"There was no moral panic about the internet" yet I was not even allowed to access the internet unless it was a rare strange treat because something really bad happened. The meeting my parents had when I told them I wanted to visit the American Girl website was like a nuclear safety council

Finally tried this on more repos, highly recommended! It’s great to sniff out the areas where your understanding is too fuzzy. And it gives some glimpses of how self-study augmented with automated tutoring could look like in the near future.

Why is so much philosophy of science more like philosophy against science

I am reading one of Marian Petre's papers about idea capture representations in early software development. Thinking about the artifacts of agentic coding as idea representations....I feel like that could be a more helpful way to appraise them, and more accurate to users, than as finished products

There’s posting and then there’s POSTing

Perhaps you have thought to yourself, *I'm* on board the Psychology of Software Teams train, but how can I identify fellow POST fans in the wild?? Well if you find me at a 2026 conference or book reading you can get a TINY PROPAGANDA STICKER

This isn't my field but reading scholars who study race has been completely transformative to how I see the world. It's one of the world's most difficult topics, done by the bravest people, toward the biggest problems we have. It's relevant to everything

Activation of some brain area does not constitute an explanation of a psychological phenomenon - certainly not a better explanation or the real explanation

Most of the people in my life aren't in tech. And they aren't academic theory professors. It's been really interesting to ask them about where they see AI impacting their jobs and tasks.

I will be speaking at the UC Irvine Research Forum on Developer Experience on May 15, 2026 and it looks like there will be a zoom option! Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... LI post from organizer Tom Zimmerman here for more details and speakers: www.linkedin.com/posts/tomzim...

In which we cover many illusions, like the illusion of explanatory depth, and the illusion of fluency... ... and in which I wonder if I have DELUSIONS of grandeur around skateboarding 🛹 open.spotify.com/episode/6E94...

🎉 New paper w/ honors student Majo Guerrero & @lindseypowell.bsky.social: 4–7-year-olds did not expect girls to be more empathic than boys, nor did they judge girls more harshly for counter-empathizing, suggesting stereotypes about empathy may emerge later in development. doi.org/10.1080/1524...

Will @ashleyjuavinett.bsky.social achieve her skateboard dreams?? Are our heuristics around learning making it impossible for us to learn? Can you improve your adherence to your goals?? Latest Change, Technically is another LEARNING STRATEGIES episode! www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/epis...

Crowdsourcing: Looking for accessible conceptual descriptions of how psychologists think about parsing up mental functions (e.g. when to lump vs split, construct validity, operationalizations; cognitive ontology, natural kinds, etc). Something succinct you'd give as an intro on topic. Know any?

Every time I see people who jump into otherwise nice conversations to write these snarky replies like, no one has any value unless they are programmers, no one can think unless they're coding, I think right. I guess so many of you thought that about me and others this whole time. Wild.

The coolest part of waiting on an insurance denial appeal is when you're having lunch and your brain goes WOW WHAT IF WE'RE NEVER GONNA BE OK AGAIN and then you have to be like yeah, what if. Anyway lunch still matters

every single study about AI right now is just that "Study Reveals: Babies are Stupid" Onion Headline

I had a lively argument w/someone in CS last fall about the utility of "brute force" solutions & it became wildly clear that our two backgrounds of (him) CS, formal systems and top-down rules vs (mine) environmental, psych, probabilistic effects, capitalizing on experimentation were just AT ODDS

"your brain will become pudding"

Wow that's interesting. One of the biggest most interesting ways to understand these complex effects in the world is to start to unpack how things that we assume confer equal benefit actually don't and in fact the same "treatment" may generally be different processes entirely

catsky

I had in mind Annette Baier (esp. "Trust and Antitrust" and "What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?") and Mary Midgley, neither of them alive. But @add-hawk.bsky.social fits the bill, and his recent book, The Score, is brilliant! I wouldn't miss this short piece by Midgley, though.

I truly underestimated how many people genuinely don't seem to believe human cognition can form mental models. I don't know. It's wild that the people arguing we imbue AI with minds seem to not believe we have structures around understanding and learning ourselves.

really good from @grimalkina.bsky.social. I’ve been thinking about writing something about a habit or maybe skill I have, which is that I’m good at treating things I hear as tentative and holding onto them for later confirmation (or not) www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-he...

Google Slides' new "Beautify this slide" AI tool is comedic gold. Don't think I could have made an uglier, more illegible slide if I tried:

I wish there were actually a nice place to talk about human behavior and this enormous thing that's going on with human behavior for the people I study and work with

New paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com with @simonag.bsky.social and Darko Odic! We show that young children and adults use different internal signals for reporting memory versus perceptual confidence judgements. But by age six, the internal signals become comparable. Free access link: rdcu.be/fgZvV

It's incredibly difficult for me, as a psychologist, to really figure out what people mean by sycophantic because most expressions of generic support and warmth seem to qualify

Caring about open science in the agentic coding era is really interesting. It is kind of a mental freedom. Like if somebody points their Claude at all the code of our No Silver Bullets paper and builds their own analysis of software data that's more thoughtful about variation....good?!??

just a mastery oriented girl in a performance oriented world

It would be cool if the software engineer part of edtech didn't have a practice of absolutely obliterating and driving out every researcher who works on effort and process and has real learning science expertise but that's not the reality

I feel like Bsky isn't a fun enough place to do May 4th stuff and reveal how much of a star wars fan I am but I did make a really cool xwing jumpsuit variant last year because I was on a panel talking about the psychology of resistance and Andor

Ashley and I just made stickers and bookmarks to distribute when I do readings this summer! It's getting so real!!!

i recommend @grimalkina.bsky.social custom skills for Codex or Claude Code: github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

I feel this Wikipedia entry deserves an edit from someone who chooses to engage with that culture (I don't). Does the first line in research really need to mention her husband.

Saying "this is how vaccines work" is not an effective counter because they believe the mechanisms of the vax itself is damaging. They associate this with stuff like myocarditis. "that's how it works" affirms their fear tbh The "circulating spike protein load" antivax argument is an entire thing

I feel like people online often want to bully me into saying I'm observing different things than I'm actually observing with developers. Sometimes that has been that they have human needs but right now it is that they...have human needs even when they are using AI, AND are still trying to learn

Got to present this early draft paper today at a neat workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social. It's my attempt to grapple with the need for struggle and friction in learning in a world where LLMs remove all that friction. Read the whole thing at stats.andrewheiss.com/pinky-lychee/

Absent from the discussion about risks in using AI is the idea of use cases where you absolutely want to identify high quality information and can pretty easily discard low quality information, and the hq information needs to be bespoke and specific Like an insurance appeal for a medication denial

There are two things that really bother me in tech commentary these days. First thing is the constant calling everyone else stupid, second is the saying because everyone else is stupid no positive change is possible

Cognitive offloading by flipping on the tidyverse motors

such a dark timeline it's time (to buy the skateboard)

I'm sorry. But I fact checked this. I'm sorry. I had to. I was like?!??!!? I will not let this individual out-science me on this topic IN PARTICULAR. How on earth would we be getting a population-level sample of all these microbiomes to make this estimate. Sample reading skill issue

I will be speaking at the UC Irvine Research Forum on Developer Experience on May 15, 2026 and it looks like there will be a zoom option! Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... LI post from organizer Tom Zimmerman here for more details and speakers: www.linkedin.com/posts/tomzim...

This thread points out one source of measurement error (the poor data collection itself). I've been reading nutrition science for a while now and I can add there are approximately ten thousand errors in every statistical approach I read, too

I'm going to be in Toronto the week of May 18 to keynote at CTO Craft Con and sticking around a bit -- reach out if you're there and want to chat psychology of teams and we should get coffee! 🙂 I'm always running a packed schedule these days so will have to see but I don't know who I know there!

balancing my usual pushes for compassionate takes on the very rational reasons people are trying to use AI for their own tasks to say: lord but some people have ludicrous visions and you sure see that in media

We're in a dark timeline when I'm reading substack posts from tenured faculty about Twitter pileups that I WAS THERE FOR and REMEMBER DIFFERENTLY

🚨 Our lab's first paper is published! The claim: anxiety distorts not just what looks threatening, but the task models people use to plan. 🧵 This tiny study provides preliminary support that world model variation is critical to explaining anxiety. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...