So heuristics make no promises. They may succeed on some inputs, they may fail on many inputs. There are no guarantees, they may fail massively, terribly, and often. Using heuristics is more like faith or hope than computer science or engineering. So what about approximation algorithms? 17/🧵

Bayesian Intractability Is Not an Ailment That Approximation Can Cure

Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

📢 Out now in PLOS Comp Biol: **cpm** — a Python library for theory-driven modelling in computational psychiatry. No scikit-learn for mechanistic cognitive models — so we built one: RL, prospect-theory & metacognition, hierarchical Bayes, and as many more as you can code 🔗 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

cpm: A python library for theory-driven modelling in computational psychiatry

Author summary Computational psychiatry is a field that makes extensive use of computational methods to understand mental health. In this field and related disciplines, there is a strong need to desig...

doi.org

We @saschafrolich.bsky.social @stefankiebel.bsky.social investigated how habitual- and goal-directed control interact when actions must be made under time pressure. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Context-dependent interaction between goal-directed and habitual control under time pressure - Communications Psychology

This study investigates the dynamic interplay between habitual and goal-directed control. Using RL and drift-diffusion modelling, we show that these systems interact in a context-dependent manner: hab...

nature.com

Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication. For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too

If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

nature.com

"The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) means many things to many people (see Table 1) (...). One meaning of ‘AI’ that seems often forgotten these days is one that played a crucial role in the birth of cognitive science as an interdiscipline in the 1970s and ’80s." 2/n

on the perils of survey work (there will be trolls!)

Robert Ross@robert-m-ross.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

greatest steam update of all time, because of one unnecessary detail

…reproducibility problems are widespread. Only one in three authors (35%) share code, and even when code is available, only every second main result (51%) is numerically reproducible.

I'm really glad more and more people are noticing correlationism, part of the conspiratorial logic of AI... Guest, O. & Martin, A. E. (2025). A Metatheory of Classical and Modern Connectionism. Psychological Review. doi.org/10.1037/rev0... PDF: repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/ha...

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 10mo ago

"Just because a model correlates with neural and behavioral data, it is not sufficient for us to infer that the model is performing cognition: correlation does not imply cognition." On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. doi.org/10.1007/s421... 3/n

Hitting the nail on its head with respect to always having to think about "the next step" as a postdoc, even after just having started a new job. We know it is part of the deal, and it is very hard to change this system, but it is important to keep discussing this. advalvas.vu.nl/en/science-e...

The disposable worker bees of science

Postdocs carry out a substantial share of academic work, but the conditions under which they do so are stressful. As a result, more than forty percent suffer from mental health problems, research show...

advalvas.vu.nl

New study in Lancet eClinical Medicine (N=20,358) found that mental healthcare utilization initially increases (consistent with assessment requirements under guidelines), then drops substantially, following gender-affirming medical care. #transgender #mentalhealth #medicine

🎉 psp just hit 14K+ downloads! Our #rstats package for parameter space partitioning powered our work on g-distance, model comparison, irrationality, and heterogeneity: doi.org/10.1037/rev0... CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=psp

psp: Parameter Space Partitioning MCMC for Global Model Evaluation

Implements an n-dimensional parameter space partitioning algorithm for evaluating the global behaviour of formal computational models as described by Pitt, Kim, Navarro and Myung (2006) &lt;<a href="h...

cran.r-project.org

I wrote about this last month. Overshooting on reducing migration is going to be very costly. samf.substack.com/p/the-oversh...

The Overshoot

What happens to politics, and the country, as net migration collapses?

samf.substack.com

Jonathan Portes@jdportes.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The immigration doom loop in full swing. Chasing the xenophobes is a doomed strategy both economically *and* politically. (1/3) archive.ph/pyVLg

Preprint alert 🚨! Excited to share our new work on metacognition in value-based decision-making. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/.... We ask whether it is possible to derive a computational measure of metacognitive ability for economic preference choices.

Computational characterization of metacognitive ability in subjective decision-making

Metacognition is the process of reflecting on and controlling one's own thoughts and behaviors. Metacognitive ability is often measured through modeling the relationship between confidence reports and...

biorxiv.org

A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing. Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br... Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...

Brain Injury During Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation for Substance Use Disorder

sciencedirect.com

Reading the discussion below the quoted post I am astonished at how fucking privileged and ignorant some researchers are when it comes to very obvious issues like biases.

anybody as immature and brain rotted as me 🌝

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 11mo ago

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Come and say hi to @seowxft.bsky.social @floorburghoorn.bsky.social @lenarddome.bsky.social & @kenzakdr.bsky.social who will be demonstrating our brain explorer app and research at the @medresfdn.bsky.social stand at New Scientist Live event in London @uclqsion.bsky.social @unituebingen.bsky.social

Medical Research Foundation@medresfdn.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New Scientist Live 2025 is taking place next weekend! ✨ 📍 18-19 October | Excel London We're thrilled to be returning to the exhibition once again! Visit us at stand C20, where you can meet our wonderful staff volunteers and world-class researchers. ➡️ See what we've got planned: shorturl.at/dEVmn

📢 NEW PREPRINT 📢 We show a metacognitive paradox (not blanket deficit!) in OCD: confidence is persistently lower, but fluctuations track evidence more tightly and are nearer Bayes-optimal. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7... 🧵👇

A new preprint 📝 with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @kenzakdr.bsky.social @benjwagner.bsky.social and Andrew Webb accompanying our cpm-toolbox.net python modelling library - including details about our motivations, toolbox features, framework and workflows! 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Some really cool stuff here! Really glad to have been involved in the making 📝🥳 day-to-day fluctuations of confidence (across multiple domains) relate to OCD symptom reports

Leya@aleyamarzuki.bsky.social · 11mo ago

🚨New pre-print out! 🍂 Using daily gamified smartphone 📱 tracking, we found that reductions in both self- and decision-making confidence precede when people are likely to report experiencing symptoms of OCD. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.

Our research on video game loot boxes was cited in a recent Forbes article about Labubus. The article was a systematic review exploring the links between loot boxes, problem gambling and problem video gaming. In other words, purchases with chance-based outcomes. 1/2 www.forbes.com/sites/traver...

2 Reasons Behind The Sudden ‘Labubu’ Craze, According To A Psychologist

Some are baffled by how quickly Labubu’s have taken the world by storm. But, psychologically, trends like these are anything but surprising.

forbes.com

New models (three variants of Prospect Theory), new features (more ways to manage parameters, more model components to use), and of course bug fixes. If you want to make your computational modelling reproducible and robust, check out and install the new version of *cpm*: github.com/DevComPsy/cp...

Release v0.23.18 - New Prospect Models, improved parameter management, and a few bug fixes · DevComPsy/cpm

Install You can install the new release straight from the PyPi repository: pip install cpm-toolbox Added Add input validation and error handling in all cpm.optimisation.minimise methods Add test u...

github.com

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge

This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

irisvanrooijcogsci.com

Ever have a symptom & assume the worst? That’s the Inverse Base Rate Effect—we over-focus on rare outcomes. A new #psynomPBR study by Dome @lenarddome.bsky.social & Wills finds distraction & time pressure can reduce this bias. Post by Alyssa Asmar. buff.ly/FTDQE25

Don’t think too much … it might make you irrational

Every so often, I get random chest pain and immediately spiral – is this it? Am I having a heart attack? Then I remind myself that I’m 25, probably overcaffeinated, and maybe just a little stressed…

buff.ly

I wonder how much tax money goes into research programmes likely this? In Europe for example? A shame indeed

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · last yr.

this is what happens when infinite resources are poured into a technology based on 'promises' and 'potentials' rather than verifiable evidence (standard that applies everywhere except AI)

So excited to share that the NeNa registrations are open now! Can’t wait to see everyone in Heidelberg this October. 🎓🍂

NeNa Conference@nena-conference.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨 NeNa 2025 registrations are OPEN! Don’t miss your spot — sign up now: nenaconference.github.io - Thank you for our sponsors: @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social‬, @hih-tuebingen.bsky.social‬, @mpicybernetics.bsky.social‬, and Centre for Integrative Neuroscience #NeNa2025 #Heidelberg

5. The right-wing enthusiasm for AI science is not about doing better science faster. It’s about eliminating one of the most effective forms of societal resistance to authoritarian control.

“Even the term 'Artificial Intelligence' … is widely misused, with conceptual unclarity coopted to advance industry agendas and undermine scholarly discussions. It is our task to demystify and to challenge 'AI' in our teaching, research & engagement with society.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...