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...

you know, we research whether the baby stroller has all the features and amenities we like, not whether it will kill the baby

Trump directed federal agencies on Weds to prioritize AI in education, except that… Mere days later, NSF then terminated active grants on AI education, claiming that they no longer “effectuate agency priorities” at DOGE’s behest.

Sending lots of support to the NSF and NIH program officers who have been serving the science community in so many ways. Thank you 🙏

Shout out to all the hard working program officers and administration staff holding on at the NSF (and other federal agencies). Your work is appreciated and more meaningful with every passing day.

🤦‍♂️https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/24/california-bar-exam-ai

Last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined. wapo.st/4luJyph

So with the decimation of science funding (ie science education), who does the administration think American tech companies are gonna be hiring? (not unique to tech obvs)

For the last 3 yrs, I was the director for the Science of Science program at the NSF. We funded projects on science communication - science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, citizens engagement & participation in science. 🧵

This is incredible. Wait about 20 seconds into this clip. 🙃

omfg! Does the stupidity of these people have no bounds?

New R package almost birthed - SemanticDistance - computes two semantic distance metrics (experiential and embedding) for any rolling chunk size (ngram-to-ngram, word-to-word, turn-to-turn, ngram-to-word). You give it your language sample. It does the rest, including lemmatize and stopword omit

Amazing illusion!

from DEI to Lysenko