I miss the old 538. It was a good website. Even if you disagreed with the models, conclusions, etc., it compiled a lot of useful data in one place, was completely free to the public, and made for a lot of great class discussions.

Post a meme made by you

This seems like a false dichotomy. Yes, the purpose of the brain surely is allostasis. Like all organs, it exists because it helps us survive & reproduce. The brain justifies its energy paycheck by helping us find food, water, safety etc. But cognition is *how* it does that!

”Sparkling authoritarian takeover” was a perfect joke at the right moment about a pointless ongoing discourse and every attempt to remix it has been pathetic!! Firstly: at least let X in sparkling Y be a french expression! That’s the whole basis of the joke! Second: it needs to relate to something!

Thinking about what heuristics I use to identify AI images from human fanart and at this point it’s usually not details/irregularities/hands but that it’s too technically proficient relative to how basic and uninspired the concept or composition or style is.

This San Francisco speak about ”being agentic” is interesting to me. Machine intelligence (supposedly) devalues human intelligence, and so new ideas about what traits are valuable in individuals arise. Humans are agents. This human-bot gap is then extended to a corresponding human-human spectrum. /

stop scrolling and learn statistics like 50% is more than half of a pie

In a healthy scientific culture/ecology even bad science can be productive if it provokes useful commentary.

this sucks man

TV tropes is an strange wiki because the pages themselves often identify a meaningful trope but the list of examples are always 75% entries missing the point. It’s seems to have a culture that only adds, never edits.

I think about this all the time.

I watched I saw the TV glow (2024) yesterday and I think the fact that I’ve been mulling it over all day today means it was Good. Never thought I’d be frightened by an aspect ratio change in a movie. That itself is an achievement.

I feel like psychologists have unfairly maligned Cohen's d_z effect size as "the wrong" effect size, as opposed to just answering a different question, one which we're rightly actually quite interested in. #stats

something sort of insane is that we have non-trivial evidence that posting is the top of all possible hierarchies of needs. some of the richest men in the world who could be on their mega-yachts choose to not only post, but orient their lives around posting related things

I just feel like political memes went from being punchy shorthands to express ideas to being the only level at which debate even takes place and that this has catastrophically dumbed down everything.

Love time-loop gimmicks. Cool video. Song is a bop. Watch

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

I did it ✌️

Sort of related to this, I think there’s a special beauty in some English-as-second-language music. There’s this yearning to belong to a larger international culture that, I recognize in myself, that shines through in ”broken English” lyrics.

Rewatched Lost In Translation for the first time since I was 16 and I really remembered it as more of a romance. There’s definitely a tension and intimate connection between Bob and Charlotte but I’m not sure it’s romantic. They’re both bored and I think deep down worried that life’s boringness is /

I think one of the most consequential questions in psychology that psychologists have differing perspectives on is the degree to which people are capable of true self-deception.

”Revealed preference” is a silly language game that hides what ”preference” means by defining all manifest behavior as preferred. Usually removing the nuances of what people wish for along the way, as well.

From “The Simpsons” house genius John Swartzwelder, interviewed in The New Yorker by Mike Sacks

In like 90% of the times where someone presents advice ”based in neuroscience” everything relevant about the advice is at a mental/psychological level of explanation and the neuroscience is just superfluous sprinkles. This drives me crazy as a psychologist.

Something that’s hard to explain to people who don’t have kids is that the very same thing parents vent about because it’s exhausting is also filled with joy. Right now my kid is in a phase where *everything* is a silly game that should be repeated over and over and over. Exhausting and delightful.

Some researchers don't discuss their future research plans for fear of being scooped. Not me. I drop bad ideas for unscrupulous people to 'steal'. - What are the neural correlates of Open Science practices? - What is the role of habits in learning a new skill through repetitive practice?

I’ll be honest, if Claude was a literal guy I was chatting with, I wouldn’t describe his problem as ”he’s not intelligent”. It’d be more like ”he’s extremely smart in a way, but he has this exotic neurological disorder which makes him at once overconfident and empty”

Despite my german last name,

Changed profile pic to match my current post-fatherhood beard which I've had for more than two years now. We stayed a long time in the hospital when my son was born, and so a beard appeared, on my face. Now I'm scared that if I shave it he'll be upset by the change.

I don’t want to go to bed. I want to keep watching the Artemis 2 livestream.

In a way AI has been a boon for us with English as a second language. Our sloppy attempts at writing suddenly marked as authentic. Only a human could display this mix of arbitrary big academic words, turns of phrase from TV, and terrible grammar.

how it feels to get feedback

Majestic, well done @rickcarlsson.bsky.social

The thing I can’t cope with is how stupid it all is. It can’t be *this* stupid? I can’t accept that. It’s to the degree where I feel relieved by explanations that involve evil and corruption. As long as it’s not dumb.

Sometimes I worry that the focus on treating various distinct psychological disorders when teaching/training clinical psychologists gives us a cohort of therapists that aren't very good at just talking about life.

As many standardized-test-takers know, there are two ways to score highly on a test: learn the material, or guess what the question-writer is thinking. LLMs have gotten really good at the second part!

Forget Pokemon, I want to see models try BABA is YOU.

all models are wrong but some models take my laptop several hours to run did I do something wrong?

What an amazing final performance from Kaori Sakamoto! So well deserved

If Claude is AGI that’s probably bad news for Anthropic because, as far as I’ve understood, all these companies are bleeding money based on the premise that it’ll be worth it once the *real* AGI arrives.

Feeling psyched my half-time review now has enough committee members, which means it will 100% happen! (April 27th) Looking forward to getting roasted haha

Another EXCELLENT paper about exposure. But this supports my claim that we have to study recommendations that come from basic science and often we don't find they improve outcomes... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Marty Supreme was good. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

War. Just like in the movies!

Not a fan of terms like "stabilize" for this purpose. To me that conjures up an image of something more dynamic/mechanistic than what is going on. Stable as opposed to chaotic. Not just diminishing returns from additional N. #stats

editing some writing atm...

I think we should spend out which hills we die on. We can’t all die on the same hill.

🎉 I just published my second paper! Woo! In psychotherapy trials we often see that symptoms reduce between screening and start of treatment. A plausible idea about that is that patients self-refer when their fluctuating symptoms are extra bad. We checked! (we tried to check) //