Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Clare Kelly

Gregor Semieniuk @gregorsemieniuk.bsky.social · 11h

🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

River or sankey diagram showing the allocation of profits from global oil and gas companies to quantiles of the US wealth size distribution via financial system intermediaries, such as asset managers, and categories of ultimate beneficiaries, such as business owners, pension funds and shareholders in listed companies. The scale is hundreds of billions of US dollars, and ultimately 50.4% of profits reaching the US personal wealth distribution go to the richest 1% of households.

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Saoirse McHugh @saoirsemc.bsky.social · 9h

😭 help . I planted a beefsteak tomato thinking it was going to grow bits of cattle flesh but it was just tomato. I'm so confused, the EU parliament needs to help me. I've been tricked and mislead

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 7h

Believing the lie is a test of commitment, the wilder the lie, the more intense the commitment. As I keep saying, all this stuff is obviously paving the way for violence. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” etc.

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 7h

I have always assumed it was some sort of anti-scihub thing. I avoid APA as much as I can as a result! So obnoxious.

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 7h

I write full time largely because of one thread about getting high with the Irish president. As cringe as it is to admit, my entire life has been massively enhanced by Twitter and ketamine over precisely the same time that those two things have proven less beneficial for Elon Musk.

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 23h

Has anything great happened in your life because of social media?

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 1d

ideally, the only places i want to be in AI are spaces for resistance, refusal and community organising

in reality, i find myself in spaces where AI governance, regulatory or institutional/scientific decisions are made where either i my input is paid lip service or entirely ignored

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 3d

Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

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Reposted by Clare Kelly

Orla Hegarty @orla-hegarty.bsky.social · 11d

New homes VAT cut proposed by Housing Minister & Taoiseach

So what’s immediate impact of VAT cut from 13.5% to say 9% on development land values using Dept Housing’s own costs?

Suburban housing sites up 14%
Suburban apartment sites up 34%
Urban apartment sites up 23% assets.gov.ie/static/docum...

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Reposted by Clare Kelly

Ali Sheridan @alisheridan.bsky.social · 3d

“Although global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022 … only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends.“

@doughnuteconomics.bsky.social

Kate Raworth @kateraworth.bsky.social · 6d

Big Doughnutty News.
Just out in Nature: the all-new 2025 Doughnut. Transformed from a single-year snapshot to an annual global monitor of 21st century social & ecological thriving. Available to all in an open-access paper by @andrewlfanning.bsky.social and me. 🧵 1/
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 23d

AI is the wrong tool to tackle complex societal & systemic problems. AI4SG is more about PR victories, boosting AI adoption (regardless of merit/usefulness) & laundering accountability for harmful tech, extractive practices, abetting atrocities. yours truly
www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/ai-...

The False Promise of “AI for Social Good”

Abeba Birhane refutes industry claims about the technology's potential to solve complex social problems.

www.project-syndicate.org

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 4d

We end on an appeal to our fellow psychologists:

"To sit idly by while deskilling and displacing of [our]selves is normalised [...] serves [solely] the technology sector, which avoids criticism and self-reflection and prefers pseudoscience and misinformation."

10/

8 Do not Embrace AI
In this paper, we unpacked why we think psychologists need
to be on high alert — not just to avoid another replication crisis,
but to avoid the total collapse of our science. What we signpost
in Table 1 may have been novel to readers until this point, but
the deeper problems are absolutely known. Also, as Crystal Steltenpohl et al. (2023, pp. 9–10) state: “Intentions alone are not
enough to move science forward. Creating responsible, considered processes for rigorously transparent open science requires
involving interested parties from a wide range of backgrounds,
perspectives, research areas, and training paradigms.”
Indeed, because many such warnings go unheeded — such as
the need for a cultivation of shared values and especially the principles of impartiality of researchers and academic freedom from
corporate influence — we find ourselves in polycrises that affect
our universities, political systems, planet, and ultimately all humanity. “When historians of science look back on the 2010s in
social and personality psychology, the decade will likely stand out
as a period of exceptional doubt and self-scrutiny in the field.”
(Schiavone & Vazire, 2023, p. 710) Why did we ever stop? Should
we ever stop?

Importantly, Hazel Rose Markus (2005, p. 180, emphasis
added) explains that: “Social psychology is often defined as the
study of how people respond to and are influenced by other people”
Algorithms, chatbots, LLMs, machines, models, inanimate objects are not people — they are the products of people (Guest,
2024, 2025). And to paraphrase Rae Carlson (1984): What’s social about chatbots? Where’s the person in an LLM?
We must sure up our subfields from the slow but certain corrosive power wielded by the harmful nonsense that is modern
displacement AI. To sit idly by while deskilling and displacing of
our students, participants, and selves is normalised — or worse
still to profit from it — serves not science but the technology sector, which avoids criticism and self-reflection and prefers pseudoscience and misinformation.

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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 5d

Said it before, will probably die saying it, we are never going to solve the climate disinfo problem if we don't fix media. As @maxboykoff.bsky.social notes here, the public by and large learns about climate change via the media, so if the media trades in false equivalence, it's damaging!

Drilled @drilledmedia.bsky.social · 5d

Today, a look at the role the media has played in climate obstruction, with @maxboykoff.bsky.social and Melissa Aronczyk: drilled.media/podcasts/dri...

S14, Ep4 | The Media As a Tool of Climate Obstruction

Investigating the obstacles to action on climate change.

drilled.media

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 4d

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧵 1/

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 4d

🙌 🙌 🙌 Can't keep up with you @olivia.science, but please keep it all coming! Teaching a class on exactly this in 2 weeks so very much looking forward to digging into this and sharing with colleagues too. Experiencing lots of "inevitability" pushback, but your work & solidarity is a balm. Thank you 🙏

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 5d

Sorry also: Sooo good to hear the notion of AGI dissected and largely binned, instead of just uncritically accepted. And for that matter, the same with the idea that mere scaling up of LLMs will get you "there" (wherever "there" is supposed to be.)

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 5d

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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Dr. Jens Foell @jensfoell.de · 4d

People are running stats on LLM-generated participants and think they’re being social scientists when in fact they’re technically just playing a very strange video game. This is like saying you’re doing math research because you’re playing sudoku.

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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Saoirse McHugh @saoirsemc.bsky.social · 5d

A massive loss to us all. His care for and wonder at both nature and the Irish language was a great gift that he shared with us all

RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 5d

The writer, broadcaster and documentary maker Manchán Magan has died at the age of 55, his family has confirmed

Broadcaster and scríbhneoir Manchán Magan dies aged 55

The writer, broadcaster and documentary maker Manchán Magan has died at the age of 55, his family has confirmed.

www.rte.ie

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Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 8d

🧪🍎📃
It only took me 500 years to finish this 📊, but here it is 🎉

Grocery shops in many wealthy countries are oversupplied with animal-based foods. They stock far more meat and dairy than we need for human and planetary health.

🔗 www.lumipie.com/data-vis/pla...

Data visualization comparing national food supplies in high-income countries (based on GDP per capita) with planetary health intake targets. Radial charts for 12 countries (including Ireland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, Australia, Norway, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia) show that supplies of animal-based foods, especially meat and dairy, consistently exceed recommended levels of intake. Bars below each chart compare grams of plant-based, animal-based, and fats & oils in total daily supply per person. Data is from FAOSTAT (2022)

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Jul 9

People asked me often over the years... now it's over but finally sharing it: Course manual — including readings, instructions on how to write essays and give presentations — for the course AI as a Science that I taught from 2020/21 to 2024/25 in the School of AI. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 12d

After a week of being gaslit (I'm merely a laggard in the tech adoption curve), of all the things I have read & thought & tried to write about generative AI, this👇 from @anthonymoser.com speaks my mind.

"The machine is disgusting and we should break it."

Celebrate your humanity, join the haters!

Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · Aug 27

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

I Am An AI Hater

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

anthonymoser.github.io

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 13d

😂 "gem"AI clearly isn't writing my posts!

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 13d

Yay, book day! It looks and sounds amazing 🙌
Congratulations!

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Katja Bruisch @kbruisch.bsky.social · 13d

📣 It's publication day! 🔥Burning Swamps🔥 is out with @universitypress.cambridge.org ! My book tells the forgotten history of peat in the context of Russia’s industrialization & electrification and points to the lingering presence of past extraction 1/5

#envhist #energysky

Book cover of "Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy" by Katja Bruisch. A black and white photograph shows a woman with a headscarf stacking peat

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Clare Kelly @clarekelly.bsky.social · 13d

Yes! This... gemAI violates almost every element of academic and scientific integrity we claim to uphold. I don't know how people square this circle.

Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 13d

Yes. So much of this would be clear academic misconduct or negligence if only people hadn't been led to believe investor money is a foolproof loophole for laws, norms, and accountability.

Either we have copyright law or we don’t. Either plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property are anathema to higher education or they aren’t. We’re either modeling academic honesty and integrity to our students or we aren’t. And in the rush to incorporate GenAI into every nook and cranny of the institution — from the classroom to the finance office — what gets repeatedly ignored is this fundamental paradox: GenAI’s architecture absolutely depends on consciously taken actions that would stand in violation of any of our institutions’ academic-integrity policies.

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