Very interesting if EU sets social media age limits. Relative to how impactful such decisions (both limiting & not) can be for human development and society, the scale of genuinely dedicated research feels rather small. www.politico.eu/article/von-...

It's amazing how it's still possible to make these processes so difficult -- noticed the same when trying to reject AI & unsubscribe from other sites they enforce re-login, while all other changes/engagement allowed directly (i think this explicitly violates GDPR)

Made a new record this week re how many invitations had to be sent to obtain three good reviewers: 49 -- i don't use any automated senders so each person was individually selected by me, and won't doubt that all 46 refused to review for the good reason of being busy

Just learned about this diamond journal, which has apparently been running since 2015! Looks like a very nice place for any meta-sciency work & probably deserves some visibility. septentrio.uit.no/index.php/no...

This book is life changing. It made me leave most philosophy (already before Wittgenstein) and become an interdisciplinary pragmatist. Dreaming of rereading one day

Can also recommend Katalin Karikó's autobiography, for a different perspective

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

IT'S ADORABLE! New fish species just dropped: the bumpy snailfish at 10,000 ft down in the ocean gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

"influential and highly cited [machine learning] articles may reside solely on preprint servers without undergoing formal publication"-- curious how much this actually happens in the machine learning community, sounds amazing if truly meaningful papers are intentionally never submitted anywhere

of the last 30 qual studies I've edited/reviewed at least 25 were reflexive thematic analysis --it's certainly one of the best-outlined analytic approaches out there but cannot understand how we ended up in this situation, it's like trying to answer all the world's statistical questions with t-test

Not surprising to many that open peer review is a bit more constructive & positive -- good to have some data to estimate the magnitude. Published/unpublished review remains a solid trade-off in the amounts of kindness & criticism, and i'll pick the former any day for a categorial imperative

Perhaps the most interesting adaptation of a film ever -- how they managed to combine full faithfulness to the original while introduce character/event randomisation to new real-time adventure design that perfectly conveys the theme was just peak creativity

This video is worth all of its 12 minutes -- entirely new way of thinking puzzle aesthetics (with the caveat of being limited to a specific genre)

Excellent essay outlining the reasons why scientific critique is currently broken -- would love to learn more about the historical part ie how/why things have changed over years (ht @syeducation.bsky.social ) www.oncologynewscentral.com/oncology/wha...

over the years i've gradually come to change my view on preprints, which now is: they're harmful & doing net damage (unpopular opinion but there are actual reasons /3

BREAKING: Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Mr. President Trump, you stood there like a little wet noodle, like a fanboy.”

issues are rarely journal-specific (true) but at this point we have good enough data to say there are certain publisher-specific issues-- a study should never be judged by its journal or publisher but what we can do is make sure our future work doesn't contribute to those problems

Back in the days when still running actively it took me 10 years to drop the not-so-smart watch as useless. Learning what stress & tiredness *feel* like takes time but when you have it, there just doesn't exist a more accurate measure

This was one of Merton's useful concepts (specified ignorance) and it's too rarely put in practice -- not so much bc ppl are too busy hyping what's claimed to be found but bc relatively few are genuinely interested in making long-term progress with RQs

There's a great short story by Ted Chiang which resonates with this liminal state -- sub-areas of science are already getting so siloed that sort of meta-humans are needed to fully understand them & LLMs shortcuts just accelerate this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evo...

Fully agree with Bodo Stern we need transition to publish-then-review models: "Open peer review of preprints isn't just a tool for transparency – it's a way to accelerate scientific progress. Without it, we cannot expect research communication to be as complete, accurate, or useful as it should be."

Detailed and time-efficient overview on why health apps/games continue to fail & what researchers can do to start making progress -- totally accessible even without Sebastian's voice track (and beats reading a paper)

I was under the impression that all journals have now come to allow preprints -- just learned that World Psychiatry still doesn't (ofc it's Wiley)

Got my first LLM-generated review. It's awkward, as one cannot provide it 100% ofc but anyone can see all the red flags screaming at you (curious how editors deal with these)

I blogged about fashion defector.com/innovation-s...

"null" is a confusing term that should be banned in most contexts --eg here “an outcome that does not confirm the desired hypothesis” but desired for whom & what about the majority of studies that don't "confirm" at all? Getting unsurprising stuff published is harder, yes, but not null by default

Many ppl make fun of this but descriptive case studies remain a power format to report scientific findings, especially on fields like this (animal play) where behaviour is largely unpredictable & natural data is worth gold

🇪🇺🤝 🇰🇷 Today, the Republic of Korea joins Horizon Europe. It is the first Asian country to take part. Korean entities can now join and lead research consortia with some of the world’s best research organisations to tackle global challenges together. More info ↓ europa.eu/!QFHCnC

This nicely reflects what's the most worrying in the current state of publishing, ie it's possible to transparently report stuff like the below & get away with it without literally anyone caring or noticing -- hence causing tons of hours of wasted expert labour only to get us back to square 1

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

A commentary that summarises why journal publication formats like Nature's "matters arising" should be retired: they're essentially based on COI, carry all the problems of the publishing system like paywalls, and are hardly optimal for communicating technical criticism rdcu.be/ewikh

This is the best possible basis for an argument in favour of for-profit prestige: if you have the $ you *could* pay to reduce factual, rhetoric etc errors close to nonsig already in peer review -- but there's no incentive for that, it's just cheaper to invite a few anon reviewers like everyone else

I love Registered Reports because it's no fun wrestling with reviewers about design decisions that we can do nothing about after data collection. But still, SO few journals in my research area accept them. So I just fired off a load of this email. Here if you want to do the same: osf.io/n6bx9

"studies indexed on the firm’s Web of Science database rose by 48%, from 1.71m to 2.53m, between 2015 and 2024" Science hasn't started magical turbo progress in 9y -- when everything is measured in papers, you get more papers. It's a genuinely interesting Q how to more optimally report progress

Lakatos (1978, p. 216) having a bit of a laugh! #PhilSci

This is a super accessible, clear intro book that comes in video format too, can highly recommend for everyone who never received formal stats training (like myself) -- with materials like this, learning isn't dependent on institutions anymore

An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.

One of the better teenage memories from the 90s was playing the adventure game that no one remembers, beavis & butt-head -- the subtitle was "virtual stupidity" and it was totally worthy of its name

It's precisely these extremely nuanced and original takes that really, really showcase how we as humans are far more clever, sophisticated, and original than software that generates the most generic, bland remixes of existing ideas.

Didn't read but this is an important topic that has gotten way too little attention. The opportunity cost of investing time on open science is nontrivial -- both individuals & orgs should seriously think how to better take that into consideration

This perspective is interesting & worth reflecting, as are the risks of doing practice-based research (in all fields). A method among others, failing and succeeding based on how it's done.

As a sips-goer this year felt the same, it was generally about good-natured, real scientific disagreements -- even Nature (surely shit-talked as Moin says) was also steel-manned & its contributions openly assessed against the damage

When work is fundamentally flawed (eg data or measure) there even isn't, by definition, a solution to the issues. It's absurd that ppl who invest tons of hours on identifying such issues are further asked to fix them (and yes, it happens all the time)

In a recent Clearer Thinking episode by @spencrgreenberg.bsky.social a listener asks about the Transparent Replications project that has now completed 12 replications of new prestige journal papers. Spencer's reply is interesting (yet unsurprising) /4 replications.clearerthinking.org/replications/

Didn't know this happens too but apparently an "international publisher" offered to buy a Finnish language diamond journal for 75k€. Capturing & transforming old local journals to paper mills makes total business sense tho (link only in 🇫🇮) anulah.wordpress.com/2025/06/29/s...

If anyone in games research is interested in doing their quant/qual work via registered reports, just contact me personally -- I've promised to help everyone new to RRs & willing to handle all such manuscripts (w/o COIs) at PCI RR. Very cool to finally collaborate with a gaming-specific journal !

It's pretty hard to measure addictive use if we don't know what addictive use is

Had to double check it's not April 1. Still cannot believe

It was about time

Whenever challenged in Parliament about how video game companies are NOT disclosing loot box presence and probabilities, the previous Con and current Labour UK governments have always used the same copy-and-paste text and maintained that research should and will be done to check compliance. 🎮 👾