🚨 Out now in TICS How can language models help cognitive science? @ruimata.bsky.social & I outline 5 uses: mapping research fields, formalizing theories, cleaning up constructs & measures, predicting behavior across tasks, and capturing environmental variation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Kudos to #ICLR2027 PCs for taking strong actions 👏 I like they keep it open to new people, mitigating a risk of "AI slop" Submission cap should be much lower, say 5 papers per author, unless their contribution is significant and they offer quality review workforce accordingly

Gautam Kamath@gautamkamath.com · 7d ago

ICLR 2027 has authorship quotas: - No more than 20 submissions per author - No more than 1 submission where no author has a paper previously accepted to a major ML conference From iclr.cc/Conferences/...

I wasn't able to attend #CogSci26 this year, but happy to share that a paper I presented there two years ago is now published in journal-length form 😊 The paper studies how people can rationally infer others' goals in open-ended spaces, and yet do so rapidly and spontaneously.

relistening to some of Frank Klepacki's music today and only now realizing just how much he was influenced by Rage Against The Machine

excited for the first #cogsci2026 poster session this afternoon! come by and chat with @ymacci.bsky.social @amirzur.bsky.social @clairebergey.bsky.social

"Do not panic or hallucinate like a fragile Large Language Model."

We have a new paper out! We asked a simple question about Long COVID “phenotypes": if you take the same patients and the same symptoms but run different clustering algorithms, do you get the same patient subgroups? Short answer: no. 🧵 #LongCovid 1/

There, I will be joining the Cooperative Systems and Intelligence Lab under @xuanalogue.bsky.social, where we will work on cool new projects at the intersection of cooperative intelligence/AI alignment and cultural evolution. Onwards to glory!

I am happy to announce that I have successfully defended my dissertation --- under the supervision of my mentor @psmaldino.bsky.social --- for the title of Doctor of Philosophy in Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced.

Looking forward to catching up with AI safety/alignment folks and giving a couple of talks at the Center for Human-Compatible AI workshop this week! Also back in Cambridge/Boston after the workshop until early July, if anyone wants to chat :)

Back in Cambridge for a research visit to MIT! Happy to meet and chat with folks who are in town :)

🧵🧵🧵 At this point, I think it's only reasonable to fully expect some sort of major and unpleasant AI-caused economic disruption and popular backlash in the next year or two. I'm just not sure which kind.

If you're a late-stage PhD student or post-doc in computer science, and want a free trip to Singapore / NUS, consider applying for this prize: comp.nus.edu.sg/research/nus... Probably helps if you're considering a faculty job at NUS or other universities in Singapore!

I spent the last 2 months trying to prevent this. If OpenAI offered a fig leaf, Google said "imagine we offered a fig leaf." Google affirms it can't veto usage, commits to modify safety filters at government request, & aspirational language with no legal restrictions. Shameful.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility! 🏳️‍⚧️ This is my first TDoV since moving back to Singapore, and the 12th since I began my transition. It's been a long and sometimes difficult journey, but somehow I've ended up as the first (to my knowledge) publicly out trans professor in the Singaporean academy (cont.)

@rikiwilchins.bsky.social 2026 Mar 18 Advocate MIT physics student ordered to vacate campus housing before graduation after his family cut him off financially for coming out as trans raises $85K on GoFundMe in days.

Facing eviction before graduation, MIT student cut off by family raises more than $85K in days

A transgender senior says he lost family support after coming out and was denied financial aid adjustments, endangering his ability to finish school.

advocate.com

Publishers say they’re blocking the Internet Archive because of AI scraping. But shutting out a nonprofit library won’t stop AI—it will damage the public’s best record of the web.

Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—th...

eff.org

frog on the floorrrr where'd he come from nobody knows where he'll goooo

Check out this recent @nature.com paper reporting a field experiment on X. It shows X's algorithm boosts conservative content and downranks traditional media—shifting users’ views on key issues. Switching to chronological doesn’t reverse the effect. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature

Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

nature.com

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

just had my first encounter with rice weevils that I recall being aware of, and I am simultaneously upset at the fact that: - there were bugs suddenly crawling out of my rice - I have probably already eaten them previously - apparently this is not especially uncommon with rice bought here 😖

this prompted me to reread my 1st year college essay on whether proper names w diff. referents are more like indexicals ("I", etc.) vs. homonyms, and I totally forgot I made all these crazy diagrams despite not having taken a philosophy class before truly doomed to be analytic-philosophy-brained 😅

Josh Habgood-Coote@impractknow.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Fucked up philosophy of language views: - names are like nouns but they don't take articles, so they're mass nouns. 'John' refers to Johnny stuff

Finally bought my first actual copy of "AI: A Modern Approach" (as a reference for the lab) and it's cool to see that assistance games have their own section now! cc: @dhadfieldmenell.bsky.social

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology

She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

nature.com

as I'm revising my course materials, I keep stumbling upon cool @mc-stan.org developments. Current favorites: 1. your model has funnels and you exhausted reparametrization ideas: metric = "dense_e" makes your HMC learn about covariance btw parameters. Sloooow, but effective! 1/

Incidentally I think one strong piece of evidence for the theory that (many) emotional expressions and their associated concepts are learned rather than innate is the ever-expanding set of Slack/Discord/etc emoji reactions.

I was curious whether people have developed "rational models" of emotional expression, and it looks like there's a very recent paper on the topic! By @yyangteoh.bsky.social and @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social.

Happy to finally see this paper (w/ @cendripetalfrce.bsky.social) out now @commspsychol.nature.com We built a computational framework to show people flexibly balance communicative benefits against social costs when deciding whether and how to express their emotions. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Value computations underpin flexible emotion expression - Communications Psychology

People do not always express the emotions they feel truthfully. Computational modelling reveals that people flexibly regulate their emotion expressions by balancing their value as a communicative sign...

nature.com

One of the earlier feminist lessons I had to learn in life was how to cut off friendships with sexual abusers (+ their friend groups). I unfortunately had to learn this in high school, but with all the Epstein stuff coming out, I'm reminded that most haven't learned this at all.