Psychological Science is running a special issue on "Advancing Psychological Science using Large Language Models", co-edited by me and @ruben.the100.ci. Check out the calls for submissions below! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

🚨JOIN the Civic Discourse Mediator Competition🚨 In 1st week of August, create & test a prompt-based AI mediator that helps people have more thoughtful, productive conversations about important public issues. Win $400! Get started here: forms.gle/HkbhEk4hELQE...

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

Special Issue Call for Submissions to Psych Science: “Advancing Psychological Science using Large Language Models” www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Finally, AI finds its ultimate use case. A diffusion model trained on burger recipes "discovers the classic Big Mac without explicit supervision and generates novel burgers optimized for deliciousness, sustainability, or nutrition." ASI= automated slider intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Generative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers - npj Science of Food

npj Science of Food - Generative artificial intelligence creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers

nature.com

Bumble bees can apparently play with balls, count, recognize faces, & perceive rhythm. A new study out today in @science.org argues they can also solve novel tasks spontaneously without explicit training, challenging the idea that such cognitive skills are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates.😲🐝🧪👇

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees

Problem-solving using novel solutions without explicit training is often considered a hallmark of cognitive flexibility. We investigated whether bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) could solve a novel obj...

science.org

🚨 A few months ago, a paper published in Science reported that “LLM adoption is associated with a large increase in researchers’ scientific output.” In a comment released today, we show that the reported effects are driven by a methodological issue in the empirical design. arxiv.org/abs/2605.17979

In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell pureed a bunch of worms and fed them to other worms. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories...

Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine

In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.

quantamagazine.org

Our new pub is out! We argue that any future scholarship on the politics of inequality should center the people. We call this the PUBLIC framework (Pluralistic methods, UnBiased perspectives, Local dynamics, Intersectional understanding, & Critical of power). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Don't miss out on new replications with the Zotero Replication Checker! This is the current set of >1.6K studies in the FORRT Library of Replication Attempts (#FLoRA). Many of them belong to large-scale projects and are not even cited in the final report, so how to keep track of them?

OK folks this reads to me like a stacked pile of nothing put in a box labeled 'wow, so interesting!' and if there is something anyone thinks I am missing (I'm talking to you, bluesky-doesn't-get-AI guys) I would like to know what it is. Here's how I read it: 1/n www.anthropic.com/research/emo...

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

Interpretability research from Anthropic on emotion concepts

anthropic.com

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

The SCORE investigation of repeatability and credibility is a lot. There are a few ways to get your head around it. 1: The Nature collection includes 3 papers from SCORE, an amazing paper from @i4replication.bsky.social and several commentaries about the work. www.nature.com/collections/... 1/

Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences

Sweeping new investigations probe the replication, robustness and reproducibility of results across the behavioural and social sciences.

nature.com

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

SCORE | Center for Open Science

SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

cos.io

1/🧵 A major update to our paper: "Scaling Reproducibility" w/ Leo Yang [Cross-posted from X] We move beyond reanalyzing a single design to (almost) full-paper replication! Paper: bit.ly/repro-ai

I describe it as such as a historian of disability because I want to remind scientists and the world that the history of science IS the history of eugenics, scientific racism and medical racism, and more. I’m not comforting them with the idea that it was a ‘pseudoscience.’ This is your history.

mataliandy@mataliandy.com · 5mo ago

It's not "race science" it's "unfounded racist scientific-sounding claims promoted by racists." I hate that eugenics is being described as a "science," even by journalists who are against it. WTF?

Three years ago I was wondering whether LLM could act in “social groups” of any sort, and how such networks would resemble real ones. A brilliant student, Nicola Zomer, came to me to ask for a thesis on exactly this question. Today, that work is published in NPJ AI! Paper: rdcu.be/e9gRH 1/🧵🧪

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How horrible to be a CS grad student under pressure to submit multiple first author papers to every conference deadline, whether they feel ready or not. This serves no one’s best interests in long run (science included). But lots of students appear to being getting advice it’s necessary to compete

Within the topic of AI alignment, there are a million tinier, but consequential, alignment choices. This paper looks at the willingness of AI to engage in scientific misconduct (p-hacking). The most recent AIs resist instructions to p-hack and do good analysis, but the guardrails can be breached.

New preprint: “A dynamical perspective on biological reproduction” hal.science/hal-05491732 The prevailing view is that an organism reproduces by building a new organism from its genomic representation, like von Neumann’s self-reproducing machine. But... 1/11

📖 ≠ 🧪 The Story is Not the Science. Code is submitted but rarely executed during peer review—an issue likely to worsen with research agents. 🧑‍🔬 We introduce 𝐌𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐀𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭, an execution-grounded evaluation of narrative + execution. 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐟𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲. 1/n

I have plenty of reservations about the reliability of funnel-plots and z-curves and such, as well as their interpretation..... But holy shit look at that.

Daniel Ansari 🇨🇦@numcog.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New: "Effect of Artificial Intelligence on Learning: A Meta-Meta-Analysis" by Wagenmakers and colleagues revealing evidence for "severe publication bias and extreme between-study heterogeneity" in existing meta-analyses of the effects of AI on learning: osf.io/preprints/ps...

From death comes diversity! 🦠🧪🌐🌏 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From death comes diversity - Nature Ecology & Evolution

A high-throughput laboratory experiment tracking the assembly of soil-derived communities shows that species-rich bacterial necromass supports increasingly diverse communities, with each additional de...

nature.com

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature

AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

nature.com

If you tell an AI to convince someone of a true vs. false claim, does truth win? In our *new* working paper, we find... ‘LLMs can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies’ But telling the AI not to lie might help. Details in thread

An attempt to express how I principally use LLMs. Rotating the Space: On LLMs as a Medium for Thought sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Sam Barrett, PhD@ai4geo.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Curious if anyone else uses or has examples of using fiction as a thinking tool with llms as I do here. This is not an isolated example for me.

How complex should network models be? 🚨 In our latest paper we quantify (if and) when higher-order interactions are informative versus reducible to pairwise structure without losing functional signal (e.g., diffusion behavior). 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

What if animals emerged by installing a new biological operating system that repurposed what already existed, much like the rise of the smartphone? Here's our new paper in @embojournal.org @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social @melisupf.bsky.social @sfiscience.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1...