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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 17h

In last night's vivid dream, I was at SNL pitching a skit for Antony Starr: Homelander is interviewing Vought staff about their loyalty, and tells one of them to eat a basketball. I then demonstrate. First by deflating it. Then by nibbling at the seams. All the producers look horrified: "Yes!"

a man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched ..

Alt: A man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched, and flies over an adoring crowd

media.tenor.com

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 11d

Yep. Forward this to those who haven't yet made the move

www.psypost.org/scientists-s...

Scientists say X (formerly Twitter) has lost its professional edge — and Bluesky is taking its place

After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, many scientists report the platform is no longer suitable for professional use. A recent survey indicates that researchers are increasingly turning to Bluesky...

www.psypost.org

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Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 23d

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin.

It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist,
When and Where
Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm
Music Room (218)
Goldring Student Centre
150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 19d

And funding agencies

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 23d

On Friday, I asked a question at LinkedIn about what everyone is doing with their writing assignments to respond to the crisis of AI in education. By yesterday afternoon, it was a fully worked-out invitation to share anchored in my own experiences. What say you?
mindwise-groningen.nl/inviting-tho...

Inviting thoughts about AI in education | Mindwise

mindwise-groningen.nl

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · 26d

Germany's far-right "remigration" movement is probably giving a preview of future Republican rhetoric in the US. For those with an interest in such things, this report is worth watching. It's from the German public state-owned international broadcaster: Deutsche Welle (DW).

youtu.be/MOrTIB8JVe8?...

The dilemma that could test the AfD's rising popularity | DW News

YouTube video by DW News

youtu.be

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Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Sep 1

I am not ready for it to be September. I am, however, ready for it to be July. Who do I speak to about this inconsistency?

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Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · Aug 30

The Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University invites applications for a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of “Science, Technology, and Governance.” #HPS #STS #PhilJobs
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30301

Cornell University, Society for the Humanities

Job #AJO30301, WDR-00046364 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science and Technology Studies, AY 2026-2028, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, US

academicjobsonline.org

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Aug 26

Once, when I lived in Toronto, a pair of police officers knocked on my apartment door. I was so surprised to see them that I just blurted out the first thought that entered my head: I invited them in for tea. They decided I wasn't who they were looking for, thanked me for the offer, and left.

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Aug 20

The archive where I'm working for the next two weeks has the largest single collection I've ever heard of: 15 shelf-kms! That's almost 50,000 linear feet!! (It's the complete property records going back to the 1820s for the entire province of Noord-Holland, which includes Amsterdam.)

A light skinned man with white hair and beard, and glasses, studies intently without realising that he has accidentally taken his own picture while putting down his phone

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Aug 14

I'm part of an enclave of historians who work inside a Psychology Institute, which is part of the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. It's fantastic. We even have a grad programme. Please send me your weird, interesting, thinky students. (We have a lot of fun!)

www.rug.nl/masters/theo...

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 26

Now I don't feel so inadequate for being unable to manage meal prep, etc, as a person who lives and eats alone. "Cooking" every day is impossible. But I can put yogurt and fruit and nuts in a bowl for breakfast. And I can add protein to a boxed salad for dinner. With coffee throughout the day.

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Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · Jul 25

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 21

The meaning of "presidential" has been so debased from what Jed Bartett preached that this now sounds like folksy charm

Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com · Jul 21

Hunter Biden has a point. And a quite colorful one.

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 19

Yep: do it now or wait until 2029. Same if you think you're gonna want an abortion 🤔

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 13

Or maybe I should have said pseudo-c0gnitive....

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/21/o...

AI can’t really be your ‘companion.’ We need new words for things like that. - The Boston Globe

Help us brainstorm better terms that honestly reflect the ways people engage with AI.

www.bostonglobe.com

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 13

When I lived in the middle of nowhere, and the electricity would fail regularly and often (sometimes for many hours), I just went and got a back-up power supply. But how do you do the equivalent with these pseudo-cognitive tools that people are starting to rely on?

www.forbes.com/sites/callum...

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Reposted by Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓

Brepols @brepols.net · Jun 30

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝟭𝟬 (𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰)
𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀, 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀

More info: bit.ly/3Gcfe3b

#History #Psychology #Science #Medicine #Historysky #Psychologsky

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jul 6

The first ever "Three Societies Meeting" has ended. It was wonderful to bring together so many scholars and friends to discuss the history of psychology, the history of the behavioral and social sciences, and the history of the human sciences. Let's not wait another sixty years to do it again!

In what felt like record-setting heat, The representatives from the Three Societies (ESHHS, Cheiron, and SHP) open the proceedings at the American Church in Paris

Thoughts, reminiscences, and thank yous at the dinner

Dr Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, president of the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association), speaks about AI and education—and his research in digital history that spans the gap between them

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jun 26

Come to think of it, my ex's family talked like that. They were from the far suburbs, and they *hated* my hometown: dirty and disorganized, and full of diversity. But many of them hadn't been downtown in years. It was like talking to space aliens who'd seen a brochure from a competing tour company.

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jun 26

APA Style too. Not so good if there are multiple editions published in different places.

Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jun 26

Some of these comments are probably from real people. But some are probably from Bot Farms whose purpose is to cause chaos and make it harder to have grassroots democratic movements. (Can we subscribe to a Block List IRL?)

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Jeremy Trevelyan Burman 🎓 @burmanphd.bsky.social · Jun 24

Look, this is really getting serious: I need you all to stop publishing such interesting books. I simply can't afford to buy them all. And anyway, I've run out of shelf space. Both at home and at the office. So, please: stop being so clever! (Take a vacation without bringing your laptop!!)

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