A crucial part of doing science is the art of expressing & engaging with disagreement. Cheng et al show 11 AI models are sycophantic & make users more convinced they're right & less willing to take responsibility or repair conflict. Q. As we adopt AI in science how can we preserve healthy discourse?

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence

Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

science.org

New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

This thread helped me understand that the outrage about Anthropic's watermarking is the confluence of a lack of understanding of how LLMs (or any statistical language model) works and general angst at the current economics.

Alex Hern@hern.bsky.social · last wk.

If you use Claude right now, then it doesn’t pick the “best” word for a sentence. It creates a distribution of possible words, assesses the probability of any given word fitting the slot, and randomly picks between them based on that probability.

> I had a conversation ... about how a developer's job is now is to teach the AI to be better, make fewer mistakes, etc. To review the code. And to test the changes that the AI makes. This is a horrible existence This is so relatable. brettcodes.com/im-done-usin...

I'm done using AI

Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.

brettcodes.com

Twelve quick tips for AI-assisted coding in science journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... - our latest by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social with @thisisadax.bsky.social , Zijiao Chen, Zhicheng Lin, @hritz.bsky.social and @joachim.cidlab.com

Twelve quick tips for AI-assisted coding in science

While AI coding tools have demonstrated potential to accelerate software development, their use in scientific computing raises critical questions about code quality and scientific validity. In this pa...

journals.plos.org

This looks useful. A typical meta-analysis in ecology mixes experiments with observational studies, mixes coefficients with different controls and therefore different causal meanings. I would not normally say "hey the folks in medicine are doing it right, imitate them" but in this case maybe

Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar@asanchez-tojar.bsky.social · last mo.

Are our ecological conclusions built on shaky foundations? Our latest paper in @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social highlights that Risk of Bias (RoB) assessment, crucial for ensuring the internal validity of research, is almost never used in #systematicreviews in eco & evo 📉 🔗 doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Better Code, Better Science is back after a bit of travel. We also have a new web site (bettercode-book.org). Next week I will post a number of bonus articles based on sections added since the original posts - stay tuned! russpoldrack.substack.com/p/statistica...

Statistical calibration using randomization

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 9, Part 6

russpoldrack.substack.com

I think this kind of thing deserves a response that reveals the assumptions that make "Rabois World" correct, including no mediators or colliders. I don't have time for that though. So here's my old series on what's wrong with thinking like a regression: elevanth.org/blog/2021/06...

Regression, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1/3)

It isn't my job to disappoint people, but I'm good at it.

elevanth.org

Saloni@scientificdiscovery.dev · 2mo ago

Oh no! Oh no!!

A fun podcast with Maxime Gabella about our dreams about AI. The next frontier of AI is building agents that use statistical learning to tackle problem-specific challenges from data. Agents come with promises, but they need a statistical harness, as @probabl.ai's www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNpv...

Can AI Become a Real Data Scientist? | Gaël Varoquaux on scikit-learn, Probabl & Scientific Judgment

YouTube video by Maxime Gabella

youtube.com

Cette animation est saisissante. Elle montre, en seulement quelques secondes, l'accélération spectaculaire de la fréquence des vagues de chaleur au cours des 126 dernières années en France. 1/3

+1000% de mortalité chez les poules, +200% chez les porcs, +45% chez les bovins. Plusieurs millions d'animaux d'élevage sont morts sous l'effet de la canicule. 1/13

Konrad Kording argues that the best way to understand the brain may be to read its wiring directly rather than infer it from the outside. @kordinglab.bsky.social joins @juanbenet.bsky.social for Ep 5 of the Juan Benet Podcast. Full episode: youtu.be/FHQfmJEpRmU

The Power of a Single Neuron and a Path to Simulating the Brain | Dr. Konrad Kording

YouTube video by Juan Benet Podcast

youtu.be

“agents should not directly touch the text of the paper. Paper text should be written by a human.” This is my lab’s explicit policy as well. As always, @mcxfrank.bsky.social nails it.

Mike Frank@mcxfrank.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Some thoughts on how to collaborate on reproducible paper writing with AI agents, without them introducing hallucinated references or other issues into your paper. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/06/help...

🧑‍💻🧑‍🏫 I'm recruiting a post-doc to work on Tabular Foundation Models, one of the hotest topics in AI, where we are at the leading edge team.inria.fr/soda/files/2... This is an opportunity to develop the next-level tabular AI, blending deep learning and tables.

For those who are attending @ohbmofficial.bsky.social brainhack, I will be giving a short presentation of this work at the neuroimaging statistics workshop, co-hosted with brainhack: sites.google.com/view/nsw2026

NeuroStats2026

sites.google.com

Thomas Yeo@bttyeo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

In a meta-analysis of 210 biomedical AI studies that statistically compared models under cross-validation, 97% used invalid statistical tests. Here's our new preprint doi.org/10.64898/202... led by @tianchu.bsky.social @hetuli.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social @nichols.bsky.social 1/N

Job ad (1/2): Postdoc fellowship in the AFNI group (SSCC, NIMH, NIH, USA). FMRI/MRI methods dev, software design, statistics, analysis, data viz, quality control, machine learning and more! Please see: discuss.afni.nimh.nih.gov/t/job-ad-pos... I am happy to chat at OHBM+Brainhack. Please share!

La start-up française #MistralAI signe un partenariat stratégique avec le ministère des #Armées 👉"Garantir la #souveraineté et l’excellence technologique de la défense française" 👉La mise en œuvre du contrat sera supervisée par l’AMIAD www.bfmtv.com/tech/intelli...

"All intelligence is collective intelligence: each of us consists of a huge number of cells working together to generate a coherent cognitive being with goals, preferences, & memories that belong to the whole and not to its parts" @drmichaellevin.bsky.social paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37204591/

I think of it as this: LLMs lower the barrier of entry, and they make coders (beginners and experts) more productive. It's still worth investing in becoming an expert, because then you will get even more out of LLMs and will be able to deliver even better results.

Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:

Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.

Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.

open.substack.com

Lots of interesting LLM releases last week. My fav was actually Olmo 3 (I love the Olmo series due to their full open-sourceness and transparency). If you are interested in reading through the architecture details, I coded it from scratch here: github.com/rasbt/LLMs-f...

Interesting mystery. It is known that animals can learn to control neurons pretty much anywhere in the brain. But they can not learn to ignore hunger which probably means they can't turn of hunger sensing neurons. How is that avoided in the brain? They even have DA inputs.

New issue of Nature - with NINE studies on #brain #development from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) 🧠🧪🔬 An amazing set of resources for all scientists working on the brain! 🧠 Immersive feature: www.nature.com/immersive/d4... 🧠 Perspective: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I couldn't be more on board with this. Focusing on corruption/fraud/misconduct at the level of individual scientist appears to be misguided and counterproductive when systemic forces and selection biases are at play. This appears to be true even beyond the context of industry manipulation.

Joe Bak-Coleman@jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Science has faced these challenges before. However, many think manipulation happens through corruption of scientists. Instead, we highlighted a broader range of mechanisms: -Burying Internal research -Selectively publishing -Design bias -Selective funding and access.

🚀 We’re hiring! Are you curious about how young children's brains develop? 🧠 👉 buff.ly/09zJXX2 💻 Postdoc (Computer Science) - on brain atlases & developmental trajectories in young kids buff.ly/sDffS1b 📋 Project Coordinator - lead the implementation & monitoring buff.ly/tMQ2gZn

Dans un contexte où la #Reproductibilité est clé pour la crédibilité de la science, ces journées rassemblent des scientifiques pour tenter de reproduire des études publiées. 👏 Bravo à toutes et tous ! 👉 Lire l'article : www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...

Les « jeux de la réplication », ou quand la science s’amuse à se reproduire

Une vingtaine de chercheurs ont traqué, le 3 octobre, les failles de plusieurs articles de sciences sociales parus dans des revues de renom.

lemonde.fr

Lefort-Besnard and Pron et al. present a survey and review on current infrastructures for sharing human neuroimaging data in the EU: doi.org/10.52294/001... @cmaumet.bsky.social @ohbmossig.bsky.social #OpenDatasets #SpecialIssue

Vous êtes en dernière année d’école d’ingénieur ou de master spécialisé IA/embarqué/robotique et intéressé(e) par les problématiques autour de la distillation et de la quantization de modèles et des techniques d'optimisation de l'inférence ? Ce stage est pour vous. www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

🚀 Offre de stage – avec Daniel Trezentos, nous proposons un stage de fin d'études au sein de l'AMIAD - Agence Ministérielle pour l'IA de Défense sur la thématique de la compression et l&#3...

🚀 Offre de stage – avec Daniel Trezentos, nous proposons un stage de fin d'études au sein de l'AMIAD - Agence Ministérielle pour l'IA de Défense sur la thématique de la compression et l'optimisation d...

linkedin.com

L’électronique ou la robotique t’intéresse ? 🤖 ➡️ RDV le mardi soir 18h-20h chaque semaine à l’ #Edulab de #Rennes 📍 Viens aussi découvrir aujourd’hui pendant l’ #OpenLab 14-18h (même endroit)

A sensitivity analysis of preprocessing pipelines: toward a solution for multiverse analyses with @melanieganzben1.bsky.social et al. Basically, adapting meta-analysis tools accountting for the correlations between pipelines direct.mit.edu/imag/article...