe. It's bad that what I wrote here is controversial.

Great post. The language evolution conference @evolangconf.bsky.social is also this type of interdisciplinarity at its best. Submit your work. If you come, you’re guaranteed an amazing time! sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/e...