Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Liz Renner

Alexander Douglas @axdouglas.bsky.social · 9h

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are a picture of sober restraint compared to the research funding councils on this thing.

Alexander Douglas @axdouglas.bsky.social · 9h

“How silly are these investors in the AI bubble! Financial euphoria! Tulips! South Sea! Charles Kindelberger! John Kenneth Galbraith!” — proclaims a chorus of intellectuals who, until a week ago, were hyping this gimmick to the stratosphere.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Guardian view on an AI bubble: capitalism still hasn’t evolved to protect itself | Editorial

Editorial: Warnings about inflated tech stocks suggest investors never learn and central bankers learn too late

www.theguardian.com

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 1d

The EHBEA2026 conference website is now live 👇 Deadline for abstract submission: 15 December

EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 1d

🚨𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀!
www.ehbea2026.com is now live for our 2026 European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA) conference in Leiden (NL🇳🇱) Check for 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻, first 𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 & the [𝗔𝗜]𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸!
🗓️ 14–17 Apr 2026 | CBEN pre-conf 14 Apr
📍Pesthuis
#EHBEA2026

Overview | EHBEA2026

www.ehbea2026.com

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 2d

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

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Prof Christina Pagel @chrischirp.bsky.social · 2d

🧵🚨

The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

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UK’s arm’s length public bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation

Seven in ten Britons say it is important for top scientific institutions to be independent in exclusive new polling.

www.ucl.ac.uk

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2d

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 2d

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM.

Hope this helps

Dane 🔜 NYCC AA L-34 @monkeyminion.com · 2d

I wrote a 15 page report on heraldic symbolism in medieval armor and weapon design for my art history class the night before it was due (8am class). Made up 90% of it (only found one book for reference) and got an A. GenAI could fucking never.

wrote 20 pages on Faulkner's The Bear four hours before final papers were due on trucker pills and coffee and cigarettes and got an A, fuck you.
You people couldn't hang with real slackers.
finn
wokeupchic • 4d
It's fuck Al till your homework due in 25 minutes

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Robbie Moore @robbiemoore.bsky.social · 2d

Rank the macerated remains of our university system from 1 to 10

Headline in the Guardian: University of Melbourne rated best in Australia in global rankings report
Times Higher Eduction ranks university as 37th in the world, with five other Australian schools in top 100

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Mirya R. Holman @mirya.bsky.social · 2d

Here are my published articles in each year and the number of times each was rejected before publication

A scatterplot of the number of rejections (y axis) by year (x axis)

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violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 2d

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla.bsky.social · 6d

And he’s back!!

Sunday isn’t Sunday without Stewart Lee. We were so thrilled at @thenerve.news that Stewart came with us.

His satirical columns for the Observer were some of our most-read content: funny, surreal, angry true. Essential weekend reading.

www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le...

DOUBLETHINK DOES DOUBLETIME

STEWART LEE

www.thenerve.news

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 3d

I'm not an economist but seems worrying that the whole US economy is seven companies in a trenchcoat, passing the same $20 up and down

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 3d

NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 3d

I think that people who experienced the Internet Before have to act as monks preserving the illuminated manuscripts until something better eventually emerges

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 3d

How should university boards prepare?

- Strategize in advance (could happen here)
- Leverage internal expertise (strategize with political scientists, public policy scholars and law faculty)
- Respond collectively and support one another
-Stay true to the mission

This is the real fiduciary duty!

Jackie Gardina @jackiegardina.bsky.social · 3d

@joshpasek.com, @umich.edu, provides boards of trustees a roadmap for responding to external pressue, like the so-called Educational Compact.

@aaup.org @utaustinaaup.bsky.social @aaup-penn.bsky.social

riverside.fm/shared/expor...

One thing boards can d... | Oct 7, 2025 001 - Riverside - HD Podcast & Video Software

riverside.fm

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your #3 source for absurdist true crime 🔨 @davidgerard.co.uk · 4d

AI SLURS

*ahem*

Clanker
Slopper
Token tanker
Thought stopper

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Patrick Cosmos @veryimportant.lawyer · Sep 8

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

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Liz Renner @lrrenner.bsky.social · 5d

Ah, that time of year again, when the leaves are changing, the nights are drawing in, and the only thing I'm interested in is how many hours until I can have another Lemsip.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 7d

As a theoretical cosmologist, I'm frequently asked "what is the benefit of the work you're doing for people's lives?" Nothing I work on makes money or cures disease.

There are a few different answers one can give, at various levels of "convincing" / "actually relevant to why the work is done."

1/🧵

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Liz Renner @lrrenner.bsky.social · 7d

this is the question I want the answer to the most. How much longer will I be cursed to mark AI-generated essays? (please let it not be forever)

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 7d

Yesterday the Royal Society held a series of panels & keynotes in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test. The unanimous critical takes on AGI, big tech's power concentration & the call for urgent action left me w hope things might be turning

Watch here m.youtube.com/live/GmnBTCK...

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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 10d

One of the loudest bells tolling for social science right now is that the decade of abundant data on humans is coming to a close. Whether you work on digital trace or surveys, LLM pollution is a serious problem, even while the wide roll out of LLMs creates an urgent need for social science.

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 10d

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds

Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

www.science.org

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Liz Renner @lrrenner.bsky.social · 9d

Oh no. I think I hate everything

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Hillary Rodham Clinton @hillaryclinton.bsky.social · 9d

For over 60 years, Jane Goodall was a force for research about our precious planet—and climate change action to protect it—while breaking glass ceilings along the way.

I'll so miss her courage and commitment to help expand what we know about our world and preserve it for the generations to come.

Jane Goodall holding a sign that says “Vote for Nature!” in a group shot

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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 12d

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

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poorly drawn cats @poorlycatdraw.bsky.social · 12d

something very spooky is coming this week 🎃

a preview of a new plushie! i can’t tell you what it is… it’s a surprise

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Dave Vanness @djvanness.bsky.social · 11d

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · 12d

30% drop year over year!

Amid visa restrictions, international freshmen enrollment plummets at UW-Madison

This year’s number of international freshmen is the lowest recorded since at least 2015.

www.jsonline.com

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