This a pretty funny encapsulation of ai scientist work. The authors hand it some softball software tasks, then it comes back with very different results than what it’s replicating and the authors shrug at the data being different www.nature.com/articles/s43...

🚀🎓We have exciting opportunities at the PhD and Postdoc level, including in the new Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience, a 10-year initiative spanning a powerful international network of labs working across species and disciplines - please reach out if interested bsky.app/profile/simo...

was at an event on AI for science yesterday, a panel discussion here at NeurIPS. The panelists discussed how they plan to replace humans at all levels in the scientific process. So I stood up and protested that what they are doing is evil. Full post: togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/plea...

3. I appealed to the joy of doing science—and got the predictable question: Would you rather live in a world where AI cured cancer or live in a world where you personally get to do science? But that's not the dilemma we face at all. There's no cause to think that AI could do anything of the sort.

8000 Artikel über zu viel "Wokeness" an den deutschen Unis; vornehmes Schweigen dazu, dass diese Unis gerade im Rahmen einer harten Austeritätspolitik abgewickelt werden.

Tobias Niehues @tobnie.bsky.social is presenting our work with @dominikstrb.bsky.social 'Amortized Bayesian decision-making for inferring decision-making parameters from behavior' at the Amortized ProbML Workshop and the @ellis.eu UnConference. Please come by our poster!

If you're looking for a PhD position, check out this opportunity! I had a great time doing my PhD in Darmstadt. Exciting research with lots of opportunities for collaboration across AI and cognitive science in a very livable city.

Q: Why did the LLM cross the road? A: We're not sure, but it achieved 94.7% on CHIKENBench-Large

The vision of human-out-of-the-loop science fundamentally mistakes what knowledge production is. It aims at the production of, wait for it, knowledge: a thing that definitionally involves an epistemic agent or agents, unless you are theistic about it.

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

In other news, I am now a ✨ COXI ✨ (cognitive scientist in Osnabrück, Germany) www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/campus-li... I'll be looking for PhD students & postdocs later this year, so watch this space if combining cognitive modelling, EEG & tFUS to study flexible cognition sounds exciting to you 🚀

G'day #ECVP! Today, three more colleagues present their posters. 38: @celinehonekamp.bsky.social will introduce you to dual adaptation in the temporal domain. 48: Tarek will present a relative depth experiment conducted on the multifocal display he built.

I won't get to join you all at #ecvp2025 @ecvp.bsky.social this year because I'm on holiday in Australia... but my lab is there in force! Please do go say hi, and check out my students' and postdocs' amazing work! @ben.graphics @lschmittwilken.bsky.social @lreining.bsky.social

#ECVP2025 be ready: my poster on repeated exposure to delay in two different tasks is up on Thursday 15:30-17:00 (No 38) Come and say hi

I'd be glad to see a lot of people at our poster on Tuesday, August 26th, 10-11.30am at #ECVP2025 and tell you more about which cost functions shape your behavior in sensorimotor decision-making!

Looking forward to meeting you #ECVP2025 Mainz this week, including collaborative work with @tobnie.bsky.social @dominikstrb.bsky.social @ookenfooken.bsky.social @fatatai.bsky.social @tsawallis.bsky.social @mamassian.bsky.social @guidomaiello.bsky.social @mariaeckstein.bsky.social and many others

my friend/colleague Frank Jäkel wrote a book on AI. I sadly don't know German but I happily know Frank, and I've heard him talking about this for a while now, and just on that basis I'd recommend the German speakers in the audience check it out

post 1 disappointed Weizenbaum for every thinkpiece u read like this

I'm presenting our work "Revisiting Cost Functions in Sensorimotor Decision-Making" at #CCN2025! Stop by our poster (@dominikstrb.bsky.social‬, @c-rothkopf.bsky.social‬) and learn more about how to rethink common modeling assumptions. 📅 When: Friday, August 15, 2pm–5pm 📍 Where: De Brug, Poster C1

I have never understood the insane hostility that LLM fanboys have towards academics who disagree with them (see also: Gary Marcus). (Also how does “we fed an AI every available unit of human language and it’s pretty good” refute “10k words a day isn’t enough for babies to learn as well as they do”)

⬅️➡️ "Delay adaptation does not transfer between discrete button press actions and continuous control" by van Dam et al Delay adaptation occurs for stylus (graphics tablet) and arrow buttons (keyboard) but doesn't transfer between response styles journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

After her party halted the election of Brosius-Gersdorf as a constitutional judge using fake news, the federal minister of science (and space!) expects candidates to have "a little resilience" and "being able to take criticism". Is this how to protect academic freedom? www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

Eigentlich sollte eine Wissenschaftsministerin Stimme der Wissenschaft im politischen System sein. Bär will hingegen was anderes sein und fordert von Wissenschaftlerinnen "Kritikfähigkeit" ein, wenn sie diffamiert werden. www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

So much alignment talk ignores the more traditional and pressing question about who should own the means of production in the first place since that ultimately determines who gets to make these decisions

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social is such a fantastic public face of the countermovement to tech company overreach and creeping fascism.

Excited to share that our paper got accepted at #ICML2025!! 🎉 We challenge Vision-Language Models like OpenAI’s o1 with Bongard problems, classic visual reasoning challenges and uncover surprising shortcomings. Check out the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2410.19546 & read more below 👇

I’m excited to announce that I’m recruiting for a fully-funded 3.5-year PhD position in my lab in Southampton (UK). For details and to apply, see here: www.southampton.ac.uk/study/postgr...

Welcome #VSS2025! For those attending the sunny, beaches, and science at this years Florida conference, make sure not to miss the awesome talks and posters from our lab!

Registration for IICCSSS 2025 in Darmstadt is open! 🥳 Sign up now for a week of exciting talks, hands-on projects and inspiring discussions! www.iiccsss.org/registration/ As always, IICCSSS is free, and open to all students who are excited about computational cognitive science 💡🧠

Very excited to be part of the Simons collaboration on ecological neuroscience @simonsfoundation.org together with this fantastic team! Theory-driven investigation of where representations for perception, cognition, and action in ecological tasks come from. POMDPs FTW. Stay tuned for job openings...

And as long as there is no real increase in funding, many countries are just pitching local talent against US talent, which results in a more difficult market for everybody. If you want to attract foreign talent, make sure your fundamental funding is _very_ strong!

@tobnie.bsky.social will be presenting our #ICLR2025 paper on extending Bayesian models of perception and action to arbitrary cost functions and how to fit them to human behavior Stop by our poster if you're interested in cognitive modeling and Bayesian decision-making!

For the first time since WWII an extreme right party is #1 in the German polls. Anti-fascist economic policy is urgently needed. Instead the new coalition agenda entails: - cut profit tax - end 8 hr workday - open tap for defense, austerity for the rest - weaken social security

Congratulations to Matthias Schultheis for defending his PhD thesis 'Inverse reinforcement learning for human decision-making under uncertainty' with distinction. Significant contributions to understanding bounded actors with inverse POMDPs for partial observabilities and non-stationary behavior

It's bonkers that in academic science we spend hours obsessing over the wording of a paper, but often only one person has seen the code that produced the results! 2/N

predicting ≠ understanding

Happy to share that my PhD thesis is now published 🎓 "Inverse normative modeling of continuous perception and action" tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/29614/

deutsche akademiker:innen im völlig stellenbefreiten wissenschaftsbetrieb beim lesen der vielen hoffnungsvollen op eds, dass der brain drain aus den usa nach deutschland beginnen könnte

Interesting move after February's email in which we were assured that "VSS remains strong, independent, and committed to... the diversity of our community"

Hey @vssmtg.bsky.social, do you no longer support diversity and inclusion? Looks like your policies were quietly removed from your website? #VSS2025 #VSS

Könnte Deutschland Forscher aus den USA abwerben? Was braucht es dafür? Ein Gespräch mit Ulrike Malmendier, Wirtschaftsweise u Professorin in Berkeley, California. www.zdf.de/nachrichten/...

Someone pointed out that influencers use serotonin/dopamine/cortisol/oxytocin like they’re the four humors and now I can’t stop seeing it

Here are six examples of how foreign visitors to the US with no criminal record are being treated: 1. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding student with no criminal record married to an American is abducted by ICE and is still in detention over a week later. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/n... ......

This is the part of the book where William James famously wrote “you can’t bore a German”! Well, maybe, but some people mistakenly extrapolated “psychophysics is boring”. That ain’t true!

Nice post! I’d also recommend interested readers to see this paper for a longer explainer on a normative approach to cognitive science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Nice blog post! I agree that we should be precise about the assumptions behind models and what they can and cannot achieve. A good summary of the conceptual logic of normative models is also provided in this table from a BBS article by John Anderson (1991): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...