"We are being asked to accept the permanent loss of a landscape our ancestors built, walked, and prayed in, in exchange for 14 wells... This is not energy strategy. 90% of the San Juan Basin is already leased. Chaco is not what stands between this country and its energy needs" - Acoma Gov. Riley

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

The beautiful game. The people’s game. Throughout this World Cup, we have been reminded of a simple truth: football belongs to everyone. So does the joy and community it creates. Yesterday, I joined New Yorkers on Rikers Island to watch England take on Argentina.

Elon Musk spent $290M to elect Trump in 2024 — and has spent $85M+ so far this cycle to keep Republicans in power. Now, Trump's DOT is gutting safety rules to clear the way for Musk's driverless Tesla Cybercab. We must get Big Money out of politics.

corrected proofs and index sent to press. 3.5 years after louise and i decided to do this, we are done.

Moral panics about kids not reading and kids being addicted to their devices are projection on the part of adults who no longer read and are addicted to their devices.

One wonders how we can have a system where there are some wonderboys who publish 7 papers a year in top-10 journals and also this is like the median journal experience for most of us

Fun story: I have twice sent emails withdrawing from journals at similar points which, like all emails for updates, were ignored. The journals eventually accepted my papers! ... Which meant I had to figure out what to do, since I had since submitted elsewhere. Terrible, absurd system.

it's my paperversary!

Please blow up the public comment (included below): BREAKING NEWS (7/15) — The administration wants to destroy Chaco Canyon without consulting Tribal Nations. It’s an irreplaceable historic & cultural site with 4,700 archeological sites that could be lost to the bulldozers of oil & gas development

AI Slop and Evidence about Evidence: Why Philosophy Journals Should Reject AI-Written Prose Human experts are better than LLMs at nuanced word choice and actively generated prose reflects these expert sensitivities better than passively approved prose. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2026/07/ai-s...

“.. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. “.. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.” @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

This Day in Labor History: June 14, 1877. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 begins in a revolt against the railroad industries that spread well beyond the strikers themselves. The government responded with state violence, using the Army to kill strikers!

"Students whose teachers had access to the AI tool rated their classes as less enjoyable, less interesting and less important than students in the control group." 👀 This seems...important? hechingerreport.org/proof-points...

1/6 Why have deep neural networks aligned so strongly with brains for the past 15 years? What explains it? @dyamins.bsky.social & I make progress on this question in our new paper👇 In a nutshell, we *prove* that for sufficiently hard tasks, the choice of alignment metric does *not* matter.

We need Broken Windows theory but just for white collar crime.

NEW: Our first report on the swing voters of the 2026 midterms finds that when they are asked which policies would make them definitely vote for a Democrat, the most selected option is “raise taxes on the wealthy,” followed by “create a Medicare for All health care system.”

Today, the AAUP & Texas AAUP sued Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton over directives he gave that mandated the censorship & thought policing of thousands of faculty & students leading to the suppression of academic freedom & the pursuit of knowledge. More Here: www.aaup.org/news/aaup-te... 🧵

Check out our first commentary on Mugg's "From Human Reasoning to Belief," by Devin Sanchez Curry!

Shipping a copy of "Inventing Temperature" to every reviewer or researcher who derides a contribution for being incremental

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

This sums up the frantic and coerced deployment of "AI" throughout public and private sectors. Results of even cursory audits are horrifying every time, invariably paired with forced adoption and retaliation for asserting professional norms. Colonialism is a cherry on top.

In the spirit of Roger Scruton, I feel it’s best to be up-front about my fees. So if tech companies are following, I’ll write articles arguing: Language models are moral agents: £5000 (+£2000 for patienthood) Running PyTorch makes GPUs feel pain: £7000 NLTK toolkit was always sentient: £10,000

A developer made a browser extension called "Knockoff" that shows what a wasteland Amazon truly is by filtering out brands like "GODONLIF" "EHEYCIGA," ROTTOGOON," and sponsored products. Useful and illustrative even if you don't use Amazon www.404media.co/knockoff-bro...

So… Cheyenne, WY won't take data center wastewater anymore after Meta/FB's "Fill and Flush" process (how they test data center cooling systems) was responsible for polluting their whole community's wastewater reclamation system with Cupriavidus gilardii bacteria: cowboystatedaily.com/2026/07/02/c...

A study concluded that the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live. (Published July 2025)

How do ancillary cognitive demands systematically shape young children's behaviors in a range of possibility reasoning tasks? Find out in our new paper, now in press at Developmental Psychology!

Do people solve hard problems by first building a mental model, then searching for the best solution? With @gershbrain.bsky.social, our new manuscript suggests a different route: people often start by retrieving cached solutions, and scaffold representations around them. osf.io/preprints/ps...

No one is emphasizing to nonlawyers enough that the pace ay which this Supreme Court is changing the law has never been seen before in US history, and all of the history of common law for that matter

I think the AI boom is the best thing to happen to humanities students in years because one cycle of "AI savvy" graduates as employees is all it'll take for like 90% of employers to peace out and go looking for people who have actual skills

futurism.com/future-socie... lol

1000 evaluators given identical resumes & told candidate used AI. Only difference on resumes was candidate’s name: Emily vs James. Study found women using AI are evaluated as less competent than men who use AI...To evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

I wrote the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science entry on 'Intuitive Physics': oecs.mit.edu/pub/m27ympza... --- for those who don't know it yet, OECS (@oecs-bot.bsky.social) has accessible, informative, free, serious entries on many basic topics in cognitive science

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

Everybody in the "climate space" (which means everyone on earth...) needs to understand these mind-blowing figures. Google's "total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025." In ONE year. The AI corporate arms race is eating the world.

The human brain is strikingly modular: distinct networks for language, formal reasoning, social reasoning, physical reasoning. Is this fundamental to intelligent systems, or an accident of evolution? In our new preprint, we find the same modular organization emerges in LLMs.

Saying we should all go back to physical media I think misses the point. I actually *like* buying games and movies digitally for a bunch of reasons. What we need is better consumer protections so the things we do buy digitally are actually owned and companies cant delete/revoke access!

As the director of a historical video game preservation institution, and someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to this cause, this is accurate. We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organization to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative.

Jackson.

New preprint! Children often beat adults at learning hidden patterns. Using eye-tracking and a method we built in eLife (Hann et al. 2026), we found the edge is not better error detection. It is flexibility: kids update their beliefs, adults cling to old predictions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

this whole online ID verification push stuff is turning me into a weird crank at rapid speed because I've never seen such an unpopular policy forced through with such speed in so many countries simultaneously with basically zero real consent from any population, just pure elite collusion

NEW: Meta paid hundreds of contractors to pretend they were kids—and then prompt rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to talk about subjects like suicide, sex, eating disorders, and self-harm. From @dmehro.bsky.social and @joelkhalili.bsky.social

no

Per our new polling out today, the most popular politicians in America are… Barack Obama Bernie Sanders Zohran Mamdani Pete Buttigieg Jon Ossoff & Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Trump is tied with Elon Musk and Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer and Carlson in last www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-06-29...

"Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers of which Moreton is a member, found that 20 out of the 23 foundations most active in the pluralism and depolarization space also fund conservative policy networks or pro-Israel organizations."

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜