Ehud
@duhe.bsky.social
Do you really don’t know? (I’m a philosopher and historian of biology, interested in all things evolutionary, #genetic, or #cognitive. I find most things ridiculous.) http://www.ehudlamm.com
🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇
Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration
Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.
science.org
Seems like good life advice for people who are well adjusted. I wouldn’t know ofc
Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 5h agoOne of the great joys of my adult life has been realizing that I can just pick up a new skill every so often, take a fun little class in it weekly for a year or two, and simply enjoy meeting people and getting medium proficient and not attempting to become professional in it at all!
"Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition." www.wired.com/story/jeff-d...
4 of Google’s Top AI Brains Are Leaving—and Launching Their Own AI Startup
Jeff Dean and other high-profile Google executives have founded Discovery Loop, a startup that will seek AI-powered breakthroughs in everything from drug discovery to chip design.
wired.com
Holy shit, another child gene therapy trial death in China! www.statnews.com/2026/08/05/c... Excellent @statnews.com piece by @jasonmast.bsky.social. This is a Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy trial. The piece is especially good on the "IIT" pathway, wh/Qiu also used. Yes, deaths happen in trials, but—
Once again, child dies in gene-editing trial in China, rekindling debate on transparency and safety
With a second delayed report of a child's death in China, criticism is rising of a looser form of clinical trial. One expert: what "bothers me is the lack of transparency.'
statnews.com
“A bureaucratic restructuring that leads to the selective elimination of faculty members really puts academic freedom in jeopardy… particularly for professors who have displeased admin, trustees or donors.” — Mark Criley, Senior Officer in the AAUP Dept of Academic Freedom, Tenure & Governance.
He Had Tenure. The New School Laid Him Off Anyway.
The professor, a longtime critic of the university, was among 19 educators who lost their positions as the institution navigated financial woes.
nytimes.com
Virginia health officials have confirmed the state’s first known case of locally acquired dengue fever
Virginia resident has state’s 1st locally acquired case of dengue fever - WTOP News
Virginia health officials have confirmed the state’s first known case of locally acquired dengue, a viral disease usually associated with international travel.
wtop.com
Yes, my unpopular opinion (read intuition) is that aipac has never had more impact.
Jonathan Ladd@jonathanmladd.com · 9h agoGiven how close the primary was, it seems likely she could have won if she had held the exact same policy positions but refused campaign money from AIPAC. Hard to imagine other Dem politicians not noticing and learning the lesson.
The signatories to this letter start with Stiglitz and Rodrik and go on to encompass pretty much everyone brilliant and decent in the economics field worldwide. Prof. Reddy’s scholarship is deeply grounded in human dignity and wellbeing — in the direct lineage of his teacher, the great Amartya Sen.
Open Letter Concerning Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Future of the New School
Open Letter Concerning Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Future of the New School We, the undersigned, write to express our concern regarding recent restructuring decisions at the New School, includin...
docs.google.com
Sarang Shah@sarangshah.com · 12h agoAn urgent and important read on the unjust circumstances regarding the dismissal of my dear colleague and friend Sanjay Reddy. I hope our takeaway, in part, is a redoubling of our efforts to protect social inquiry and academic freedom against what's coming. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/n...
I wonder if anyone's done meta-stylometry to recover interactions based on an non-vanilla LLMs output(?) I mean to say: repeated use of current language models can shift their output to suit the user; So, take the output of a modified model and work backwards to infer prior interactions
You are not a scholar if you’ve never turned such handles.
alix e. harrow@alixeharrow.bsky.social · yesterdayi don't like to police genre, but it's not dark academia unless somebody gets squished in one of these bad boys
if nothing else another big night for the "polling in the no-one-picks-up-their-phone-anymore Era is cooked" take
G Elliott Morris@gelliottmorris.com · 21h agoLooks like a 10-15 point polling miss in Michigan regardless of who wins. And people have been writing a lot of electability takes using this data. It’s dangerous out there folks be safe
Reading Lysenkoists arguing about what Schmalhausen got wrong about evolution of individuality. Awesome stuff. I’m probably the only person in the world reading this rn. And yes, I get paid to do this!
Ehud@duhe.bsky.social · 6mo agoYesterday it was a neat paper in history of science. Today a punchy philosophy paper. Who wants my job?
If you would like to pay me to go experience weird niche events and write about them that is my dream job so please do!
Emily Herring@emilyherring.bsky.social · yesterdayI'm in Halberstadt where I have been sent by the lovely folk over at Orbital Studies to witness and write about the 17th chord change of John Cage's "As Slow as possible" which has been playing on an organ here since 2001 and is projected to keep playing until the 2600s.
The quantum theory of voting: votes are cast only when counted. Until then anything can happen!
a lot of people forget how good high speed wireless internet was in the mid-80s
Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 21h agoFood, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.
“‘Out of curiosity,’ says the patient, hoping to delay the injection, ‘what was the odds ratio for those without the genetic variant?’ The doctor pauses, puts down the needle, and turns back to the study. ‘The odds ratio for those without the genetic variant was also 4.’”
Noah Greifer@noahgreifer.bsky.social · 20h agoKnowing that I said something profound enough to be in your blog post is an honor :) My own irreverent take on odds ratios: ngreifer.github.io/blog/an-odds...
With nearly 1,500 deaths in ten weeks, the DRC is experiencing its fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record. While neighboring Uganda nears the end of its outbreak, local DRC responders continue battling misinformation, severe funding cuts, and ongoing conflict. Elodie Toto reports for #Mongabay.
Ebola responders persevere in the DRC as Uganda nears end of outbreak
Several members of the Ebola response gathered on July 15, 2026, outside the Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) in Bunia, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to protest their working conditions.…
mongabay.cc
Pro tip: regardless of the field you want to major in or do graduate work in, favor universities with good humanities and arts. I can give you the long explanation, but you can think of them as hard to fake signals of many things that are important in unis that are hard to evaluate from the outside.
As a fan of natural experiments, I’m glad that we will soon have empirical evidence that eliminating the humanities destroys universities. As a colleague I urge us all to fight against these reckless closures.
⏰ Deadline is fast approaching: September 1, 2026! Du Châtelet Prize in Philosophy of Physics. Topic Celebrating 300th anniversary of 3rd ed. Newton’s Principia. www.duchateletprize.org Winner will receive $1000, workshop & SHPS pub Open to grad students & w/in 5 yrs PhD #HPS ⚛️
"Wyoming will become the first state in the US where you cannot receive a B.A. in Philosophy. The University of Wyoming will be the only R1 institution, the only state flagship university, and one of two land-grant universities that do not offer a B.A. in Philosophy." dailynous.com/2026/07/23/u...
An #IceAge masterpiece: This small carving (4.7cm) of a water #bird was made from mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago. It's thought to be a #diver, #cormorant, or #duck. Found in the Hohle Fels cave on the Swabian Jura. It's the oldest known representation of a bird. 🧵1/2
There is no way that betting on wildfires should be legal. www.oregonlive.com/wildfires/20...
As Oregon burns and gamblers bet, lawmakers push back against wildfire betting markets drawing millions
Wyden and Merkley are urging federal regulators to crack down on prediction markets that allow users to wager on how long wildfires will burn and how much damage they will cause
oregonlive.com
Most published claims of sex-dependent effects in the neurosciences are missing statistical evidence that the effect differed by sex. We can do better. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @ossdcomm.bsky.social @sbn-bsky.bsky.social @emoryuniversity.bsky.social @pnas.org @colbyvorland.bsky.social
My worry is why we are warranted to generalize beyond trolleys to cars and other vehicles.
Asawin Suebsaeng@swin24.bsky.social · yesterdayOne reason I don’t like the trolley problem is because are we supposing people can’t get out of the way
DSA-aligned Democrats are now the most pro-free-trade voting bloc in the United States, in an incredible turn of events www.theargumentmag.com/p/who-suppor...
In my experience the students who have the hardest time adjusting to the reflexivity and historicity of #hps/#sts are MDs. Someone should do a study.
Folks, the only voice I want to hear in my echo chamber is my own. It‘s in the name, for crying out loud.
RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/115918117109281530 "Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings" is now out in #ActaBiotheoretica as part of a special issue on Bill's work and legacy. https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s10441-026-09534-7 It's so paywalled I can't even get the PDF as an […]
Original post on spore.social
spore.social
Yogi Jaeger@yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 7mo agoWe have a new preprint out! And one that is especially dear to my heart: "Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings" https://zenodo.org/records/18293424 Bill Wimsatt is possibly the most underrated philosopher of science of our times. In this paper, I attempt […] [Original post on spore.social]
