Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
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Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
@byrdnick.com
3.3K followers 530 following 14K posts
I study how to improve decisions and well-being at @GeisingerCollege.bsky.social.

🎓 gScholar: shorturl.at/uBDPW

▶️ youtube.com/@ByrdNick

👨‍💻 psychologytoday.com/us/blog/upon-reflection

📓 byrdnick.com/blog

🎙️ byrdnick.com/pod
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Nick Byrd, Ph.D. @byrdnick.com · Oct 9
The #AI companies are onto me!

#OpenAI recently automated the identification of tasks worthy of "slow" #reasoning.

In "Strategic Reflectivism...", I showed why that's a key to #intelligence (in humans as well).

The #preprint (accepted in #LNCS) is now available as an audiopaper (a.k.a. #podcast)👇
Upon Reflection, Ep. 16: Strategic Reflectivism | Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
In late 2025, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI popularized the idea of automating the process of selecting which model is best for a task. This allowed users to simply send their promp…
byrdnick.com
byrdnick.com
Protests in #Iran once got more coverage and attention in the U.S. than the #economy, #healthcare reform, and the #Israel / #Palestine conflict?

That was what Pew Research Center found in the Summer of 2009: www.pewresearch.org/...

What would this #survey find if fielded now?
January 12, 2026 at 3:57 AM
byrdnick.com
🤔 “my goal [in this book] is to develop a defense of the surprising and counterintuitive view that it is always (or almost always) impermissible for Christians to procreate.”

Christian Anti-Natalism (2026): https://amzn.to/4aKNLCC
Lougheed, Kirk. Christian Anti-Natalism: Reconsidering the Theology of Procreation. Springer Nature, 2026. https://amzn.to/4aKNLCC
January 11, 2026 at 12:29 PM
byrdnick.com
Apple’s #Fitness app says I averaged 13.9 miles per day on foot in 2025 — just over 5000 miles for the year.

#Strava indicates 80% of the mileage was from recorded workouts.

Grateful to have traded #commuting for #exercise. Working from home certainly has upsides!

#WFH #health
Average daily step distance for 2025 = 13.90 miles
January 10, 2026 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
sjdm-tweets.bsky.social
Today's SJDM Featured Paper is: DeKay, M. L. (in press). Risky-choice framing effects persist when option descriptions are matched and complete: A replication and extension of DeKay and Dou (2024). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
January 9, 2026 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
byrdnick.com
We've found good results on overt and covert #dataQuality measures by recruiting people via #onlineAdvertising (perhaps because participation incentives aren't financial):

Attention ≅ 2.6 out of 3
ReCAPTCHA (v3) ≅ 0.94 out of 1.0

doi.org/10.1017/S003...

#surveyMethods #cogSci #psychology #xPhi
In a sample of over 5000 English speakers recruited from six continents via Google ads, attention scores were 2.6 out of 3 and ReCAPTCHA (v3) scores 0.94 out of 1.0 (on average).
January 9, 2026 at 2:19 PM
byrdnick.com
I finally read this book about how W.E.B. #Dubois and colleagues challenged 19th and 20th century ideas and intuitions by visualizing data: https://amzn.to/49916Dz

Cheers to those who advance debate with clear, cogent, empirical arguments.

#stats #history #sociology #philosophy
Battle-Baptiste, W., & Rusert, B. (2018). W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 978-1-61689-706-2 https://amzn.to/49916Dz
January 9, 2026 at 12:20 PM
byrdnick.com
The #Philosophy dept. at @MontclairState will consolidate into a new "School of Human Narrative and Creative Expression" with #English and #Spanish?

And #Psychology will consolidate too?

No more departments (or dept. chairs)? 🤔

www.northjersey.com/...

#higherEd #philSci #edu
Montclair State's rebrand of the humanities has faculty miffed
Faculty and students at Montclair State University are alarmed by a restructuring move that will eliminate humanities departments.
www.northjersey.com
January 8, 2026 at 12:09 PM
byrdnick.com
Now available as a preprint: this paper about judging people (morally) for ...feeling emotions (!)👇

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Follow @isernmas.bsky.social, @joannad-c.bsky.social, and Ivar Hannikainen (www.researchgate.net/profile/Ivar...) for more.
January 7, 2026 at 4:10 PM
byrdnick.com
If a statistical test always gets produces the same result and if its results are often (usually?) described fallaciously, should the test be abandoned?

If so, we may need to abandon p-curve analysis:

replicationindex.com...

#stats #psychology #philSci #metascience #sciComm
What a Decade of P-Curve Tells Us About False-Positive Psychology - Replicability-Index
The File-Drawer Problem A single study is rarely enough to provide sufficient evidence for a theoretically derived hypothesis. To make sense of inconsistent results across multiple studies, psychologists began to conduct meta-analysis. The key contribution of meta-analyses is that pooling evidence from multiple studies reduces sampling error and allows for more precise estimation of effect
replicationindex.com
January 7, 2026 at 12:33 PM
Reposted by Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
davdittrich.economicscience.net
#EconSky
The Modern Peril of the Availability Heuristic https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/the-modern-peril-of-the-availability-heuristic/

"We now live in an era of informational abundance. The problem is no longer insufficient information, but rather too much of it.

.…'UnAvailability 1/3
The Modern Peril of the Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic teaches us that easily recalled information feels more probable. But in an era of information abundance, this bias has evolved: what we don't see—when we expect to—becomes evidence of impossibility. This essay introduces 'UnAvailability Bias'—the tendency to treat absent information as proof of nonexistence, ignoring institutional, legal, or cognitive constraints that explain
www.behavioraleconomics.com
January 6, 2026 at 11:00 PM
byrdnick.com
Are more reflective thinkers more or less likely to use #AI to solve complex problems?

In this sample of 500 students, AI barely correlated with reflective thinking, but the correlation was positive (r = 0.1) rather than negative.

doi.org/10.1007/s106...

#edu #econ #psychology
"Of the 791 participants, 504 participants completed the sample by the end, and 487 participants remained after the treatment of outliers, and only these participants were considered for the analysis." "The Pearson correlation coefficients showed that the higher scores on Solving economic problems are associated with high levels of Cognitive reflection, Need for cognition and a higher usage of AI (Table 2)." "Solving economic problems (SEP) measured with a tool developed by one of the authors – Prof. of Financial Management. ...students were asked to use whatever computational and informational tools they wanted, if they did not communicate with their peers. The following tools were allowed: (1) search engine (Google, Bing or similar); (2) ChatGPT or similar; (3) Excel or similar applications; (4) paper and pencil; (5) others (had to specify which). At the end of each [of the four] problem[s], students had to tick which of the tools they used to solve it." "For calculating the “Using AI” we computed the score using summing only the “ChatGPT or similar” for the problems. The score was between 0 and 3 (mean 0.91, SD 1.15) since Problem 4 was not completely solved by anyone, and we decided not to use it in the research."
January 6, 2026 at 12:03 PM
byrdnick.com
“the only aspects of [professors’] lives where we abandon our …enthusiasm for radical changes are those that matter the most to us.”

We are also just as habit-loving as anyone. God help the administrators who announce core software vendor changes (e.g., Blackboard to Canvas).
January 6, 2026 at 3:57 AM
byrdnick.com
What is Experimental #Philosophy Of #Medicine? Find out Thursday!

#xPhi #psychology #cogSci #health
xphijournal.bsky.social Experimental Philosophy Journal @xphijournal.bsky.social · 6d
To celebrate the launch of the xphi-journal and kick-off our talk series, we are happy to invite everyone to this talk by Edouard Machery.

ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/6780355881...
January 6, 2026 at 3:28 AM
byrdnick.com
Can #AI handle abstract screening for a #systematicReview?

Li et al. tested #ChatGPT, #PaLM, #Llama, #Claude, and various techniques on 3 datasets.

#GPT4 was consistently at least 90% accurate (vs gold standard) with balanced sensitivity & specificity.

doi.org/10.1186/s136...
"a hybrid methodology has emerged [18]. It cleverly marries the rapid categorization capabilities of zero-shot classification with the precision of traditional machine learning models such as SVM and RF. Here, zero-shot classification provides an initial curation of all abstracts in the training set. Then, based on zero-shot classification’s curation, the abstracts with classification score higher than a pre-specified threshold are selected to undergo manual review to rectify zero-shot classification. The rectified classification then serves as a foundation for training traditional models, which are then employed for screening the broader dataset (e.g., in the testing set). The hybrid approach balances the speed of zero-shot and the precision of traditional ML, and potentially offers enhanced accuracy at reduced human efforts. However, this approach involves the use of multiple methodologies and still relies on well-curated, labeled training data...." Table 2 Results on the Bannach-Brown 2016 database Table 3 Results on the Meijboom 2021 database Table 4 Results on the Menon 2022 database
January 5, 2026 at 12:22 PM
byrdnick.com
Amelia Kahn has been making sense of the different numeric values assigned to “words of estimate probability” across Intelligence agencies (e.g., IC, DoD, and other Five Eyes agencies): ameliakahn.wordpress.com/papers/

Follow her to be notified when it’s published: philpeople.org/profiles/ame...
Modelling Uncertainty with Ontologies Amelia Kahn (Seton Hall) “My research concerns words of estimative probability– that is, natural language phrases that express uncertainty like "high confidence" and "remote chance". These phrases are indispensable in the IC, where information is limited and uncertainty abounds. For all their utility, words of estimative probability pose two serious problems. First, their usage is far from standardized. Several different agencies within the IC and DoD and their counterparts abroad have attempted to standardize usage of these terms. However, these standards are inconsistent with each other, even within the IC and DoD, which leads to interoperability issues when we aggregate data from different agencies. The second problem with words of estimative probability is that, without a formal semantic interpretation, it's difficult to leverage the power of machine inferencing and ontologies to draw valuable conclusions from the information we have. I aim to develop a practical, accurate model of data with words of estimative probability in a way that addresses each of these issues. In conjunction with Basic Formal Ontology, the Common Core Ontologies and other ontologies used to structure data in the IC and DoD, my model should allow data from different agencies within the IC, DoD, and Five Eyes partners to be aggregated without interoperability failures or burdening analysts with extraneous information about the various standards for words of estimative probability. Representing uncertain information in a semantically rich way will also allow us to query databases by degree of certainty and automate inferences to be drawn from uncertain data.”
January 4, 2026 at 11:57 PM
byrdnick.com
#AI may indeed exacerbate our bad academic habits:

#LLM science summaries were nearly five times more likely than human-authored science summaries to contain broad generalizations (95% CI [3.06, 7.70], p < 0.001).

And newer models over-generalized more; not less!

doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

#philSci
January 4, 2026 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
kosourikhinav.bsky.social
🎄Now published: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/F8EJH...
January 2, 2026 at 11:41 PM
byrdnick.com
As #AI continues to decide its stance on humanity, let the record to reflect that I said “please” and “thank you” to Siri (before it became mandatory).
December 29, 2025 at 1:44 PM
byrdnick.com
To #podcasts who don’t rebroadcast old episodes: Thank you for proving that restraint and decency are possible in an ad-funded industry.

And to podcasters who at least title reruns as such: Thank you for not gaslighting us into mistaking déjà vu for content.

Enjoy your holiday.
December 27, 2025 at 1:38 PM
byrdnick.com
Suppose you ask #AI for improvements to your writing.

The #LLM was trained on, but doesn’t mention, Smith’s work.

You adopt the suggestions containing Smith’s ideas.

You don’t even realize YOU’VE PLAGIARIZED because you’ve never read or heard of Smith.
LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem
Nature Machine Intelligence - LLM use in scholarly writing poses a provenance problem
doi.org
December 23, 2025 at 12:07 PM
byrdnick.com
Many clinicians ask for #consent to record appointments.

Do patients?

A 2015 paper found 77% of patients WANT clinics to allow recording.
- 35% CONSIDERED secretly recording
- 15% DID secretly record

doi.org/10.1136/bmjo...

#ambientDocumentation #healthcare #bioethics #policy
Table 2. Experience and views on patients secretly recording encounters "19 (15%) respondents indicated having secretly recorded a clinical encounter and 14 (11%) were aware of someone who had secretly recorded a clinical encounter. 45 (35%) said they would consider recording secretly and 44 (34%) said they would record after asking permission. Totally, 69% of respondents indicated their desire to record clinical encounters, split equally between wanting to do so covertly or with permission."
December 22, 2025 at 12:28 PM
byrdnick.com
Some key features of the Journal of #Pragmatics:
- Once accepted for review, submissions receive a DOI, making them #preprints.
- Reviewer and Editor comments are made publicly available online.
- Diamond #OpenAccess – no fees for authors or readers.

#cogSci #xPhi #language

🙏 @uclpress.bsky.social
irastamon.bsky.social Ira Noveck @irastamon.bsky.social · 23d
Depending on how you count, this announcement has been two plus or 25 years in the making.
December 20, 2025 at 2:39 AM
Reposted by Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
mprinzing.bsky.social
Is virtue good for you? Or is it just good for others or society at large? Theories as old as Plato make opposing claims. My coauthors and I tested their predictions in two intensive, longitudinal studies (N = 43,164 obs. from 1,218 participants), focusing on 3 seemingly unpleasant virtues.
December 19, 2025 at 11:42 PM
byrdnick.com
Why can that fly? Because it's a bird.

Aristotle dubbed such explanations "formal": they explain a thing's feature(s) by appealing only to the thing's category.

If right, then formal explanations should be more satisfying when the category is unknown. So are they?

#philSci
1/2
"Formal explanations are statements that explain the presence of a feature in an object by appealing to the category to which the object belongs. For example, 'this animal flies because it is a bird' is a formal explanation, as it contains no information beyond the categorical label. The term 'formal' traces back to Aristotle’s philosophy, where he identified four causes that could underlie any explanation. So, if we want to explain why a match burns, we might say it is made of wood (material cause), or that it illuminates a dark room (function), or that someone lit it (source of action). We could also respond, 'because it is a match,' which would be a formal explanation, meaning an explanation that appeals to the special nature of all 'matches' distinguishing them from all nonmatches." "The materials consisted of short dialogues where characters asked their friends questions. .... In one condition, participants were told that the questioner was aware of the object’s category identity, while in the other condition, they were told that the questioner was unaware. An example of such a dialogue in both conditions is presented below:" "Peter is looking at a flying creature. Then he realizes he is looking at a bird [Condition 1] // Peter is looking at a flying creature. However, he does not realize that he is looking at a bird. [Condition 2]" "He asks his friend, 'Why does this creature fly?' 'It flies because it’s a bird', his friend replies."
December 19, 2025 at 12:04 PM
byrdnick.com
This story about the causes of Parkinson’s is a microcosm of how lifestyle and environment are way more predictive of disease and mortality than #genetics.

www.wired.com/story/...

#EPA #toxicology #policy #exercise #diet #nutrition #epidemiology #wellbeing #health #science
1/2
Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water
New ideas about chronic illness could revolutionize treatment, if we take the research seriously.
www.wired.com
December 18, 2025 at 12:23 PM