I've trained my dog to salivate at the sound of a bell thanks to my invention, the edible bell
When and how do newborns see a face? @nmwilkinson.eurosky.social and colleagues identify a serious problem in how a foundational newborn study has been interpreted. But the Bluesky victory lap is leaving out a rather important detail: neonates track FACE drawings! bsky.app/profile/nmwi...
Dr Nick@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social · 2w agoNew paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!
"are you ready to argue about nature vs nurture?" "pfft, I was *born* ready"
always important to remember that [catastrophic/life-changing AI prediction] has been 5 years away for 70 years
i recommend david's paper and this reply. i agree much more with @dlbarack.bsky.social but the whole conversation is helpful
Konrad Kording@kordinglab.bsky.social · last wk.Why We Systems Neuroscientists Should (Usually) Be Quietists: The Philosophical Logic of NeuroAI -- response to David Barack kording.substack.com/p/why-we-sys...
At last: @neddo.bsky.social schools the 'conscious AI' brigade. Been waiting for this for a while www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be
Large language models can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill. But evidence from neuroscience suggests that intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience.
nature.com
Proud to have this paper out today at Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com ! Heroic, creative work by Zekun Sun (w/ Zhiran Xie and me).
Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · last wk.Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns
New chapter forthcoming! In this chapter, I canvas some different ways to understand NeuroAI. Utlimately, I think we can do better than just trying to understand the architecture, learning rule, and loss function for the brain--I think we can understand its compns. philpapers.org/rec/BARTPA-39
philpapers.org
🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 What is the relationship between neural networks & symbolic systems? Based on evidence from mechanistic interpretability, we argue for a quasi-symbolic view of cognition: Neural nets implement symbols but only approximately Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/n
How come Wikipedia is doing better than academic publishing? Btw love that icon: 🚫🤖 🔗 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmat...
Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS
Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency
The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whate...
doi.org
great, this bullshit correlates with some other bullshit we don’t understand
cold take: it is weird to put a job you were offered and declined on your cv
I don't understand this. 52 years later, why try and replicate the original? It's obviously not going to be the same study. The world has changed; cars, traffic, and people have changed. If one is interested in false memory, why not design the best study you can? What can you conclude meaningfully?
AAndrew Gelman et al.@statmodeling.bsky.social · 3w ago
A plan to replicate the Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment on false memories statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/10/04/a...
A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...
Our lab is growing! We're looking for a graduate student to start next fall (applications due on Dec 1) and a postdoctoral researcher to start soon (ad coming soon; starting date is flexible, probably some time next year). subjectivitylab.org
The Subjectivity Lab · Duke University · Jorge Morales, PhD
Duke interdisciplinary research group led by Dr. Jorge Morales studying vision, mental imagery, consciousness, and introspection.
subjectivitylab.org
If you are in the greater Washington DC area on Friday 6 November and have an afternoon to spare, I’m giving a talk at George Mason University. I’d love to see you there. (baboon skull diagram from Theibault et al. 2026) 1/7
missing from this argument is the fact that Williams is an extraordinarily rich college with students who are overall very well-prepared for college—essentially none of this is generalizable even to a flagship university, much less any other higher education institution
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. (Gift Article)
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
nytimes.com
Delighted to say that my paper "E Pluribus Unum: Costly Inference and Fragmented Belief" has been accepted for publication in Mind! You can find the paper at this PhilPapers link. Abstract follows in a reply. philpapers.org/rec/SPIEPU
philpapers.org
Accepted to Linguistic Inquiry! I argue on syntactic grounds “some of the apples” is really “some apples of the apples” with NP-ellipsis. This explains which quantifiers and which modifiers (adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses) can’t appear. Preprint: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009...
ling.auf.net
A paper by @quiltydunn.bsky.social and Justin Wood arguing that the nativism-empiricism dispute in cognitive science is broken caught my attention. Rather than critique their paper (linked below), I take it as an opportunity to struggle with the ideas. vincentcarchidi.substack.com/p/is-the-nat...
Is the Nativism-Empiricism Debate Broken?
Upon surveying the literature on nativism and empiricism in cognitive science, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that the entire thing is best avoided.
vincentcarchidi.substack.com
in academia if you wear a tie people react like you're wearing a tuxedo and holding a sign that says "I'm a fancy boy"
we've always had the secret hack of 'cheating'. You could, in principle, pay a qualified human to fully write your materials for you. If you see what's wrong with that, apply that reasoning to using genAI for this. If you see nothing wrong with that, I don't know what to tell you.
It’s crazy. I’m reading a Nature Communications paper. I can’t get through it. So much data. So little of it matters. So many conclusions drawn about nothing.
new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social
I have a new preprint with Athulya Aravind. In it, we ask how can children learn the presuppositional meaning component of a word (e.g. "both" presupposing a |2| domain) Our claim... ...is that they can't. Presuppositional meanings are unlearnable. Preprint: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010...
everything I know about will stancil i learned against my will