it just struck me that in French the word for an adult woman is "wife" and the word for a young girl is "daughter", whereas we have different words for men, husbands, boys, and sons. Now I'm curious to know if other languages show the same pattern

Every PI

I don't understand why reviewers can send confidential comments to the editor about a paper, but authors cannot send confidential comments to the editor about the reviews. As in "look we did our best but this review reads like an entry in the dream diary of Samuel Beckett with a bad case of flu"

As a companion piece to our 'Science Fiction Science Method' article, we explore in Nautilus how we could turn a Ted Chiang story into a behavioral experiment @azimshariff.bsky.social @iyadrahwan.bsky.social

I just confirmed my participation to a conference and meant to write "looking forward to!" but typed instead "looking forward yo!" I have turned into the academic version of Jesse Pinkman

I like how typos in manuscripts are no longer considered evidence of sloppiness, and have turned instead into luxury signals of hand-crafted writing by a human master wordsmith who keeps to the traditional ways

The canvas() function from the ggview R package is very useful for previewing/tweaking a ggplot into publication-ready format: it renders a plot "as it would appear if saved to a file with the specified dimensions". cran.r-project.org/web/packages... #RStats #ggplot #ggview

[user] analyze and summarize the attached document [French LLM] *Bonjour*

My zombie Prof would complain bitterly about \textit vs \emph and the use of raw text in math mode latex instead of using \text or proper operator commands. 💀💀💀

What a better way to start the day than reading the sentence “Grammarly is being accused of necromancy”. Now *that’s* my kind of news

This piece by psychologist/philosopher Brian Earp is about the differing attitudes toward AI in psychology vs. philosophy In psych, one common attitude is; The goal is to get the right answer to fundamental questions in psychology. If AI helps us do that, well then, all the better… 1/

One month to wait for Trace Elements, a conversation on my favorite genres by the author of my favorite series @adapalmer.bsky.social and the person whose taste in books I admire the most @bluejo.bsky.social. I’ve not been that excited about a book for a very very long while

Also: what a missed opportunity to make us Jonathan and Jennifer

My phone decided to autocomplete “Je” (French “I”) with Jérôme and my wife’s phone decided on Jennifer. from our texts you’d think we are obsessed with these two - Jerome will be late tonight - it’s ok, Jennifer will be at yoga - Jerome will stop for food on the way - Jennifer won’t need anything

#Wilmasreview ❄️ Wilma isn't looking for a new home in the snow — but she is wondering: should AI decide who gets welfare benefits like housing support? A new study by Dong, @jfbonnefon.bsky.social & @iyadrahwan.bsky.social looked at exactly this. 1/🧵

Pixel Agents A VS Code extension that turns your AI coding agents like Claude Code into animated pixel art characters in a virtual office. It shows what the agent is currently doing with animations. You can also customize the virtual office however you want. Repo: github.com/pablodelucca...

I went a little overboard with this and a little bit insane. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/t...

I do it when I'm stressed, these emails have such a soothing rhythm

Join us in June at @iast.fr Toulouse for a 2-day workshop on social influence and its large scale implications!

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center: If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

My January Reading List reactormag.com/jo-waltons-r...

“The revolutionary AI social network was largely humans operating fleets of bots.”

I saw some people calling it Rectangular February

NGL this description of Bsky in Vulture cracked me up

There are thousands and thousands of papers with an abstract that starts with the phrase “With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence,” and it looks like 99% are from Chinese authors. How come? Does that sentence sound really good in Chinese? Are Chinese LLMs particularly fond of it?

me and the peer reviewer i suggested

The claim in this article is not supported by the data. SGO and NHTSA general public data have different reporting thresholds, and the authors also seems to have used raw gen. pub. crash counts, instead of total vehicles INVOLVED in crashes. Better benchmark is around 50-100k miles b/w crashes.

Should you go to academia or industry for research in AI or cognitive science? It's the most common question I get asked by PhD students, and I've written up some of my thoughts on the answer, as an epilogue to my research-focused series on these fields: infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/on-researc...

New Bridgerton season incoming, cancel all my plans for next weekend

"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace."

by submitting a different manuscript 6 months later

Heard some sad news (though not the saddest kind of news) about a fellow bipolar person. A reminder to Always Take Your Meds — or make an appointment with a doctor, stat, if you’re not treated yet. I mean it, do it.

Do we have a trolley problem with chatbots and self-harm? Say we could show that for 20 people they successfully pull away from suicide, there is one person they push toward it. Would we be utilitarian, or would we draw a line and say that this is unacceptable regardless of net impact?

Sorry, but triumphant claims about autonomous vehicle safety are wildly exaggerated. It's an open question whether today’s self-driving cars are any safer than those driven by humans. And if reducing crashes is the goal, that isn’t even the right question. My deep dive, in Bloomberg 🧵

“In simple terms: a heavier car offers diminishing safety benefits to the person inside it, while imposing rapidly increasing risk on everyone else.” (Graph from The Economist)

Uh oh, now I’m Secretary in Chief of the Offices of the Lords of State and Head of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service. And I just can’t get my family to understand what that job really is.

All the novels I finished during 2024 and 2025, by genre and year of publication. Romance is somewhat underestimated because I just displayed the primary genre

WORKSHOP ON BEHAVIORAL CLONES Imitating humans is a powerful route to machine behavior and an emerging lens on human cognition and social simulation. 🗓 Fri, 20 May 2026 Following Machine+Behavior @ Max Planck Berlin Invited talks: Danica Dillon, @marcelbinz.bsky.social

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

AI has become such a polarizing topic in the social sciences that I wonder whether some conference organizers will want to keep their program 'pure', with no paper on AI or prominently using AI.

I keep accidentally getting indulgences doing research in Italy! I’ll be going about my day reading inscriptions on a wall, and it’ll say “Whoever reads this plaque gets an indulgence!” Or I’ll be walking to the Vatican library & pope will should out in a mic “Whoever hears this gets an indulgence!”

I like to look back at my tools at the end of the year, should we share our best picks of apps for academics? Can't-live-without-them: - Alfred (launcher) - Superhuman (email) - Things 3 (todo) - Overleaf (writing) Honorable mentions: Highlights, Bear, MindNode, ChatGPT, RStudio, Slack

My mom’s holidays decorations, 2025 edition! You’ll need to zoom in. In each scene, the figurines enact a play, novel, or poem; and the text above is an anagram of the author’s name. Good luck, some of these are really hard. The only person who solved them all needed 30+ minutes

Who would like google scholar to give us a sleek "Your Year in Citations" replay like music apps do?

This is a very special conference which you should absolutely consider attending if your research is at the intersection of behavioral science and AI See you in Berlin!

The view from my office is just glorious — but it’s time for a break! Happy holidays folks

Since we’re waiting for new episodes of #StrangerThings, look at how cute the demogorgon was in the 1976 D&D materials

Analysis of more than 1 million people shows that mental-health disorders fall into five clusters, each of them linked to a specific set of genetic variants go.nature.com/3XM18e7

🚨Two postdoc positions @tse-fr.eu @iast.fr 🚨 We are recruiting two postdocs as part of the ANR-funded project ENFORCE. Join me, @giuliandr.bsky.social, & @zhgarfield.com, to study punitive systems across societies. Full time, 2 years, no teaching. Deadline: Jan 23 www.tse-fr.eu/groups/depar...

Is this the fucking açemoglu institutions argument for furries