The relevant video about how LLMs impact human learning is below in case anyone is curious and hasn't seen it already (it's part of a 7-part series which is my pinned tweet and also findable from YouTube if you go to my playlists)

A very nice resource to have - Particularly happy to see it confirmed that my recent experiments on latent inhibition (and its reversal) cause a significant headache for Pearce-Hall and Hybrid models. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-...

rock paper scissors

New preprint and simulator of associative learning attentional models. Have fun! 👁️ arxiv.org/abs/2602.07519 cal-r.org/index.php?id... #simulation #associative_learning #attention

"In summary, our results suggest that theoretically interesting connections between LLMs and brains on three neural datasets are driven largely by fragile methodologies and overlooked confounds." -- who would have thonked that?

' Ronald Barnett describes the contemporary fascination with skills as a form of ‘bewitchment’ (others have put it more strongly elsewhere)....When individuals are defined in this way, they become more easily interchangeable in the labour market, increasing workers’ vulnerability.'

The big consciousness conference in Tucson/Arizona is cancelled. Philosophy & Cognitive Science are fields long known to be largely inside-handshake dudebro clubs, something which I said out loud (it's not that they'd hired me), and now revealed to be disproportionally present in the Epstein files.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Wolves die too. Someone should remind them that power is neither forever nor absolute, right? Just sayin' 🙃

American?!! 😮 WTF! Is the US giving citizenship to apes now? 🤔 Besides blonde millionaires, that is (Sorry Kanzi, a very unfair comment, my deepest apologies). "Kanzi (October 28, 1980 – March 18, 2025) was an American male bonobo" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanzi#:....

I see many folks generate hypotheses exactly in this manner (w or w/o the AI) and design whole studies around something they came up with as they scroll the TL, and it's treated as standard scientific practice. We should be able to do better than this crackpot when it comes to hypothesis generation.

They want to make it so publicly-funded academic knowledge production ends — the core unique role of universities — accidentally or on purpose, they want it to stop... > It’s going to start getting really, really hard to get faculty to do stuff other than show up in their classroom.

There's less than a week until our Technomoral Conversations event, 'What's the Story with AI? Exploring AI Narratives & Counter-Narratives'! During this free public event @alex-taylor.bsky.social will be in conversation with @abeba.bsky.social @johnthornhill.bsky.social & @amoorelouise.bsky.social

This stupid lying ignorant piece of shit...

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

It is a failure of colossal proportions that higher education establishments the world over didn’t understand this about AI, in their bones, from the get-go

AI does not magically infuse knowledge into people. "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand"

Striking paper from researchers at Anthropic using a randomised control trial to look at the effects of AI use on skills acquisition. TL:DR ‘We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.’ www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

If you truly believe that social media platforms are harmful places, the idea that the government now makes a list of vulnerable people and bans them from these platforms, e.g. based on age, is not a sensible or good faith solution. Regulate the platforms instead, for everybody.

Are AI models akin to pigeons? 😜 "Pigeons, trained with segmented videos, successfully learned the task. However, unlike humans, they failed to generalize their learning to non-segmented videos, even after a fading procedure was employed" www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

Bravo! This is a beautifully presented problem "Understood is the residue, patterns, correlations, and structures frozen in training data. It's what has been comprehended by others and encoded into text that the model has seen... 1/2

☹️ Saw this too www.timeshighereducation.com/news/give-ph...

I am really angry about all of the scientists who cozied up to Epstein even after it was known who he was. I am nearly as angry at how many people are justifying this as "they had to, it's how academia works" NO IT FUCKING WELL ISN'T

Latest update from @britishlibrary.bsky.social says they are launching a new version of their main catalogue on Monday 8 December and around that time also launch an interim version of their Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue. Hooray! www.bl.uk/stories/news...

Instead, we have heavy investment in GenAI and LLMs, promotion of their use, and a total lack of interest in preserving knowledge.

Probably the only reform science needs is to dethrone its gods and heroes, and abolish and purge all elite (and otherwise) boys clubs. I strongly suspect everything else would start falling into place after that.

HUGE EUROPA NEWS!! OLD DATA HAS BEEN ANALYZED AND SHOWS THE PRESENCE OF AMONIA-BEARING COMPOUNDS ON EUROPA’S SURFACE!!! THIS IS HUGE FOR THE SEARCH FOR LIFE!!

1936 American Library of Congress --retrived from LinkedIn

The south side is for black people only; the north, for white. The East corner is for dogs only; the west for Christians only, the ... FFS what's wrong with people! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'd like to re-up this paper we published last year bec I believe it makes a fundamental contribution to theoretical metascience but it is woefully underappreciated. We address a key challenge in estimating the reproducibility of a result: The distance of a replication study from the original. 1/n

Good morning all! www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKS...

Just like democracies are being put to the test around the world (and succumbing sooner than we hoped), our ideals of research integrity and scientific rigor are being tested by ever-invasive AI tools. I am not hopeful science will survive this unscathed. We'll need to rethink a lot of what we do.

As if this was something to be proud of! Ascientific, unitellectual, unethical, foolish, imprudent, grotesque, irresponsible, reckless, immature, you name it!, on a grand scale.

'Basque Coast at Dusk.' (1949) Although Valentín de Zubiaurre was predominantly a painter of figures and portraits, he also produced landscapes and a number of still-lifes. This picture most likely depicts a stretch of Bermeo's coastline in northern Spain.

$68M settlement, just imagine the amount illegally earned. (and in reality, no pasa nada)

Unsurprisingly stupid, a mere continuation of dumbed-down (US?) government and institutions

Dyslexia isn’t just about reading and writing. Prof Maggie Snowling explains how reading disorders originate in the language system, and why many children also struggle with oral language. Read the full blog to learn more. https://bit.ly/4qr5SlY

Indeed! So am I. Delivering perfect education for all. 😒

I have now watched some of the videos (not yet all), and I most certainly recommend them to you.

Well worth a read. A well intentioned game gets weaponised by people way better at this than the game company and the government. And it’s all a grift, of course, but with real harm along the way.

The right-wing persistent appropriation of traditional left symbols is not new. Now, the trend appears to present as its own and exploit women icons who would no doubt be burned by their acolytes. Since when do the right value women, less so strong ones? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

'The origins of the character are ironic, to say they least. An early iteration of Amelia began life in a counter-extremism video game funded by the UK Home Office and created to deter young people aged 13-18 from being attracted to far right extremism in Yorkshire.' 1/2

And done marking! AI did better this year.

Full credit to @bjennings90.bsky.social, see:

Curious things you find in London.

I’m going to LOSE MY SHIT!