Patrick S. Forscher

@psforscher.bsky.social

1.6K followers 280 following 410 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/

Videos

Psychology 39%

Political science 11%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

Hu Chuan-Peng @hcp4715.bsky.social · 2d

We @chineseopensci.bsky.social wrote a brief Chinese introduction for this initiative: mp.weixin.qq.com/s/j8oTyoGtJ8...

开放数据 | WARN-D机器学习比赛启动，寻找抑郁症预测最佳模型

WARN-D 项目开放抑郁症研究数据，诚邀各界团队参与机器学习比赛，寻找最具预测能力和临床价值的模型

mp.weixin.qq.com

Brian Coulter @philabcoulter.bsky.social · 3d

Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher, Wolfgang Huber

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 3d

Explainers & tutorials are a great way to criticize current practices with a positive twist. Tailoring them to a specific substantive (!) subfield can greatly increase uptake. Forget about novelty; if some statistican said sth in the 70s but no one was around to hear it, say it again.>

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 4d

In 2020, Facebook scientists worked to gauge the effect of deactivating one's account.

They found that people who stopped using FB for a week reported better mental health.

Rather than publishing/doing more research, Meta called off the research.

www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege

Rather than publishing the findings or pursuing additional research, Meta called off further work.

www.reuters.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 4d

Broadband internet access is really bad for adolescents' mental health.

Why?

"Broadband internet access [is] associated with increases in cyberbullying & body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls and a reduction in the likelihood that adolescent boys reported getting an adequate amount of sleep"

Reposted by Martin Lang, Magnus Johansson, Patrick S. Forscher , and 3 more Martin Lang, Magnus Johansson, Patrick S. Forscher, Anthony J. Evans, Larry W. Hunter, Jill A. Jacobson

Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 4d

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried

If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

eiko-fried.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 6d

I saw this chart in the wild a few days ago and it's been on my mind because the longer I look at it, the more confused I become by it. 📊

I'm fairly sure it's AI generated for a few reasons...

A #DataViz thread 🧵

Bar chart of percentage of population aged 25-64 that can't speak a foreign language. UK is at the top. The chart design is confusing to say the least.

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Patrick S. Forscher

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 20d

One of the most important books I've read this year, from
@adambecker.bsky.social.

It's a devastating read at times—you'll find yourself shouting at the book "how can they be that goddamn crazy???!!!"

But it's critical to realize that they are.

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 20d

12. @adambecker.bsky.social is a science journalist and author of MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, a book that chronicles the stew of nonsense that informs and motivates many of tech’s leaders.

Adam Becker Takes Aim at Silicon Valley Nonsense | TechPolicy.Press

In a new book, the science journalist Adam Becker skewers the more outlandish ideas and motivations in the tech industry.

www.techpolicy.press

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 23d

It is utterly catastrophic that RFK Jr. plans to end CDC recommendations for most childhood vaccines.

It’s a betrayal of science, ethics, compassion, and the people of the United States.

And it was also a specific goal of Project 2025 (page 254).

Screenshot from project 2025 that says By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children "should be" masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building.
Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people "should" do, it readily becomes a "must" backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the "should" and "must" policy calls to politically accountable parties.
Conflicts of Interest. There was a time when the CDC could not take money

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Brady T. West, Richard McElreath , and 3 more Dorothy Bishop, Brady T. West, Richard McElreath, Patrick S. Forscher, Andrew Livingstone, Jan R. Boehnke

rogier kievit @rogierk.bsky.social · 24d

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

Reposted by Lisa W. Fazio, Richard S.J. Tol, Dorothy Bishop , and 35 more Lisa W. Fazio, Richard S.J. Tol, Dorothy Bishop, Colin F. Camerer, Arthur Geßler, Gavin A. Schmidt, Joshua S. Weitz, Scott L. Greer, Steve Peers, Simon Chapman, Caroline Krafft, Philip N. Cohen, Rita Rubin, Lesley A. Hall, Efrén O. Pérez, David W. Kerstetter, Kevin Carey, Raffaella Ravinetto, Devon Greyson, Smith, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Janet Murray, Alan Richardson, Patrick S. Forscher, Ben Tonra, Julia Lynch, Caroline Fohlin, Sebastian Karcher, David C. Kimball, Lisa Diedrich, Catherine J. Frieman, Christina Ho, Larry W. Hunter, Richard M. Carpiano, Julie Rovner, Nicole Guenther Discenza, Dana Howard, Clark Gray

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 25d

Very happy to have received a replication grant from NWO! We will be reproducing power analyses of large scale replication projects, to learn how to improve power analyses, and increase quality control in large team Science projects! www.openscience.nl/en/news/27-s...

27 studies re-examined | Open Science NL

Open Science NL has awarded funding to 27 applicants to replicate earlier studies. They will reanalyse original data, repeat experiments, and replicate studies with slight variations to the original…

www.openscience.nl

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher, Daniel Kuehn

Sarah Karlin-Smith @sarahkarlin-smith.bsky.social · 25d

Seems interesting that CDC is awarding $1.6M to a university in Denmark to study Hep B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau given recent CDC vax changes and FDA's Hoeg's connections to Denmark. Does this study sound ethical?
public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-23245.p...

public-inspection.federalregister.gov

Reposted by Andreas Ortmann, Wim Van Lancker, Patrick S. Forscher , and 3 more Andreas Ortmann, Wim Van Lancker, Patrick S. Forscher, Veli‐Matti Karhulahti, Paul Nightingale, Michael Larkin

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25d

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 26d

I cannot readily imagine a relative advantage of sampling survey/experiment data from an LLM to sampling known models/distributions if we cannot meaningfully define a population LLMs sample or formalize the sampling scheme. Idk what we can learn abt a model/method without clarity abt what we put in.

Reposted by Robert Böhm, Brady T. West, Brendan Nyhan , and 43 more Robert Böhm, Brady T. West, Brendan Nyhan, Gordon Hodson, Carl T. Bergstrom, Richard Price, Steven Van de Walle, Mary Feeney, Jamie Morgan, Ian Hall, Fabián Muniesa, Jason Reifler, Kelly Smith, Ingo Rohlfing, Ian Hussey, James Grimmelmann, Smith, Rebecca Tushnet, David R. Miller, Patrick S. Forscher, Michelle L. Mazurek, Margot C. Finn, Michael D. McDonald, Sebastian Karcher, Martin Kreidl, Maria Abreu, Eric Hehman, Zen Faulkes, Joanna Tai, Madeleine Pownall, Damian Trilling, David Murakami Wood, Sofia Stathi, Johannes Breuer, Woodrow Hartzog, Greg Linden, Jack Stilgoe, Richard M. Carpiano, Aleksandra Urman, Juan Ramón, Gemma C. Sharp, Terry Gaasterland, Maksym Polyakov, Jake Anders, Jeannette Sutton, Béatrice Cointe

Sabrina Norwood @sabrinanorwood.bsky.social · 26d

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Text reads: About synthetic panels
Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels.

Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey.

Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads:
Discussion
The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002)
of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen, Fabián Muniesa, Silvia Secchi , and 3 more Philip N. Cohen, Fabián Muniesa, Silvia Secchi, Patrick S. Forscher, Sebastian Karcher, Shan Kothari

Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 28d

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

Context Widows

or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

artificialbureaucracy.substack.com

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

zooko2.bsky.social @zooko2.bsky.social · 28d

Wtf. I just carefully read this entire interview with Frances Allen, only to find out at the end that it wasn’t really an interview with her, but was AI generated. “Vox Meditantis” and “Bob Lynn” have lied to me and I will not read their words again.

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, David Chester, Andrew K Przybylski , and 5 more Dorothy Bishop, David Chester, Andrew K Przybylski, Magnus Johansson, Patrick S. Forscher, Ariadne Vromen, Johannes Breuer, Jesper Wulff

Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · Dec 12

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen, Fabián Muniesa, Peter Campbell , and 5 more Philip N. Cohen, Fabián Muniesa, Peter Campbell, Patrick S. Forscher, Timothy Graham, Juan Ramón, David Stott, Paul Langley

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Dec 11

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?"

Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

Can Your Face Predict Your Salary? Using AI Personality Assessments in Hiring

A new study from Wharton faculty explores how AI can extract personality traits from facial images — and what that means for your career.

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · Dec 10

🇨🇦🇨🇦 Just announced: a massive new program from the Canadian govt, separate from the well-known CRCs and CERCs, to recruit foreign scientific talent

Canada was already a destination for scientists but whoa. Real impressive for a new govt to back political talking points with serious investment

$1.7 billion to attract international researchers to Canada

Details of the major federal initiative to draw new talent to the country's universities were announced today at UdeM.

nouvelles.umontreal.ca

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 10

Ridiculous. How does ChatGPT have any knowledge at all?

Reposted by Norbert Schwarz, Patrick S. Forscher, Dominik Vogel

Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · Dec 10

Many psychologists are treating LLMs as if they are the mind of god.

This study had chatGPT rate how central academic disciplines are to various constructs.

Why would chatGPT know this?

Where is the evidence its ratings are reliable or valid?

compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

P.S: This paper is part of a much bigger special issue in Proc B on diversifying cultural evolution research. There's lots of interesting stuff there -- please check it out!

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

7/

Volume 380 Issue 1940 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B | The Royal Society

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

royalsocietypublishing.org

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

Thanks to Jaspreet Singh for leading the paper, and to our collaborators @fallonmody.bsky.social, Mario Schmidt, Stephanie Shari, Joel Wambua, David Wilkinson, and the rest of the @replicats.bsky.social team!

6/

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

I think there are many cool ways to follow up these findings:

- Benchmark the judgments against empirical replications & generalizations of the 80 papers

- Explore the possibility of the protocol we used to elicit quality judgments (IDEA) as an educational tool

5/

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

Regardless of which possibility is right, we believe that it is naive to assume a shared perception of research quality across cultures and geographies

4/

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

1. Our Kenyan assessors know something the Global North assessors do not

2. The Global North assessors are especially pessimistic due to the replication crisis

3. The comparison is simply invalid due to methodological issues or the fact that the research contexts are too different to compare

3/

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

To our surprise, this included dimensions of quality we expected them to be pessimistic about, such as generalizability.

We're not sure why this is, but consider 3 possibilities:

2/

Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · Dec 8

New in Proceedings B, led by Jaspreet Singh: "Comparing expert assessments of research quality between the Global North and East Africa"

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

We found that Kenyan assessors were more optimistic about the quality of 80 papers than were Global North assessors 1/

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