Patrick S. Forscher
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psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher
@psforscher.bsky.social
1.6K followers 280 following 400 posts

Director of the CREME developmental meta-research team at Busara, a non-profit that does behavioral science in service of poverty alleviation. https://patrickforscher.com/

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Psychology 39%
Political science 11%
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psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 6d
Really interesting and thought-provoking thread. Thanks for writing it

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

jbakcoleman.bsky.social
Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 6d
In any event, this is the point of the preprint below. The asymmetry here makes it all too easy to distract, delay and bias science without even needing to corrupt a single scientist.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to ...
arxiv.org

Reposted by Melanie C. Green, Patrick S. Forscher

scientificdiscovery.dev
Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 6d
I'm surprised I only came across it now, but this review on improving communication in data visualization is excellent.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works - Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Jessica Hullman, 2021
Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, an...
journals.sagepub.com

Reposted by Axel Bruns, Scott L. Greer, Philip N. Cohen , and 1 more

carlbergstrom.com
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 10d
“We analyzed 47000 conversations that people had with ChatGPT. We’re pretty sure we don’t have consent for a lot of them. So we are reproducing screenshots here.”

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
ChatGPT conversations are private by default, but users can create a link to share them with others. Public chats do not display a username or other information about the person who shared them. The Post downloaded 93,268 shared chats preserved in the Internet Archive, from June 2024 to August this year. The analysis focused on the 47,000 conversations that were primarily in English. It's possible many of the people who shared the conversations did not realize they would be publicly preserved online. In July, OpenAI removed an option to make shared conversations discoverable via Google search, saying people had accidentally made some chats public.

psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 12d
not that economics is great at this -- or social anthropology for that matter. but for a science that brands itself as uncovering the universals of human behavior, psych really does only care about *certain* humans

psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 12d
psychology is notably worse in its national diversity than economics; compare the national origin of first authored papers over time in psych (left) and economics (right)

(from the missing majority dashboard)

remi-theriault.com/dashboards/m...

psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 12d
This is absolutely right, and you can see the disingenuousness of the “it’s too hard!” objection by noting that there absolutely are disciplines adjacent to psychology that do take sampling diversity more seriously, such as development economics and social anthropology

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

syeducation.bsky.social
moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 12d
It still comes down to the matter of wanting to do it. We will do hard work when it aligns with our values and priorities, and then throw up our hands and say "too hard!" when it doesn't. This, from my "Slow Progress towards Diversification in Psychological Research" paper osf.io/preprints/ps...

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

syeducation.bsky.social
moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 12d
A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea:

"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"

Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Screenshot of the article, "Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"

Reposted by Jonathan A. Eisen, Mark A. Lemley, Steve Peers , and 25 more

paulgp.com
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 13d
For folks (and journalists) who want to search the Oversight Committee email texts, I made a database for searching the 20k text files:

splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
Epstein Document Search
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app

psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 13d
Generally in Busara’s projects we try to ensure that people understand the materials through pilots and initial qualitative work rather than attention checks for this reason

Reposted by Sebastian Karcher

psforscher.bsky.social
Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 13d
We have some unpublished data where we find that pretty much all the attention checks we tried filter out people with lower incomes

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

connect-btss.bsky.social
CONNECT partnership @connect-btss.bsky.social · 14d
We're so excited to announce that our first official CONNECT preprint is now available:

"A network of networks: The next frontier for Big Team Science"
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Please read, share, and give us feedback!
✉️ connect-contact[at]manybabies[dot]org
OSF
doi.org

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall, Patrick S. Forscher

rebeccasear.bsky.social
Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22d
Richard Lynn was criticised for using a sample of children with intellectual impairment to calculate the "national IQ" of Equatorial Guinea in 2002. In 2019, he calculated the IQs of Native Americans from children referred for psychoeducational evaluations, including those with learning difficulties
Extract from page 160 of the 2019 book Intelligence of Nations by Richard Lynn and David Becker, which describes the 2019 version of Lynn's "national IQ" database, which claims to provide national average IQs for nation states worldwide: This extract appears in the section describing the samples used to calculate the US "national IQ": "From a rural area in Southeast Alaska a low-SES sample of Tlingit, mostly with learning difficulties, was reported by Connelly (1983, Table 1). WISC-R FS-IQs for younger participants of 86.89 and older participants of 83.88 were averaged to an uncor. IQ of 85.39, to which 0.68 had to be added for FE-correction but 2.50 had to be subtracted for country correction, which resulted in a cor. IQ of 83.57."

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Dorothy Bishop, Brian J. Enquist , and 15 more

carnage4life.bsky.social
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 24d
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org

Reposted by Steve Peers, Jonathan Wolff, Ian Campbell , and 8 more

cbsnews.com
CBS News @cbsnews.com · 25d
A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said.
Cyclist falls down 130-foot ravine in France, survives 3 days by drinking wine he had in shopping bag
A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with a rescue doctor calling his survival "a miracle."
cbsn.ws

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

lakens.bsky.social
Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 25d
New paper finds that selective reporting remains the most replicable finding in science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... I especially like their new exploratory metric 'p-values per participant'. Some papers had 11 p-values per participant! 🤯
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

criminalerin.bsky.social
Erin Fogg says Free Link @criminalerin.bsky.social · 28d
"Introducing Doublespeed, an [Andreessen Horowitz backed] startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients.

Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm."
AI "Phone Farm" Startup Gets Funding from Marc Andreessen to Flood Social Media With Spam
Andreessen Horowitz has injected $1 million into Doublespeed, a startup meant to flood social media with gobs of for-profit spam.
futurism.com

Reposted by David Chester, Patrick S. Forscher, Matt N Williams , and 4 more

bsiepe.bsky.social
Björn Siepe @bsiepe.bsky.social · Oct 22
We built the openESM database:
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python

Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Reposted by Efrén O. Pérez, James Grimmelmann, Patrick S. Forscher

mthrjo.bsky.social
Jo Kershaw @mthrjo.bsky.social · Oct 20
I have found an EXCELLENT meme for the church history lecture on Wednesday (which includes the Great Schism)
Pope Francis looks repelled by a diagram of the Orthodox theological position that the Son and the Spirit both proceed from the Father alone. In a second image, Pope Francis points approvingly at a diagram of the Filioque, in which the Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son together.

Reposted by David Lazer, Carl T. Bergstrom, Patrick S. Forscher

jbakcoleman.bsky.social
Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · Oct 20
This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta.

Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵

www.reuters.com/business/ins...
Exclusive: Instagram shows more ‘eating disorder adjacent’ content to vulnerable teens, internal Meta research shows
Meta researchers found that teens who report that Instagram regularly made them feel bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters.
www.reuters.com

Reposted by Brian M. Lucey, Ingo Rohlfing, Patrick S. Forscher , and 1 more

weratedags.com
WeRateDAGs @weratedags.com · Oct 17
Hello Bluesky!

We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.

Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?

1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"
"the Afghanisdag", a massive tangle of arrows and noun phrases, possibly describing a counterinsurgency problem: lethal within 20ft in briefing environments.

Reposted by Glyn Elwyn, Hugo Mercier, Ian Hussey , and 1 more

rebeccasear.bsky.social
Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · Oct 17
Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org

Reposted by Elizabeth Stokoe, Patrick S. Forscher

matthewfacciani.bsky.social
Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · Oct 16
New research finds that Twitter’s efforts to remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation were largely ineffective and sometimes backfired. Skeptical communities grew more active and viral, and content quality declined over time. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Explaining Twitter’s inability to effectively moderate content during the COVID-19 pandemic - Scientific Reports
Social media platforms routinely face pressure to restrict harmful content while protecting free speech; however, prior theory suggests that platform design might undermine the efficacy of content mod...
link.springer.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher, Adrian Vickers

gregegansf.bsky.social
Greg Egan @gregegansf.bsky.social · Oct 16
“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
www.technologyreview.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

scalzi.com
John Scalzi @scalzi.com · Oct 10
Well, good for DC

search.app/PK45E
DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’
“People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic.”
search.app

Reposted by Jürgen Maier, Alexander Wuttke, Andrew K Przybylski , and 8 more

aufdroeseler.bsky.social
Lukas Röseler @aufdroeseler.bsky.social · Oct 10
ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions!

Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher, Veli‐Matti Karhulahti

dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · Oct 7
I really strongly feel that some fields of research would profit if researchers stopped collecting online data for some time and instead maybe just read a bit outside of their field.
The ‘harm hypothesis’ strikes me as being deeply rooted in contemporary WEIRD values rather than being the result of a specific ‘evolved’ or ‘innate’ instinct or psychological mechanism. And indeed the literature cited to support it seems to suggest this. Costello & Acerbi cite 5 papers in the paragraph above to support the model: Stewart-Williams et al., 2024: the sample here consists of Prolific users mostly in the UK. FeldmanHall et al., 2016: the samples were MTurk users in the US and volunteers in the UK. Curry et al., 2004: the sample is convicted offenders in Texas in 1991. Graso et al., 2023: US MTurk users again. Graso & Reynolds, 2024: this is a review paper which does make some cross-cultural claims, but when you check the references you can see some important limitations. For example, they write that “Across cultures, women were perceived as less powerful than men but were seen more positively,” and when you check the reference it goes to Glick et al., 2004, which samples from 16 nations. However, when you read that paper they note in the methods that, “Most samples consisted primarily of college students participating for extra credit.”

Reposted by Ian Hussey, Patrick S. Forscher

cchapman.bsky.social
Chris Chapman @cchapman.bsky.social · Oct 1
Excellent 🧵 about LLM synthetic data (silicon samples etc) and why they don't solve any particular problem in human research.

FWIW, in addition to results and considerations like these, I've argued elsewhere that the entire question is ill-formed: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

vincentab.bsky.social
Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · Sep 29
{tinytable} 0.14.0 for #RStats makes it super easy to draw tables in html, tex, docx, typ, md & png.

There are only a few functions to learn, but don't be fooled! Small 📦s can still be powerful.

Check out the new gallery page for fun case studies.

vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/vi...
a table about lemurs a table about students and schools a table about wines