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...

UPDATE: Abstract deadline: Nov 1, 25! Invited speakers: Corrine Occhino, Dagmar Divjak, Idan Blank, Randy Allen Harris, Gary Lupyan, Laura Michaelis, Kanishka Misra ! @dagmardivjak.bsky.social @randyallenharris.bsky.social @congramqueen.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social @kanishka.bsky.social

I agree with this. A solid understanding of stats is incredibly useful for navigating the world (and knowing when you’re being bullshitted) in 2025.

My god, we are living at a time when there are people (w/in the same culture) claiming ⬇️ and writing this: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-... You can probably guess what I think

I see Google now uses its special "AI" metric in its distance calculations

I told a friend that I thought the discrepancy b/w what LLMs can do in practice and our understanding of them, is currently larger than of any other technology in human history. And she said, well, except for medicine. And, uhm, yes, that seems right 😳

What makes a puzzle hard? I found this video delightful.

I took it an hour each way to high school 1994-1998 The crime rate was double what it is now. Never an issue. Have never seen an issue (except all the slow trains).

if you're not from or have never been to new york i cannot stress enough how normal the subway is 99% of the time. kids take it to school. everyone is basically chill. you learn to be in proximity with harmless weirdos or minor irritations pretty quick. for all its issues it's an incredible thing

I'm teaching a grad seminar this Fall on the Cognitive Science of LLMs focusing on how they can act to stress test cognitive theories. If you have any readings that scream *yes this one!!* please send them my way!

despite being unrelated to my own work, i stumbled on this absolutely fantastic and fascinating talk looking at how different types of learning (e.g., social learning and individuals learning) might evolve* *if i were a nativist, this is absolutely the route I'd go youtu.be/phF3qiX8hkY?...

Lots of interesting analyses here, eg “Just five US universities train more US faculty than all non-US universities combined.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oh, huh.. when you click on an arxiv link generated in a ChatGPT response, it adds a GET reference: utm_source=chatgpt.com. So arxiv (and presumably others) should have accurate stats of the proportion of LLM refs. Wonder how the distribution of LLM refs compared with human-produced refs.

Call for papers for Evolang 2026 is now out! evolang2026.org. @cogscisociety.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

What a fantastic #CogSci2025! Somehow I've missed the last 6! And what a joy to see old and new cogsci friends in one place! There's a feeling of real scientific progress and a deep Connectionist<-->Bayesian merger afoot.

I'm not loving a country that pays its adults half as much to teach children to spell as it does to kidnap them.

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

Demonstrating what matters most, a language lesson from a 5-year old: 5-y.o: I winned! Babysitter: ‘I won!’ 5-y.o: No, you didn’t!

This is a great post about the magic mixture that made Bell labs work. I especially like this bit because it accords very strongly with something I've always believed. "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

What’s remarkable to me is the lack of a sensible middle ground. AI progress is real and scientifically paradigm-shifting. It’s pattern matching but the lesson here is you can do *that* w pattern matching?! (H/t Shalizi). But you don’t get true answers for free. These aren’t oracles!

🧵 Masha Gessen, who lived under Russia’s secret police, is sounding the alarm: the U.S. is now echoing those same authoritarian patterns. Raids, surveillance, fear tactics—it’s not theoretical anymore. We are watching a police state take root in real time. #OnYourSide @mashagessen.bsky.social

Please stop calling these "savings". These are just unauthorized funding cuts. If I find a store where I can buy the same food for less, I'm saving money, and arguably "eliminating waste". But if I just stop buying food, I'm not "saving money" -- I'm starving.

The problem w this approach is that to get to the hard stuff, one has to spend a lot of time doing the stuff that a computer is very good at. AI in education allows you complete work without mastery, leaving you without the foundations for the hard stuff

I can't even... www.reddit.com/r/abanpreach...

Trump, asked if he has to 'uphold the Constitution,' says, 'I don't know' www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...