I wrote my new Nature World View in this transition — one last reflection before leaving Colombia. It explains why inequities persist in science, even when dressed up as inclusion, and why we must stop mistaking access for change. 👉 rdcu.be/eGEun

I often think how among all the other things it is against, fascism (and its attendant authoritarianisms and make-believes) is fundamentally a war against complexity—against the inherent complexity and multiplicity of the universe and social reality—and against any efforts to understand them as such

Ted Chiang: "The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write [...]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning."

📢 During #PeerPeviewWeek2025, we are tackling a common myth: “Preprints aren’t peer-reviewed, so they must be poor quality.”❌ 🎬 Watch the video to learn about the evidence why that’s not true 👇 buff.ly/MKjUzAo

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases. This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions. arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Book launch for “Methods in the Philosophy of Science: a user’s guide”. Ftf in Exeter and online on the 29th of Sept feat Sophie Veigl, Kerry McKenzie, Hasok Chang, and me. It should be fun! (the book will be open access in July, contact me in the meantime) www.exeter.ac.uk/events/detai... #philsci

Come share all your papers! about.hcommons.org Also, you only need an account to upload. If you just want to read and download PDFs, you don't need to register.

How’s that for university marketing: “with the accessibility and availability of our faculty you won’t need an LLM!”

This week, we’re joined by Professor Miriam Solomon to discuss stigma and its impact on psychiatry — how it has shaped diagnoses, DSM revisions, and ideas of what counts as disorder linktr.ee/thehpspodcast #hps #philsci #psych

“(…) jargon infused with technology industry hype, such as shown in Table 1, does not meaningfully explain. (…) We strive to remain critical of the vocabulary the technology industry coopts and deploys, and to remain respectful of scientific terminology.” zenodo.org/records/1706... 8/🧵

And the median watch count on YouTube videos is 40. The Internet is very weird and you have almost certainly only ever seen the most wildly popular parts of it.

An unrelated yet astute observation: "Dead metaphors provide inexhaustible intuitive fuel for entrenched positions, precisely because they are not recognized as metaphors, and therefore very difficult to eliminate." Which may cause ethical harm. Like mistaking "war on crime" for an actual war.

Another concept in this book that makes me think thoughts: "Fallacy of pre-figuration"—Assuming that reality has well-defined parts and properties that exist independently of all conceptualization. Boils down to objects of our discourse being necessarily mind-framed. Chang goes on to distinguish his

Available #OpenAccess, Michael Kirchhoff's "The Idealized Mind" brings together ideas from the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of science to reconcile scientific realism with model-based science: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255293...

We end on asking you to use our lens where useful to note Pygmalion displacements as a first step towards escaping the cycle of sexist AI-based harm. When a parallel between women and AI is drawn, ask whom does that bait-and-switch serve?

We also make the case that the Turing test, the imitation game (see "Interlude: Can women think?" in https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jqxb6…) rhetorically helps to form the founding historical example of Pygmalion displacement: when women computers were replaced by digital computers.

I've a preprint with Annelies K. and Lelia E. that is relevant to feminised people and our relationship to AI; dehumanisation here follows previously underdiscussed patterns from AI's inception: Pygmalion Displacement: When Humanising AI Dehumanises Women. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jqxb6

this is wild - i was aware of Mary-Claire King's absurdly important discoveries on BRCA / inherited breast cancer but I had no idea that her first PhD paper (King & Wilson 1975, Science, not bad lol) is the "99% of protein coding shared btwn chimps and humans" result www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

This is actually the best satire about free speech and corporate conformists kow towing to nazis (though walt disney himself would actually probably enjoy this because he was a racist nazi mf his damn self)

Most of the people who write about AI and whom I admire are women.

Dublin on the 27th ✊️💚

Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The misplaced optimism of the academic who appends .FINAL to their latest document

Images don’t necessarily show a single frozen moment. Look how they can depict multiple moments at once:

I was mesmerized by the idea that something static can convey not only motion but also temporality, and I decided to test it empirically. It wasn’t an easy task, as the way our data was organized didn’t make it straightforward. But now, here is our paper! ♥️ www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

New book— just got my copy! I know people often don’t read book chapters but I think that’s a mistake. They are usually much more reflective and wide ranging than journal articles.

Open access link: academic.oup.com/book/60807

xkcd.com/3144/ "People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers."

For my money, this is one of the most important stories of the year. FLF are one of my clients, but I'm happy to put my voice behind this proposition, which looks like it has cracked fusion. /1 www.energyvoice.com/renewables-e...

“We are not working on building an AI agent. We are working to protect Signal from the invasion of AI agents that threaten privacy and that are being implemented in irresponsible ways”

Is analytical flexibility really the biggest problem while you’re confusing the ephemeral statistical effects of psychological processes with the ephemeral statistical effects of language prediction trained on massive data sets? Hah.

Looking forward to speak at this fantastic workshop on a such an important and neglected topic! Join us in San Sebastián ! Thank you for having me 🙏

617 of the world’s top scientists, cryptographers and security researchers have released an open letter today (10 September) calling on governments to reject the upcoming final vote on the EU’s ‘Chat Control’ legislation. www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/c...

"[W]e argue that scientific reforms aimed at explicating tacit knowledge and reducing reliance on personal expertise create the conditions for new enclosures of expertise in the hands of a few and thus creating new (epistemic) oligarchies in science."

Just to add to the discourse: academia dot edu is a garbage website that adds no value. I deleted my account a decade ago and never once even remotely regretted it. You can get the same experience but better elsewhere.

I wrote about why it is imperative that we make fun of the maniacs who govern us and their billionaire friends app.thenewworld.co.uk?article=page...

So, let's not regulate *them*. Let's look at what put them into such positions of power. Take away their monopolies. Promote ecosystems that give us BlueSky and mastodon.ie; require interoperability and open standards; stop depending on individual companies for communication strategies. Etc. 4/4

This worked for me. There was no menu on the linked page itself, but clicking "Privacy" got me to a page with the dropdown -> Account Settings, and right at the bottom a box to vent in before hitting "Delete Account".

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

Sigh. And it seems I can't get into my Academia(dot)edu account in order to delete it without accepting the Terms of Service.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

“Ideas don’t deserve platforms simply because someone is willing to argue for them loudly. They earn legitimacy through evidence, peer review, and sustained engagement with reality.” Excellent stuff as always from Mike.

I wonder if researchers who study attention and researchers who study emotion are aware about the strong parallel controversies regarding the theoretical targets? Let me describe them.

"In the latest installment of AI Killed My Job" *Whatever happens to musicians will happen to everybody www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/artists-ar...

“Our theories are the first draft of reality.” — @ruha9.bsky.social Don’t forget to dream/imagine/theorize, especially in hard times #BookSky wwnorton.com/books/978132...

This must be the cloud computing I keep hearing about

What’s so frustrating about this is there are thousands of flash card decks and worksheets and free training plans online to answer both of those inquiries completely. That has to be true, because otherwise an LLM couldn’t do it. But people want ChatGPT to regurgitate it to them, like baby birds

Correlation is not cognition.[1] Stop with the nonsense. Everyday we slip further into the abyss. I often regret reading emails from other academics. [1] Guest & @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (2023). On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. doi.org/10.1007/s421...

It’s time to move beyond the individual… link.springer.com/article/10.1...