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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 2d

Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that "humans evolved heightened sensitivity to harm directed at women." This excellent (albeit at times gruesome) post makes the point that the ethnographic evidence does not really support this narrative.

Did humans evolve to 'protect' women?

Ethnography complicates a convenient narrative

traditionsofconflict.substack.com

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Jonathan Horowitz @jonathanhorowi1.bsky.social · 3d

RCTs work for medical research (if your sample composition is good enough, big "if") because by randomizing the individuals you are randomizing many contexts. But in behavioral and social science research the context is much broader than "your body" so its generalizability is always in question.

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Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 5d

All the arguments about fair labor and intellectual property seem to distract from the core message, which is in the last sentence:

"Psychology is meant to study humans, not statistical models."

Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 5d

For me this is a hard red line in psychological science. If you advocate the use of "silicon samples" you do not understand what it is we're supposed to be doing (and likely don't understand LLMs, or are a grifter). Luckily I haven't seen much of this among people I'd consider my peer group.

Except from Table 1 of Guest & van Rooij, 2025:

3) Displacement of Participants

“I can use AI instead of participants to perform tasks and generate data.”

The providence of the data used in these models indicates it is not ethically sourced, falling below standards for our discipline, involving sweatshop labour and no consent for private data used in experiments. The output can contain direct original input data (i.e. double dipping), but smoothed to remove outliers, conform to our pre-existing ideas of what it should look like (data fabrication), and all-round irreplicable. Psychology is meant to study humans, not patterns at the output of biased statistical models.

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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 5d

I didn't realize that JAX is taking over in the probabilistic programming space. Very fair (afaict) post from Bob Carpenter, one of the core Stan developers, on how that looks from the Stan side.

It’s a JAX, JAX, JAX, JAX World | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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John Oxley @joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 5d

GDPR is a great example of the sort of regulation which (I) creates a bunch of effort for people who want to comply (ii) gets innocently over-zealously deployed (III) becomes deployed as an excuse for orgs not to do things they don't want to and (iv)is fairly easily disregarded by those who want to.

Nicola @scrapegroat.bsky.social · 5d

Also actually I am sick of how much you hear about GDPR when absolutely every fucker signs you up to their email list by default no matter how careful you are not to opt in.

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Rich Lucas @richlucas.bsky.social · 6d

We already know that lagged effects in CLPMs are likely to be upwardly biased, but just how easy is it to find significant effects? Way too easy. I tested CLPMS in 100 randomly selected pairs of correlated variables and found significant effects in 98 of them. New preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

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Michael Haslam @twigtechnology.bsky.social · 7d

Jane Goodall was also the first to bring attention to wild tool-using vultures, which she spotted randomly one day while out driving. These birds use stones to break into ostrich eggs.

Be observant like Jane and who knows what you’ll see! 🧪🥚

A two page spread of national geographic magazine with a story by Jane Goodall and her husband reporting on egg-breaking, tool-using Egyptian vultures.

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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 7d

Breaking News: Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, died at 91. Her discoveries in the 1960s about how chimpanzees behaved in the wild broke new ground and represented what was called “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” nyti.ms/42kpGxt

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Gilad Feldman @giladfeldman.bsky.social · 9d

Our PCIRR Stage 2 Registered Report now officially accepted by Royal Society Open Science:

"Revisiting mental accounting classic paradigms: Replication Registered Report of the problems reviewed in Thaler (1999)"

Mengfei Li's remarkable UG RRR thesis.

Details 👇🧵

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Marlene Berke @marleneberke.bsky.social · 9d

Psychophysics meets moral psych! In the best possible way!

I worry what this means for clinical research and patient reported outcomes, which often measure things like pain on a very simple 1-10 scale, often without clear anchoring.

Such important work by
@vladchituc.bsky.social!

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Florian Cova @floriancova.bsky.social · 9d

Les cours à l'université ont repris. J'ai mis en ligne les deux premières séances de mon cours d'introduction à la philosophie et son histoire sur le thème du "sens de la vie". La première séance est ici :
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoe...
mediaserver.unige.ch/play/280098

#1 - Aristote et le Souverain Bien (Le Sens de la Vie)

YouTube video by Empeiria

www.youtube.com

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Vlad Chituc @vladchituc.bsky.social · 10d

Thrilled to announce a new paper out this weekend in
@cognitionjournal.bsky.social.

Moral psychologists almost always use self-report scales to study moral judgment. But there's a problem: the meaning of these scales is inherently relative.

A 2 min demo (and a short thread):

1/7

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 11d

Unfortunately, many historical science anecdotes are probably false.

• Edward Jenner didn't deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine; and he wasn't the first to try using cowpox
• Pasteur didn't discover a chicken cholera vaccine accidentally

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 11d

TIL the anecdote that Pasteur accidentally discovered an effective chicken cholera vaccine was probably made up, and the soured broth actually resulted from lots of work by his assistant Emile Roux.

According to standard accounts, which can be traced to
Pasteur's collaborator Emile Duclaux, an attenuated strain of the chicken
cholera microbe—in a word, a "vaccine" against the disease—emerged only
because Pasteur's collaborators forgot or neglected his instructions to recultivate the microbe at short intervals during a summer vacation that he spent,
as usual, at the familial home in Arbois As the cultures sat on the shelf
unattended, they underwent attenuation and proved to induce immunity
against chicken cholera when injected into experimental animals
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By this account, a lack of diligence during a summer vacation was thus a
major factor in the discovery of the first laboratory-produced vaccine, the
only other vaccine at the time being the naturally occurring cowpox virus
that Jenner had deployed against smallpox Unfortunately for advocates of
serendipity, Antonio Cadeddu has recently destroyed this appealing legend
by analyzing Pasteur's notebooks from the time Cadeddu shows that the
chicken cholera vaccine did not emerge "by accident" at all, but rather was
the product of a prolonged, complex, and quite deliberate program of research undertaken by Emile Roux without Pasteur's knowledge
43
Perhaps
that is why Duclaux's version of the story does not appear in Pasteur's quasiautobiography of 1883, which elsewhere reveals his willingness to indulge
such popular stories of the path to his discoveries
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Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 11d

We asked people in 17 advanced economies what gives them meaning in life.

Americans were much more likely to mention religion as a source of meaning.
www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/...

The topic of faith, religion and spirituality is also one where some societies notably differ. Outside of the U.S., religion is never one of the top 10 sources of meaning cited – and no more than 5% of any non-American public mention it. In the U.S., however, 15% mention religion or God as a source of meaning, making it the fifth most mentioned topic. For some, the emphasis on religion is about their personal relationship with Jesus: “I follow Jesus so my faith and hope is based on how he plays a role in my life. I don’t rely on any human to benefit my life.” Others note the benefits that come from being part of organized religion, such as camaraderie in a tough time: “My husband just died, so life is not very fulfilling right now. The support of family and friends, church, and his coworkers have helped me find meaning, as well as thinking about the good things we shared.” Evangelical Protestants in the U.S. are much more likely than mainline Protestants to mention faith as a source of meaning – 34% vs. 13%, respectively. Across all U.S. religious groups, those who attend religious services more often are much more likely to cite their religion in their answer than those who are less frequent attendees.

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FX Coudert @nanoporous.net · 13d

Incroyable tableau en arrivant dans ma salle de cours ce matin @normalesup.bsky.social 🤩

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Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 13d

Simonsohn has now posted a blog response to our recent paper about the poor statistical properties of the P curve. @clintin.bsky.social and I are finishing up a less-technical paper that will serve as a response. But I wanted to address a meta-issue *around* this that may clarify some things. 1/x

Data Colada @datacolada.bsky.social · 14d

Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it?
datacolada.org/129

PIano being dropped on car in car testing facility

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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 13d

Great comments! LLMs are also decrease hierarchies based on resources in some ways -- previously having an army of RAs code speeches would cost thousands of euros, now a savvy master student could do it for the cost of a lunch.

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Emil Hvitfeldt @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social · 14d

I'm exited to announce a new resource about making slides with quarto and revealjs. This book is the combination of all the work I have done in this area, reordered and polished up

There isn't a lot of new information yet, but this format allows me to add more easily

slidecrafting-book.com
#quarto

Screenshot of first page of slidecrafting-book.com website

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Jean-Baptiste André @jbaptistandre.bsky.social · 15d

Ever wanted to read about an old problem almost nobody cares about anymore?

Well, I wrote about it.

🧵

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 15d

So a spurious correlation from an observational study is “gold standard science”, but testing vaccines in multiple RCTs with over 30,000 participants each is not?

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Kirstan Brodie @kirstanbrodie.bsky.social · 16d

Can reasoned arguments shift moral behavior? In a new preprint, @eschwitz.bsky.social, Jason Nemirow, @fierycushman.bsky.social and I explore this question in the context of charitable donation. (1/10)

Title: Philosophical Arguments Can Boost Charitable Giving
Authors: Kirstan Brodie, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman

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Ed Hagen @edhagen.net · 16d

TIL that the "Krebs" of Krebs and Davies was the son of "Krebs" of the Krebs cycle:

Arvid Ågren @arvidagren.bsky.social · 16d

John Krebs on growing up with a famous father (and not naming his daughters Hans).

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Benoît de Courson @bdecourson.bsky.social · 16d

Close Netflix and open this: probably the best modeling paper I've ever read

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Joan Silk @jbsilk.bsky.social · 16d

Some very good advice for thriving in graduate school dorsaamir.medium.com/modest-advic...

Modest Advice for New Graduate Students

Throughout the course of my years in graduate school, I kept a running list of the best advice given to me, and the strategies that helped…

dorsaamir.medium.com

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Andrei Cimpian @andreicimpian.bsky.social · 16d

💖This paper has been ~11 years in the making - and probably my favorite project of all time. Thrilled to see it in @pnas.org! I'm so lucky that Zach decided to do a second PhD and join my lab @psychillinois.bsky.social back in 2014 - a fabulous scientist & human being! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

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