Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Emory Richardson

@emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social

1.6K followers 3.3K following 150 posts

cognitive scientist & intellectual. intuitive theories, collaboration, cumulative culture, networks, philosophy of science/mind/bio, language. Also kettlebells. past: @UMich @Yale @UChicago @stjohnscollege. https://rchrdsnemory.github.io/site/

rchrdsnemory.github.io

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 4

New blog post inspired by my 5yo's most recent library book: asking an LLM for help is kind of like asking Amelia Bedelia for help!

AKA, why the range of tasks where using AI is worth your time is probably a lot narrower than you think.

rchrdsnemory.github.io/site/blog/20...

1 3 11

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Ned Block @neddo.bsky.social · 2d

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

authors.elsevier.com

6 34 75

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 11d

New paper. TLDR: Social power influence a person’s ability to establish the question under discussion in a conversation. Combining work in formal pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, and social epistemology can help us identify the mechanisms by which this happens. philpapers.org/rec/MALIIX

Fintan Mallory, Inquisitive Injustice - PhilPapers

The ability to control the direction of a conversation, which topics are raised, which questions are asked, and which lines of inquiry are followed, is a basic and powerful form of ...

philpapers.org

2 15 61

Reposted by Emory Richardson

David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 11d

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime: Shifting scales and missing benchmarks in the study of moral judgment

Moral judgment is central to both everyday life and cognitive science, but how can it be studied with quantitative precision? By far the most direct a…

www.sciencedirect.com

3 11

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Alireza Modirshanechi @modirshanechi.bsky.social · 12d

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

37 93

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 22d

Can large language models stand in for human participants?
Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research.

One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want.

THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

12 150 330

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · 22d

I’ve been doing the same thing and I’ve started thinking that the 1g/lb of body weight thing is really way more about satiety than the amount needed to build muscle, plus the interaction with the additional fiber you have to eat to move that much protein thru your gut.

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 22d

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order!

𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData

The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit

The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity.

tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

9 84 270

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social · 28d

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but this being the biggest story in the world at present really speaks to how much Twitter still serves as a universal assignments editor for English-language journalists.

110 1.3K 6.3K

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 29d

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

ggplot2 4.0.0

A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.

www.tidyverse.org

9 280 850

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · Sep 8

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

870 7.9K 31K

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Sep 8

Nippard’s shoulders do seem like strong evidence that you should take his advice about shoulders though.

On the other hand, I seriously doubt he can swing 90 lbs around his head:

youtu.be/4j4erLzF7Po?...

Can We Swing a 90LB Steel Club? | Unboxing Great Lakes Girya Club With The Flowing Dutchman

YouTube video by Mark Wildman

youtu.be

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Sep 7

some jackasses in Florida decided to expose their kids to polio?

I'd like to be told that's not how insurance works, but I've heard of this exact thing happening with home insurance costs.

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Sep 7

Correct me if I'm wrong but if insurance companies are going to be facing increased risk in some areas of the country as a result of absolutely moronic choices by the local majorities wouldnt they also be...pricing that risk into the premiums we pay in the rest of the country?

so, I'll pay more bc

Jon Cooper @joncooper-us.bsky.social · Sep 7

My neighbor in Orlando mentioned this EXACT concern to me last night!

1 2

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · Sep 3

What are your pros/cons of using AI in science?

Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.

24 15 45

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Sep 3

Last night? What kind of alternate universe for review turnaround times are you living in, and how do I get there!?

2 2

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Ben Lyons @benlyons.bsky.social · Sep 2

great title link.springer.com/article/10.1...

A Tutorial for Deception Detection Analysis or: How I Learned to Stop Aggregating Veracity Judgments and Embraced Signal Detection Theory Mixed Models - Journal of Nonverbal Behavior

Historically, deception detection research has relied on factorial analyses of response accuracy to make inferences. However, this practice overlooks important sources of variability resulting in pote...

link.springer.com

1 3

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · Sep 2

Despite all the silly AGI hype, the miracle of what AI *can* do remains underappreciated.

I had to move my blog from a Movable Type site (Typepad RIP) to a Wordpress site. After support from one hosting company failed to help me, I found a different site and GPT5 guided me through every single step

1 5 31

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · Aug 23

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate.

Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

29 470 1.5K

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 29

humans are a spectacularly cooperative species in general.

The idea that people are responding to the combination of inequality & a long term effort by a major political party to get its voters to blame "the other" seems much more likely than 40% of society *truly* being zero-sum bigots.

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 29

This is not to deny that whatever the hell is going on with the Mussolini wannabes running the GOP has some weird vengeance fetish involved.

But fascism thrives on inequality, say the polisci researchers - in part bc it makes ppl look for someone to blame. Zero-sum thinking may play a role, but

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 29

like the ultimatum game, there's a pot of money to split.

One person gets to decide how to split it. The other player has no say - but they can reject the "offer", in which case neither gets any money.

The threshold seems to be ~30% - so the $10/20 split here would be rejected!

1 1

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 29

I think it's a mistake to frame this as all about zero-sum thinking.

People accept big losses to punish unfair behavior, and rampant inequality makes it easy to convince them that *someone* is cheating. The "who" can be alliance-based, and subject to propaganda.

In resource-sharing exps...🧵

David Roberts @volts.wtf · Aug 28

I think it is difficult for lefties -- ok, has been difficult for me -- to really, truly absorb, on an affective level, that people like this are not mistaken about the facts. They're not confused. There's no "false consciousness" waiting for liberation. Their zero-sum values are deep & sincere.

1 1

Reposted by Emory Richardson

Shenhav Lab @shenhavlab.bsky.social · Aug 27

After scrolling Twitter, it will take you a while to get back into “work mode”. Why is this the case? Our new work (out now in Psych Review), led by Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, explores the costs of adjusting cognitive control to meet different goals:
psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

🧵 A thread:

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

1 17 42

Emory Richardson @emoryrchrdsn.bsky.social · Aug 26

What is this from?

Reposted by Emory Richardson

The Review of Economic Studies (REStud) @reveconstudies.bsky.social · Aug 22

"Political brokers use social networks to identify & target reciprocal non-copartisans for vote buying. Parties recruit brokers central in networks to sway persuadable voters."

From @rduartegonzalez.bsky.social, Finan, @hlarreguy.bsky.social and Schechter:

www.restud.com/brokering-vo...

#Econsky

6 13