just had my first encounter with rice weevils that I recall being aware of, and I am simultaneously upset at the fact that: - there were bugs suddenly crawling out of my rice - I have probably already eaten them previously - apparently this is not especially uncommon with rice bought here 😖

this prompted me to reread my 1st year college essay on whether proper names w diff. referents are more like indexicals ("I", etc.) vs. homonyms, and I totally forgot I made all these crazy diagrams despite not having taken a philosophy class before truly doomed to be analytic-philosophy-brained 😅

Finally bought my first actual copy of "AI: A Modern Approach" (as a reference for the lab) and it's cool to see that assistance games have their own section now! cc: @dhadfieldmenell.bsky.social

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...

as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

Incidentally I think one strong piece of evidence for the theory that (many) emotional expressions and their associated concepts are learned rather than innate is the ever-expanding set of Slack/Discord/etc emoji reactions.

I was curious whether people have developed "rational models" of emotional expression, and it looks like there's a very recent paper on the topic! By @yyangteoh.bsky.social and @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social.

Happy to finally see this paper (w/ @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social) out now @commspsychol.nature.com We built a computational framework to show people flexibly balance communicative benefits against social costs when deciding whether and how to express their emotions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

One of the earlier feminist lessons I had to learn in life was how to cut off friendships with sexual abusers (+ their friend groups). I unfortunately had to learn this in high school, but with all the Epstein stuff coming out, I'm reminded that most haven't learned this at all.

Doo do doo

in which my students explain the context-sensitivity of social roles and norms 😅

a phd

other people: reading the Innovator's Dilemma bc they want to run a successful start-up me rn: reading the Innovator's Dilemma bc I'm a historical materialist 🌹

I'd like to say something about ICE, but what if they review my social media history the next time I apply for an ESTA, decide my wokeness will destroy America, and shoot me 10 times dead when I next cross the border? Can't really blame them 🤷🏻‍♀️

watched Ed Feigenbaum talk at #AAAI2026 and apparently the way he got into AI research was kinda like mine --- got bored as an elec. eng. freshman, took a class on "Ideas & Social Change", which led to studying with Herbert Simon on Math. Models in the Social Sciences, and hence, AI!

Just walked past a NUS student dance group doing warmups to a ballroom / vogue track, Ha Dub and all, and frankly I'm confused how the gayest possible dance music has become this globally mainstream.

I regret to report that the AI ads have spread to HK airport.

The district court injunction that prevented NIH from capping indirects at 15% was upheld today on appeal! www.reuters.com/world/trump-...

bye again america please invade less countries next time if/when I visit

This is an important negative reality. It's also sustained by industry incentives—and the thing most likely to break it is a big company or two deciding it's bad business to network on a competitor's site. I am a fan of banning mean bsky account FlameTroll420, but that's not the tipping point.

Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...

love listening to a random Vivaldi mandolin concerto for the "first" time, finding the motif strangely familiar, then realizing I actually first heard it as a sample of a Yo-Yo Ma cello cover in a 90s hip-hop album

Guardian reports how misgendering can affect mental health when the victim is cis. Doesn't seem so bothered when it happens to trans people. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Again I find it baffling to compare the coverage to when Gemini generated implausibly many Black hockey players etc. That was apparently a societal emergency. But the mass harassment campaign taking place in public barely warrants a mention.

I know this is yesterday’s news and feels relatively unimportant now but just want to note that this is ongoing and X and xAI continue to do absolutely nothing about it despite being able to end it by pressing a single button.

I've recently been reading LeGuin's Hainish cycle, and finding that I appreciate how the Ekumen (a planetary confederation) goes about cultural change / intervention more than what happens in Banks' Culture novels. I think a lot of that is do with LeGuin's feminism and how it influences her work.

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

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