Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

today's Big Metaphor™: some plants do better when you ignore them, but wilt & die w/your focused attention (office plants👀). Others need constant pruning & the water & fertilizer just right, & even then are pest-prone (tomato👀) The challenge is figuring out what kind of plants you're trying to grow.

This is both useful guidance (how to turn off AI summaries in Google), and also an important way to think. "it’s worth pushing past what you think you can accomplish. If something’s not working, don’t give up—try to figure out why. You might just fix it." buttondown.com/justinpot/ar...

How to turn off those AI summaries (and other thoughts)

Hi! This week I’m going to show you how to turn off Google’s AI feature, then talk a bit about why it’s fun to make things working How to get the old Google...

buttondown.com

"We're all worried," as what it means to do research (in my field, Theoretical CS) seems to be shifting, and shifting fast. What to do? Senior researchers must lead by example, knowing that not everything will pan out. What I'm suggesting below may not work everywhere, but here's my own advice: 1/

Air travel in the US: get there 2+ hrs early, pour out all liquids, we may cavity search you Train travel in US: if you roll up more than 10min early we simply cannot even tell you where your train will be, just hover in front of this info board on these pews

Scary stories about teens sell. The data tells a different story. After decades studying adolescent mental health, here's what I found: This isn't an anxious generation. It's a resilient one. Let's start treating them that way. go.ted.com/candiceodgers

What we're getting wrong about teens and tech

For years, the warning has been: smartphones are destroying a generation. But developmental psychologist Candice Odgers says that decades of data on teens tells a different story — violence, alcohol u...

go.ted.com

Love a new demo for my cognition class

852dude@852dude.bsky.social · 2w ago

On import, before wrangling, after wrangling, before analysis, after analysis, before sharing. Honestly, just do it 2x a day like flossing.

Crystal Lewis@cghlewis.bsky.social · 2w ago

I sound like a broken record, but if you can only do one sanity check before sharing your data, let it be this. Check your rows. 1. Do you have the correct number of cases? 2. Are any cases duplicated or missing? 3. Are the unique identifiers valid? Thank you for your time. 🙏

Hey good news!! (It really does seem to me that if institutions commit to fighting them they frequently back off and it really makes one wish the fight started a lot sooner.)

Steve Herman@newsguy.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Trump administration’s EEOC withdraws its subpoena seeking the names of Jews working for the University of Pennsylvania. www.thedp.com/article/2026...

I have just learned that, per current APA7 formatting guidance, we can no longer write e.g. '36-month-olds'. We must write '36-month-old children' (or toddler, preschooler etc.). What are we even doing. This is like legislating daylight savings time when the world's on fire. #PsychSciSky

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

Researchers replicated a study on bias on hiring w/ AI. When one candidate failed as a doctor, AI stopped hiring anyone from that candidate's group as a doctor & hired them as janitors. AI was more likely to stereotype ppl than humans in the original study. www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/20/1...

AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

AI doesn’t just learn stereotypes from its training. It can cook up new ones, too.

technologyreview.com

New from me and Alan Leslie! We got the band back together to lay out our view on object representations in the infant mind: non-discursive indexes that operate within a language of thought, & which get development of a more complex object concept off the ground www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

tonight‘s Big Metaphor™ is the toddler who throws their blanket off in order to come out of their room, exhausted, insisting they need someone to come and put their blanket on, over and over again.

within every [academic] there are 2 [reasons we agree to review] 1) sounds interesting & we wanna know about it...bc we are huge nerds 2) sounds problematic & we wanna make sure someone is sufficiently critical...bc we are huge nerds (ok ok & sometimes we wanna do the editor a solid) #AcademicSky

helpful thread on the latest asinine efforts to break academia by limiting international students in myriad ways, reposting the last piece of the thread since this is what i wanted to know: timeline and a sketch of next steps can we support/expect to push against it.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 3w ago

Finally, know that these rules do not go into effect until September 15, AND are likely to be subject to legal challenges. And in the meantime, stay tuned for further guidance from organizations which are impacted by these changes. Full rule: public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-14439.pdf

Mount Holyoke College is hiring a clinical developmental psychologist! We’re a research-focused SLAC in beautiful western Mass - we have amazing students and we offer excellent faculty support - app review begins 9/7: mtholyoke.wd504.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

So you’ve commented on the OMB rule. Here’s what needs to happen next if we don’t want to see this rule implemented: 1. Call your members of Congress. 2. Join the movement urging Congress to impeach and convict Russell Vought. actionnetwork.org/forms/civil-...

Civil Servants Demand: Impeach Russell Vought

The Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is the central architect driving the destruction of your government. Russell Vought created lawlessness in every part of the Trump administ...

actionnetwork.org

A cautionary note for those seeking a shortcut to publication--from a very authoritative source.🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...

science.org

calling all researchers who collect data from humans 🧠🧪 we are running a very brief survey (<1 min) about jsPsych, the software ecosystem for browser-based data collection. if you use jsPsych, or if you collect data with any other software, please fill it out at tinyurl.com/jspsych-census!

NEW: The Trump admin finalized a regulation which makes the largest changes to the student visa process in 50 years, along with changes to rules for exchange visitors and international journalists. 🧵on some of the most consequential changes set to go into effect in September.

AILA@aila.org · 3w ago

DHS has published its Final Rule to eliminate "duration of status" for F, J & I nonimmigrants. One of the most significant changes to international student, exchange visitor & foreign media programs in decades, it will be costly, cause chaos, and cut legal immigration.

RFK Jr. asked the National Institute of Health to dedicate $5 billion (!) to finding a link between vaccines and autism. "That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide."

Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy

Insider accounts reveal the scale of the health secretary's ambitions to curb childhood immunizations and unearth a link between vaccines and autism.

reuters.com

I’m kind of hopeful we might be in for a new round of in person meetups. They died back for a while but it really feels like folks are desperate for personal connection and to talk through their fears and anxieties (and hopes) for the future

Donald Szlosek@dszlosek.bsky.social · 3w ago

So Thankful for the MASSIVE turn out at our second event for the Greater Boston R User Group meeting! Outstanding Conversations from econometrics, to health equity / policy, to clinical trials and causal inference #rstats

ooh ooh guess the difference between what these buttons do:

ooh, intriguing on first skim: "Does Overconfidence Really Confer Adaptive Benefits to Children’s Learning?" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... (Hint: if the title is a question the answer is 'no') Now do PIs... #CogSciSky

Academic Would You Rather, 2026: WYR they cancelled the existence of the funds altogether or that they just didn't like your proposal? current anecdata n=2, & def. the latter bc I CAN CHANGE I CAN DO BETTER I'LL TRY AGAIN seems more viable than fixing federal/private science funding #AcademicSky

a thought after an inspiring workshop in Portugal on Early Childhood policy: There are things we should do for children *not* bc they will measurably improve GDP on election cycle timelines, but bc kids are fragile fellow humans. That we have to quantify the 'worth' of clean air food & love is sad.

Good morning. Today is the LAST DAY to comment on the proposed OMB rule that will, honestly, destroy science in the US. And it will do FAR MORE THAN THAT. www.theverge.com/science/9576...

The war against ‘woke’ could end US science as we know it

‘Everyone will be affected, not just scientists. Every community in the country.’

theverge.com

You're going to get left behind if you don't use Al." Leave me then. Leave me with my critical thinking skills, my ability to read and write long- form, and books without needing Al summaries.