Mods are asleep, post blobby Qing dynasty cats

This week's #PaperILike is "Elephants Don't Pack Groceries: Robot Task Planning for Low Entropy Belief States" (Adu-Bredu, RAL 2022). Love the focus on planning with "low entropy beliefs" -- not full-fledged POMDPs, but also not full observability. PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2011.09105

watching Shiva Baby when you awkwardly know some Yiddish from a previous r/s that your current (Jewish) partner doesn't character: he's married to a shiksa princess. poor guy. gf: what's a shiksa again...? me: ...it's me, I'm a shiksa.

have to say that having received hatemail from someone not entirely well who paranoidly believes I stole their research ideas, the whole Brown + MIT prof shooting is a little jarring

really can't do psychology research in the US like this any more, I see now why one must Make American Science Great Again

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

Unfortunately it appears much of the academic community has reconstituted itself on LinkedIn

The last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint! “Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇

To anyone who may have been present at my talk today in which I intimated that you can just, you know, do this: you can just, you know, do this.

I think this is good and support it. dailynous.com/2025/12/10/e...

11 Dec 2025 @rikiwilchins.bsky.social -- Trans and NB young adult 13-24 whose pronouns were respected were 31% less likely to try to commit suicide in past year. 23%who said no one respects theirs had attempted suicide in past year verse just 10% who said almost everyone respects theirs.

Really refuse to let the worst people have ownership of techno-optimism

It’s been two weeks since ICE took Yuanxin Zheng from his father. He is six years old. He’s still not home. This has to end.

Everyone imitates Tolkien all the time except when it comes to the one way it would really matter: making the protagonist of your novel for children a short, fat, 50-year-old man who doesn't want to do anything.

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

watched m3gan 2.0 on the flight over and I still think it's wild how mainstream ai alignment theory is now

Well this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

all the LLM bros are obsessed with counting model weights, but me? I do weighted model counting 😎

I know AI people don't really believe in Bayes these days, but sometimes I read AI papers from the 70s to 90s, where the predominant formalism was first order logic and I'm so glad I started my PhD after the Pearl-Kaelbing-Russell-etc synthesis of AI and Bayesian decision theory.

okay I may have gone overly viral again T_T

had a nightmare about going viral on the other site, probably I spend too much time there for my own good 🙃

me: *considers registering a .dev or .me domain under xuan-ai or xuanai since .ai domains are too expensive* me: hmm let's see what other websites use that first, don't want to be confused for something else me: *checks xuanai dot com* me: welp, I'm never using that 😳🥲

📣 New BBS preprint out now! 📣 "Models casting egalitarian societies as crucibles of equality perpetuate the factually uninformed notion that foragers are somehow more noble. Critiques portray egalitarianism as romantic fantasy. Neither characterization is wholly justified." doi.org/10.1017/S014...

maybe humans *should* block out the sun so that the machines have to rely on us for bioelectricity, because that way we can still extract natural resource rents in the full automation economy

a notable thing here is that Jin is about as powerful and privileged as you can be - first-tier Chinese aristocracy, basically, super-connected - and that still didn't prevent her from being harassed by Summers

The Harvard Crimson has ID'ed and published the name of a well-known economist who was the subject of emails between Larry Summers and Epstein. Born in China, she did her B.A. – Ph.D. at Harvard. The code name that Summers and Epstein used in their emails about her was "peril." What a vile pig.

Hello fellow nerds! The upcoming Australasian Mathematical Psych Conference (AMPC) is going to be on Feb 23-25, and they've just put out the call for abstracts. Details below. This is one of my favourite conferences and this year it's in Singapore(!!) which should be awesome.

Finished teaching my first seminar course today! Had tons of fun introducing my students to the rational foundations of human-like cooperation. Now that the course is over, I'm sharing the syllabus more widely!

my favourite part of pantheon is how everyone is a furry or sanrio character in the future, truly a world worth fighting for 🥹

Fascinating study, in line with the general unreliability of LMs at ToM reasoning I've seen. I expect they'll be unreliable about other propositional attitudes (want, hope, expect, suspect, etc.), and suspect this is bc they're not trained on data that grounds this vocabulary.

How do people flexibly integrate visual & textual information to draw mental inferences about agents we've never met? In a new paper led by @lanceying.bsky.social, we introduce a cognitive model that achieves this by synthesizing rational agent models on-the-fly -- presented at #EMNLP2025!

Obligatory pinned post: my new book, The Revenge of Reason, is now available to buy: www.urbanomic.com/book/the-rev...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

I'm now also looking for a postdoc with strong Bayesian background and interest in developing Bayesian cross-validation theory, methods and software. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact information at users.aalto.fi/~ave/). Others, please share

Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)

shockingly, it can both be true that 1) we should improve labor conditions 2) the workers prefer what they have now to what they had before.

just had to do inverse planning for the gf bc she walked to the fridge and was like "wait, why did I walk here again?" and thankfully I'm an inverse planning expert ✨

blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a... FYI the blog post for the updated policy is out. Our llm future is dire:/

We have a really strong position paper that has been rejected multiple times from arxiv, both CS.AI and CS.CY, because our "submission does not contain sufficient original or substantive scholarly research and is not of interest to arXiv." Appealing has not helped. Any ideas of what we can do?

Everyone has memoryholed this and thus I'm constantly on about it, but *before 2016* antifascism was incredibly unpopular in The Left. It was basically confined to a minority tendency within anarchism. Virtually everyone else wanted a popular front that didn't create splits over kicking nazis out.

d/acc as in specifically accelerating biomedical research on life-threatening diseases that do not afflict elderly dictators and oligarchs

1/ Alright, this one’s been sitting in my drawer for a year now, after @mcxfrank.bsky.social and I got turned down for a public commentary. But before I forget about it completely, here’s the preprint: Can we harvest insights for rice theory from two state farms in China? osf.io/preprints/ps...

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

finally read @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social on Vice Signalling and not only is it really good obviously i find myself suddenly understanding a lot of what i think of as very confused "feminist" behaviour through this lens www.olufemiotaiwo.com/uploads/1/0/...

is this anything

okay who designed the wallpaper on this bus to look like a machine learning dataset

Our team is building open algorithmic feeds for ATProto. The big bet here is not that we can make something radically better than the platforms, but radically more collaborative. We're building tools for everyone to experiment with the problem. And choose what they like best from the results.

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io