Elsevier is bad, huh. Like, I did all your stupid proofing for you, and yet you didn't incorporate the comments. None of the authors have affiliations. Clearly it's fully automated and no humans eyes process the feedback. Sigh.

I reviewed Steven Pinker's new book on common knowledge. Tl;dr: "A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue".

Lovely detailed description by @haneuljang.bsky.social & @danielredhead.bsky.social of how knowledge & skills are differentially spread through the network of a forager village in DRC. And how this is patterned by own & contact age, kinship and relationship status

This is a notable scholar's citations per year. Can you think of an explanation for 2018? (Note: I'm not suggesting anything funky about this pattern, just curious to understand why).

Ever needed to measure anything to do with religion and spirituality? Open access book with 300 (!) scales. (Incidentally, 300 is wayyyyy too many... but it's nice to have them all in one place). link.springer.com/book/9783031...

I'm looking for a primary reference on the famous Bullet Ant rite of passage among the Sateré-Mawé people. What's the canonical or definitive account?

People do this!? Imagine voluntarily choosing a sample that is both the product of a regression to the mean AND noisier.

You know who is a terrible writer? Me, six months ago. You know who is a great writer? Me, today. Rinse and repeat.

hey hey, paper accepted today! It's been a little while!

Maybe I'll eat my hat on this, but Silksong isn't notably harder than the original Hollow Knight. I'm not a 'get good' kinda guy, but I don't see what everyone is complaining about. (Yet?). Like the original: if you can't do an area, back off, go upgrade, and come back with a new ability.

We are delighted to announce that the CES2026 conference website is now live! We invite you to submit your presentation proposals using the link on the webpage, deadline November 16th: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

I find it curious that the most medicated culture in history is also espouses and most strongly endorses talk therapy. Americans *love* to talk about therapy, and argue that most people need it (and everyone would benefit from it). But it seems like a symptom of their medicalized culture.

The Ghost of Otto von Bismarck, soberly reflecting on the state of things: "… I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off." He looks pensively into his drink. Then looks up. "Owo", he concludes.

So it's really starting to seem like the shooter had a incoherent ideology that defies the traditional continuum. But it's also seeming like any motivation that might have been attributed to a left-winger is absent in their addled brain.

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright

I submitted two grant applications and a manuscript this week. I'm tired, man.

I poke around Reddit a fair bit, including topics on Psychology. Every other week a high schooler or undergrad is asking for a primer on the discipline. There is no, agreed-upon, singular 'go to' book. Psychology really needs an accessible history, with simple take-aways and frames-of-reference.

A life-hack for responding to peer review is, when you really don't want to do something requested by a reviewer, lay out your reasons and add "... we respectfully will leave this matter for the editor's adjudication, and will happily comply with their decision" Hasn't failed me yet.

Shout out to my current R2 who is thorough to a point! There's like 20,000 words here and they called out specifically the one (1) time that I spelled 'the' -> 'teh', and the one (1) stray fullstop. My god, how did you even *see* that?

If 'Behind the Bastards' has taught me anything, when a right-wing activist gets shot, it's better than even odds it was another right-winger with beef.

This isn't my idea it's @alicebennett.bsky.social 's as I recall, but I think it's time for this meme to join our HE binfire pantheon.

Interesting thread. And it gets at something I've long held and try to promote. "Looking professional" is classist, and insistence upon it is, at least some of the time, prejudicial or even a form of violence. (lower case 'v' on the violence, tho).

I'm no Michelin Star chef, but I'm pretty sure I can get about 30% of the way there by using 8 times more butter than I think is sensible.

I've had cats my whole life. I'm an academic psychologist. Cats are a more alien kind of intelligence than frogs. We anthropomorphise cats so deeply we can't easily see how fucking wierd they are.

All grants should be on a rolling-deadline, reviewed quarterly. This is the only humane solution.

I'm all for being a smart-arse in your journal papers... but I thought this was a google-doc auto-edit... but it's actually the title of the paper. We can include emojis in titles *and* reference them that way!?

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Spent most of the weekend at Scotland tabletop. Got a great haul of interesting games. Also, 'The last job' is going to be carried (at least for a little while) by 4 (!) retailers.

I think aspiring students don't realize that their request to chat is not cheap or easy. And to offload their own writing (presumably for the sake of efficiency - they're probably sending a lot of these) then it's not sending a signal that anything will be reciprocated.

Got an email from a student who wants to discuss a PhD. It really *feels* like it was written by an LLM. "Your work on X, Y, Z has deeply inspired me. My work on A, B may offer fresh insights on X, Y, Z. I would be honoured ..."

Look at this. Just look at this. If this isn't the sweetest damn thing.

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Nature is healing on bsky.

I just set up my a brand new Ender-3 V3 SE, and it's crazy how much of an immediate improvement it is over the V2. So much faster, so many QoL improvements. (But it's missing the draw from the V2!?). (It's a 3D printer. And yes, maybe one other person will appreciate this).

There are a lot of cognitive scientsts asking questions like 'How do we 'know' God is real?', and not enough asking 'Is a hotdog a sandwhich?' or 'is cereal a soup? I know it sounds like a joke, but while the latter eg's are less sexy, they are aguably more relevant to everyday life.

I'm not going to say that acolytes of Trump are in a cult. But I think it's fairly defensible to say it's 'cult-like'. And one of the most profound and impactful aspects of Cult-like movements is cutting members off from the people around them.

🚨 New paper led by ‪@asatsa.bsky.social‬! We show that participation in Luhya mourning rituals overall increases well-being and cooperation among the bereaved, yet qualitative findings show they can also be perceived negatively by some community members royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Ties are an interaction of costly signals and conspicuous consumption which exploit the visual system to draw attention toward features responsible for mate choice.

Pargin is so consistently insightful on these topics.

On tiktok I learned that there are lots of people who think 'Andor' is the worst Star Wars spin off. ... and wow. I mean, what can you even say to something like that? I get some folks don't want a slow-burn, but imagine looking at Luke and thinking "Yes, this is the best story about Empire".

I re-watched Drive (2011) last night, and my headcannon is that it's a dream sequence from Barbie when Ken was discovering his own toxic masculinity.

I was at an Airbnb last night, and they had this movie on their DVD shelf. It looks like utter trash, but... it has John C. Reilly, Selma Heyek, Willem Dafoe, and Ken Watanabe. WTAF!?!? I think I have to watch this. www.imdb.com/title/tt0450...

Students, in so many domains, opt out of soliciting feedback because they're afraid of judgement. We need to stop validating this idea. I don't know how. But this belief is a construction of their own minds and is not grounded in reality. theconversation.com/uni-students...

Original lizard people template courtesy @caseyg.bsky.social

I know it's a cliche, but some corpo training is especially bad.

"International borders change suddenly" is a true statement if you're only examining maps, and not the actual terrain. Oh, hey, I think I've stumbled upon a metaphor!

I often think about the reviewer who told us people don't change their beliefs, and that beliefs (in society) are primarily changed through cohort replacement. ... and it seems obvious to me that this is a finding based on weak methods and measurement.

There's a lawsuit about AI stealing your work. It's the same lawyers taking on Elsevier et al in a separate case. Academics: 1. Check if your work is in LibGen at www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... 2. If so, let the lawyers know at www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...

I'm fully behind this kind of work. Tho the first thing that jumps to mind in reading this table is that SMBC cartoon* where one guy says "Arguing with you is really frustrating" and then the guy-with-bad-opinion explains they interpret nuance and complexity as uncertainty. *can't find, plz help?