Time to bring this one back around.

Now published in open access! Your one-stop shop for the philosophy of language models. It's the spiritual descendant of our two-part preprint from 2024, fully updated. This should be particularly useful for anyone looking for an entry point into this rapidly growing field.

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

H1B visas were historically key for postdocs and research scientists (and future PIs and professors) - and the fee threatened to totally derail that pipeline. This is good news.

Metaphor alert.

New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists. That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.

Dear colleagues, PLEASE submit a comment against OMB's proposed rule. Elizabeth wrote great guide on drafting a comment. To submit it, go to www.regulations.gov/search and search for OMB-2026-0034. It will take time & effort to write a good comment, but a worthwhile effort to save our profession.

New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!! Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Worth highlighting this part. If it goes through, I’m not sure conferences survive. Currently scheduled ones may see people withdrawing at rates that require cancellation. I don’t know anyone with an active grant who budgeted for specific conferences, and many don’t have alternative funds.

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

Excited to have been wrong about this! A few years ago, Tal told me he was working on intuitions about complexity. I knee-jerkily said, “but surely that’s not a natural kind! Why think that people have intuitions about complexity across domains?” Good thing this is the last time I’ll ever be wrong!

Fun little review paper w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, in which we discuss the role of language in the development of exact number concepts! 1/5 osf.io/preprints/ps...

The work: experimental studies of language and conceptual development with kids 2-7. 1-yr position with possible renewal, starts Aug/Sep 2026. Please share with interested students! Lab: childlanguage.yale.edu

Hiring! Athulya Aravind and I are looking for a full-time Postgraduate Associate at Yale (Linguistics/Psychology). The position is designed as preparation for PhD applications in linguistics, cog sci, or psychology, including structured mentoring and research training. tinyurl.com/mrxjya5t

If you've ever sought NSF funding for anything behavioral sciences related, do this now: cossa.org/action-cente...

NSF wouldn’t have to do this if only we had institutions where the best researchers from different disciplines were all in a complex of buildings so it would be easy to work together, and also they did that while training the next generation of researchers, and also they liked Trump more

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

American science deserves better... not just from the federal government but from the leaders of the organization that ostensibly represents the best of the best in science, engineering and medicine. But, that reputation depends not just on past achievements but what they do in the moment.

Announcement for @nationalacademies.org "State of the Science" address on 6/2 declares: "Since McNutt delivered her 2025 address, federal funding for science has held steady, but significant cuts are still being considered." Really? On what planet is funding steady & cuts being *considered*? a 🧵

The grant is "clean" means it no longer contains "terms potentially associated with misalignment with agency priorities" picked up by the "computational text analysis tool." Grants cannot be funded without checking this box. Yet NIH leaders like Bhattacharya & Letai insist NIH has no banned words.

I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...

Once the expert advisory boards are gone, next step: replace with political ideologues and/or patronage system. Example from NIH via @mmolteni.bsky.social: Blanche may not have prior publications/NIH funding but is Founder/CEO of "Integrative Healing Center & Spa, a holistic medicine practice."

Again, the White House has decided to prioritize the destruction of public science, ignoring both what the public want and what the laws that Congress has passed demand.

Congress has to stop assuming that it's business as usual! Write it in the law! I'm at a loss for why @vanhollen.senate.gov and company would assume that OMB isn't going to use every lever at their disposal to break the government.

We asked Congress about this. Here's the statement we got from @vanhollen.senate.gov's office.

At an all-hands meeting, when asked, Brian Stone who is performing the duties of NSF Director, said: "That was in the report language. It wasn't in the appropriations law. We try to follow the report language, but in this case we weren't able to do it. You can't make the numbers add up."

What remains to be seen is what Congress does. In their report accompanying the appropriations bill, Congress directed NSF to fund all directorates "equitably" and not cut any by more than 5%. That language is not technically binding, conveys Congressional intent.

In an early draft of the spending plan, NSF would have pushed 1.2 billion to AI and 500 million to quantum. Interestingly, this would also have pushed 60 million to SBE, boosting it by 30% (SBE is currently slated for a 30% cut in FY26, and $0 in the FY27 budget request).

Meanwhile, BIO, ENG, GEO programs, would all see major cuts. (EDU listed separately, but would lose ~25%) NSF did not answer questions about why these cuts were being applied, but agency leadership has publicly discussed addressing White House priorities of quantum and AI science.

At their current levels, the allocations appear to closely match OMB's FY26 estimates for NSF. If the funding stays this way, the only directorates getting a boost are CISE (~6%) and TIP (~33%), relative to FY25 actual.

NSF is moving forward and has, as of earlier this week, allocated the vast majority of funding to each directorate. This is good news for scientists waiting to hear back on their proposals, but bad news for most of the directorates, which appear to be receiving substantial cuts.

When OMB apportioned NSF money from the appropriations bill in mid-February, it seemed like things might pick up. But they didn't—instead, NSF, OMB, and Congress became embroiled in a dispute over how that money would be spent. The spending plan has still not been approved by Congress.

A variety of factors have led to the delays in spending: a 6-week shutdown, late appropriations bill. An underreported one is that NSF staff received verbal instructions to spend the continuing resolution at president's budget request levels (i.e. a 57% cut).

This spending has not been evenly distributed. Far and away the lowest is the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences which has spent less than .2% of its FY25 total, funding only 2 new grants in FY26. (n.b. This low level predates the FY27 president's budget request)

Some background: As of 19 April, NSF has obligated about 540 million in funding. At this point in the fiscal year, the agency has typically already spent close to 2 billion. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

NEW: NSF has been funding research at a fraction of its historic rate. Last week, the agency finally began distributing money to its directorates and is now likely to pick up the grantmaking pace. But these allocations also amount to substantial cuts across the sciences. My reporting:

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

oooh a fun new thing to worry about

'The NSF has only committed $500 million of the $8 billion it was appropriated for the fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1. The NSF will lose the billions of remaining funding if it does not spend it by Sept. 30.' thehill.com/homenews/adm...

Also, if the problem is that trust has "eroded" in the last decade & 📈 costs are the problem, then 1) we should talk about the central cause of 📈 costs at public universities, which is declining state $$; & 2) we should talk about how inflation-adjusted costs have actually <declined> since 2013.

I really don't know what to tell folks if they think any of these proposed reforms from Yale, or anything that we can possibly do here at UW - Madison, will change the Narrative™️ from the right in American politics about universities. We're a century into this stuff. We're not the problem.

Rising costs didn't erode trust. Technology didn't erode trust. Biased admissions that have existed for a century didn't erode trust suddenly in the last decade. The self-censoring & campus speech stuff starts to get at the problem, but again, the root cause of that is not even mentioned here.

This report hits on many important issues & identifies important problems that could be addressed. But it fails by writing about the problem of trust, from the outset, without even mentioning the decades of concerted attacks & lies coming from the far right authoritarian party & right-wing pundits.

... Fascism. According to Science, OMB (White House Office of Mgmt and Budget) is throttling spending -- a back door attempt to enforce the funding cuts the WH wanted. Congress approved $8.8bn, but there is a rumor that "OMB must approve any spending above the president’s request of $3.9 bn" 2/x

BREAKING: In response to huge cuts in Trump's budget request, NSF is shuttering its SBE directorate. Staff will be transferred to other parts of the agency and "grants that align with Administration priorities" will be maintained. That & more w/ @maxkozlov.bsky.social & @edwrdchen.bsky.social

The complete destruction of American cognitive science is happening right now