New post! There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost. Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

I like to look back at my tools at the end of the year, should we share our best picks of apps for academics? Can't-live-without-them: - Alfred (launcher) - Superhuman (email) - Things 3 (todo) - Overleaf (writing) Honorable mentions: Highlights, Bear, MindNode, ChatGPT, RStudio, Slack

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

🎄 Hope you’ve got all your presents ready 💝 Google search interest shows a stable pattern: 🎅 “Christmas gift wife” peaks just before Christmas Eve 🎅 “Christmas gift husband” peaks much earlier #MerryChristmas to all of you! 🎁 📈 Google Trends (Nov 18–Dec 24, 2020–2024) #dataviz #ggplot2

Never heard back from the author so I emailed the editors and it turns out the authors had already discovered this shortly after publishing and sent a corrigendum which had not been published until just now.

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

Google AI is wrong to refer to the QI website for a quotation I have never examined. The AI is confused because I do have an article referring to Lord Bowen and another article referring to an umbrella quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/15/h... quoteinvestigator.com/2011/04/07/b...

Our paper on the ☀️ "summer slide" 🛝 is out now @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Summer slide is a replicable phenomenon across diverse datasets that's more than "forgetting" school material in vacation months, but effects of socioeconomic inequality are ➡️ 7x bigger! ⬅️ #PsychSciSky #DevPsy 🧵👇

Join our Replicability Project: Health Behavior! We have 55 replication studies underway, our target is 65-70. We are only recruiting for secondary data replications--i.e., using existing data to test the original question. Here's a list of studies we think could be feasible. If interested...

Si vous aimez les SHS/sciences cog/philo et ce qui est deep, allez écouter ce podcast de potes qui invitent des chercheurs.euses pour parler de tout ça dans une ambiance relax ! Partagez ici et notez sur les apps pour nous aider à atteindre notre audience svp 🙏 open.spotify.com/show/7iDdboe...

🚨 Now out in Psych Science 🚨 We report an adversarial collaboration (with @donandrewmoore.bsky.social) testing whether overconfidence is genuinely a trait The paper was led by Jabin Binnendyk & Sophia Li (who is fantastic and on the job market!) Free copy here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/7JIYS...

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

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

Huh I wonder if there were any other global events happening in in 2008. Guess we’ll never know.

Congratulations to @bethclarke.bsky.social on her PhD graduation!! It’s been amazing watching you become the incredible scholar that you are, thanks for letting me come along for the ride! You’re the best! 🎉🥂🌟

A fascinating & damning exposé on Oliver Sacks, author of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. It turns out, by his own admission in his private journals, that much of his work was akin to “fairy tales” — based on “lies”, “falsifications”, & “fabrications”. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Grant competitions are a waste of everyone's time. If you must do it, at least make it efficient. A new-ish study shows that asking for a paragraph + CV versus a full proposal basically generates the same results. So let's not waste people's time. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New experimental paper on intuitions about whether people have obligations *to themselves* From philosopher Laura Soter (@laurasoter.bsky.social) in JPSP psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Good to know for people who use LLMs for their R code

Our affiliate, Seema Jayachandran, argues in this blog post that, when fundraising, nonprofits shouldn't just care about how much they raise. They should value new funds they attract to the cause more than competitive grants they win that would have otherwise gone to an equally capable peer.

Great article about fertility in South Korea. That motherhood penalty 😳 worksinprogress.co/issue/two-is...

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

I honestly don't get the "extend the y-axis to zero" dogma that seems to have sprouted up. /start obvious advice Sometimes you should, sometimes you shouldn't. /end obvious advice.

Psychological science is an endless struggle between the theory that humans are really weird and the theory that humans aren’t actually that weird.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

I made an error that I found thanks to @lukaswallrich.bsky.social. The code and preprint have been corrected/updated. Effects on false positive rates are smaller and only for alternative and correlation method but I think the overall argument still works.

This dataset, which claims to provide a single IQ value for each country, is in the news again. Here's a thread on my dive into the data a couple of years ago. I didn't have to look far to find major problems. My #rstats code is linked at the end. 🧪

This one will make you have to sit down. . .

I just published a Cambridge Elements that offers a critical overview of recent work in epistocracy, Confucian meritocracy, and democratic theories of meritocracy. Free to download for the next two weeks. URL: t.co/Z5BOYrCRGF.

Fadeout of cognitive training remains one of the more replicable findings in psychology in this preregistered study of 300 preschool children. Well-done study with a 4 year follow up. The language gains either faded or the control group caught up. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Projects like this & applying integrative analysis methods are very exciting. I bet there's more to do with all the data we collect & curation and good use of metadata is currently underappreciated

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all times, Yes, I teach it to students daily, and refer to it in lots of papers. Sorry. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

New preprint 🎉 Living systematic reviews ensure evidence stays current osf.io/preprints/ps... In this brief comment (all four pages are here ⬇️), @iaiversen.bsky.social and I cover the benefits and challenges of living systematic reviews, along with two ways to increase their uptake 🧵 1/8

I named my fists Kahneman and Tversky because I’m gonna make your losses loom larger than your gains

On the reading list it goes!

"I wish I could be a postdoc again: no admin, no responsibilities, just pure research time."

I maintain that once somebody published a study, anybody can criticize it publicly, & there is no *obligation* to wait for the original authors' (OA) to reply. 1st, why would the OAs get to have the last word at every step? 2nd, waiting opens up a loophole for the OAs to derail the process.

Four Aspects of Harmony [today's blog post, link in thread] What is it to harmonize with the world? Inspired by @vonkriegstein.bsky.social, I suggest: 1. Mental correspondence (e.g., knowing, achievements in tune with the world) 2. Positive attitudes (e.g., joy, approval, appreciation) [1/2]

"In 2019 we notified journals about serious integrity concerns in 172 clinical trials. Over five years later, only 22 have been retracted. The 135 unretracted trials have 1989 citations in systematic reviews, clinical guidelines, and consensus statements" [paraphrased] www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ smile: a n̶o̶n̶obtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis (Strack et al., 1988)

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS. Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Experimental participants to us

Wow- the world has changed. Such a job exists. #metascience

this is mesmerizing

Berlioz is an inspiration to all of us who aspire to take reasonable ideas to their unreasonable extremes.

this is one of my favourite observations about sample size calculations. (afaik first articulated by Miettinen in 1985)

Paul Ekman died last week - I found out via @hillaryanger.bsky.social on FB. Surprised there's no NYT or WashPo obit. I took a class with him and he was friends/coauthors with my friend's mom. Hugely impactful on the field. Too much to say in a skeet. www.paulekman.com/blog/the-pas...