Here are three words: pine, crab, sauce. There’s a fourth word that combines with each of the others to create another common word. What is it?

USAID prevented 90 million deaths from 2001-21. USAID cuts led to 757 k excess deaths. Global aid cuts will cause more than 14 mill by 2030. Americans can't be trusted across the aisles to prevent this Other countries should step up, individuals should donate better: www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund

sure tom steyer might think we have to protect trans kids but he doesn't know who runs wired

Current bsky feedstack because Popular with Friends and Discover were too rage bait-y

no u

you gotta be maxmaxxing bro

Very well written. I’ve long felt that facial feedback and power posing are on similar trajectories: small non-artificial effects on subjective feelings, no psychologically interesting effects on physiology, and far stronger moderation by expectancies, demand, and real-world context 😅

It is not enough that LLMs hallucinate, they must make us hallucinate Made by Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive Thinking

I see this behavior a lot in science. There's something important we don't understand, a challenge to existing models or knowledge, and a ton of people immediately come forward to say "that's not a challenge because I have a possible explanation". Which is not the same as the correct explanation.

"Fake quotes are usually dumber than the people they are said to come from. People want foolish quotes more often than wise ones." ---Plato, Gorgias

New paper with lead author Snetha Sheth, Mike Doswell, Kalina Christoff Hadjiileva, @beckety.bsky.social @evanthompson.bsky.social and Lawrence Ward: Phenomenology of the stream of thought: dissociable dynamic dimensions revealed through experience sampling academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

A master student, Mink Veltman, is helping us to develop a miscitation detection module for Metacheck. If you want to help us to reduce miscitations, it would be great if you could take 5 minutes to fill out this survey: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/J7ugQw8mic Thanks in advance!

tokens are what phone minutes used to be

This is not new. The Fires of Enlightenment are an asymmetric weapon, they burn down things in the funeral pyre of empirical falsification. They'll keep burning but we must understand and not underestimate influence and rhetoric that are symmetric and can be wielded by all sides.

phenomenology: phainein (to show, to make appear) + logos (study) phenomenogogy: phainein (to show, to make appear) + agōgē (guiding)

Reading Sanderson after a long break. I watched his creative writing class during that. This book has been good, though I can see the bones of the story a bit too clearly. There's an automatic quality to the story beats: yes, but; no and; perspective skip; shoehorned theme to be relevant later etc.

The formula for the american illiberal right/left seems simple: be born rich, mock liberal institutions and norms and those who uphold them, pretend to represent and scam the downwardly mobile for money and influence, gain political influence by diminishing liberal institutions, make more money.

Can gratitude interventions make the world happier? We tested 6 gratitude practices across 34 countries with 10,696 participants to find out — and the answer is more interesting than a simple yes 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Beautiful piece by Awais. Money quote below. My one concern is that many psychiatrists do not in fact mean what Awais means when they say "you have ADHD". They mean it in exactly the same way one says "you have liver cancer". And it's very harmful for mental health science and practice.

Can corporations twist people into doing things or warp markets or regulations? Sure, to an extent, but if you make more than $80k/year you're in the global 1%, and I'm skeptical of stories the global 1% tell of being helpless pawns forced to consume and drive and eat meat and buy big lawns.

Paper now published in Neuroscience of Consciousness and led by @chkhaidze.bsky.social: From dots to faces: individual differences in visual imagery capacity predict the content of Ganzflicker-induced hallucinations academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

"there are no technical solutions to social problems". Yes, there are.

"losing debates to bad faith people is an integral part of my artistic process" shes so cool

Happy Hume Day. The Great Infidel, the wonderful David Hume vexed the Church, woke up Kant and confounded causality. "It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom."

many people do not want a public square, they want a gladiator pit

they are making me like Ryan Holiday again help

We have made such strong effort to erase Skinner and Behaviourism from the history of Psychology that we have come to fully ignore some critical analysis of the associative structure: the first approach to integrate predictive and goal-directed learning S:R-->O (S-->O and R-->O)

↙↙↙

"no matter how you check, it turns out that under certain conditions modern children and educated adults believe that magical powers operate not only in the domain of the imagination but also in the domain of everyday reality"

"Remember: sufficiently advanced synthesis looks like non-sequitur."

I want to defend punching down in academia. Scratch that. I want to defend punching, full stop. Up, down, sideways. The norm against critiquing junior scholars publicly comes from a good place but breaks something fundamental about how science works. New essay. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

you can just give hostage to fortune

Very cool analysis of the submissions to a major management journal that shows how much the system of science, built for humans, is under strain as a result of AI. AI can be used to do better science or it can be used to just do more stuff. The danger is that "more" is winning due to incentives.

Noice! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I vibe coded a web UI to LiteParse by LlamaIndex, a neat open source library for extracting text from annoying layouts PDFs https://simonw.github.io/liteparse/ More about how I built it on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/liteparse-for-the-web/

Many thanks @irishtimes.com for the thoughtful review of our book #ScienceUnderSiege @michaelemann.bsky.social @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social www.irishtimes.com/science/2026...

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps

An erotic randomized controlled trial: participants were "randomly instructed to write erotic narratives at least twice weekly (n=30), or a control group (n = 30), instructed to write a narrative about dining with friends" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41996557/ 😳

Nadine Dijkstra's talk at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rciv....

I have just finished reading The Technology of Teaching by Skinner it confirmed two ideas for me. First, the image of Skinner as an “evil” behaviorist is false. Reading him directly, I find a profoundly humanist thinker. Second, he may be more useful than expected in our AI-powered era Few takeaways

I consider Dr. Foa’s exposure therapy work among the most profound achievements in clinical psychology. Her work has saved so, so many lives. She led a big life. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/h...

I'm excited to share our preprint: "Selfing without a self: The missing dimension of identification in computational accounts of selfhood" The puzzle: How can meditators claim persistent selfless experience without dysfunction when computational accounts claim it's maladaptive? 🧵 t.ly/vDv4n

The link between functional neurological disorder and migraines is kinda weird.

One was done by excellent institutions, the other by a deplorable populace thirsting for chaos, bored of prosperity wanting to burn down those institutions.

A lot of our education on writing well focuses on logic, clarity, and argument. AI will force us to think more about style. The boredom that comes from everything on the internet reading Claude-y now, no matter how good the substance is, should make us appreciate (and make us want to develop) style.

Science is good. We should fund it.

uhum

Optogenetics induces aphantasia and hyperphantasia in mice I am thrilled to announce my latest study, providing objective neural evidence for imagery extremes – in mice! 🐁 Read the paper here: tinyurl.com/ycxnkka7 <----👀 A thread 🧵 1/N

A new Element in the Cognitive Linguistics series. Writing and Reading Poetry by @mmgiovanelli.bsky.social and @kpager1.bsky.social Free to download till 2 April! www.cambridge.org/core/element...