I had a great time speaking w @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social about his research on my podcast "Yes, this". We discussed AI, LLMs, AlphaGo, social contagions, categorization, mass influence, the new science of culture, and much more. Link here: open.spotify.com/episode/18R0...

I had a great time speaking w Julia Bunte-Mein about my research on her podcast "Yes, this". We discussed AI, LLMs, AlphaGo, social contagions, categorization, mass influence, the new science of culture, and much more. Link here: open.spotify.com/episode/18R0...

Presented our work, “Cultural and Cognitive Insights from 2.6 Billion Drawings,” at @ic2s2.bsky.social this morning. Big thanks to Mauro Martino, Nima Dehmamy, @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social, and @baronca.bsky.social for the collaboration ✨ Stay tuned for more results!

𝐃𝐨 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐚? In a forthcoming paper in 𝐶𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, we show yes! But this synesthesia deviates significantly from the color associations of ppl, incl. colorseeing, colorblind, and painters. osf.io/preprints/ps...

One of my latest choons already has 1K streams. Nice little surprise. A mournful drum and bass track in collaboration with @douglasguilbeault.bsky.social (aka metachemist). Nothing's better than getting a like or comment on SoundCloud!

New 💫 Letter to the Editor in Cognitive Science, by @samhforbes.bsky.social & @olivia.science lnkd.in/eea8Cwmd

Researchers at Annenberg and @umdscience.bsky.social show that proposed NIH funding cuts lead to an estimated $16 billion in economic loss and 68,000 jobs lost nationwide. Learn about their project and view the interactive map here:

I’m excited to share a preprint of a new collaboration with Spencer Caplan (CUNY) and Charles Yang (Upenn): “A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions.” osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excited to share our new paper in Nature Physics @naturephysics.bsky.social: Cooperative hydrodynamics accompany multicellular-like colonial organization in the unicellular Stentor! How do single-celled organisms benefit from teamwork?

Also, we've just removed the paywall for this.

Spurred by “alarming political interference in academic research by the Trump administration,” Brussels’s Vrije Universiteit (VUB), or Free University, allocated $2.7 million in funding last week for at least 12 new postdoctoral roles open to “censored Americans.”

ONE WEEK TO DEADLINE for Collective Intelligence 2025 submissions! Accepting non-archival AND proceedings submissions, to include contributions from a diverse set of academic traditions. More info here: ci.acm.org/2025/submit/

What was more interesting to me is the correlation between use time and loneliness. Higher use time was positively associated with loneliness. This is very likely driven by the fact that lonelier people are just more likely to spend more time with the chat.

Does daily use of ChatGPT reduce loneliness? I was very excited to see that OpenAI just published its first paper on GPT use and well-being with an experimental design. The outcome is quite disappointing . 🧵 www.media.mit.edu/publications...

I love this insight. The friction in a creative act (in art, but also writing, science) is so crucial. The trouble, the difficulty, the finding a way past roadblocks is how we discover new things about the world and about ourselves. Be wary of tools (like AI) that promise to remove all the friction.

I am very excited to see "Market Design as Organizational Problem" out at AJS: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1.... How do we explain systemic levels of destructive behavior in platform markets (system failures)? I suggest that we should focus on the organization that

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world. 
I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

I’m excited to be featured tomorrow (915am PT) in Wikimedia’s Research Showcase for their Gender Gaps theme in lieu of Women’s History Month. I’ll be presenting our paper “Online Images Amplify Gender Bias”. The talk will be streamed live on Wikimedia's Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRTd...

The intractability proof (a.k.a. Ingenia theorem) implies that any attempts to scale up AI-by-Learning to situations of real-world, human-level complexity will consume an astronomical amount of resources (see Box 1 for an explanation). 13/n

Top notch. "discourse about large models as intelligent agents is fundamentally misconceived. ... Large Models should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents, but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated."

How AlphaGo like architectures can explain human insight. Out now in Cognition!

New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024. That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved. Show me a better investment than that. www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

Really important piece that highlights an essential perspective for understanding current large-scale trends spanning not just academia but also politics

How can we reduce conceptual clutter in the psychological sciences? @ruimata.bsky.social and I propose a solution based on a fine-tuned 🤖 LLM (bit.ly/mpnet-pers) and test it for 🎭 personality psychology. The paper is finally out in @natrevpsych.bsky.social: go.nature.com/4bEaaja

In a world of Matts, be a Derek.

If we could record all neurons we still would not know how they communicate: medium.com/@kording/628...

He has a green card! So dangerous.

Partisanship is a hell of a drug