Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Dan Lametti

Emily Myers @emilymyers.bsky.social · 1d

Heavyweight is one of my favorite podcasts, and I was relieved to see it back after a long hiatus (Spotify cut it loose to pay for Joe Rogan —ahem—). This week’s episode is a quiet heartbreaker. overcast.fm/+ABNzfgKxvqs

#61 The Bank Robber — Heavyweight

overcast.fm

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Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 2d

It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful

#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs

How to get PhD funding in the UK

It is that time of year again. The leaves are turning golden, red, and orange (or just brown), the nights are drawing in, and there is a chi...

aidanhorner.blogspot.com

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Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore @sjblakemore.bsky.social · 7d

jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

jmarriott.substack.com

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 7d

Had the discussion. 1/3 of the class (15 students) said it was the first time they'd read something this long (7k words) in one sitting. To me, this suggests not that students don't read anymore but that we should assign more interesting things for them to read.

Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 8d

Tomorrow, in my science writing seminar, we're discussing "Daryl Bem Proved ESP is Real—Which Means Science is Broken". I highly recommend this piece if you haven't read it. Writer Dan Engber turns a story about shoddy research methods into something absolutely captivating. slate.com/health-and-s...

Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real. Which Means Science Is Broken.

The scientist couldn't have foreseen the crisis his research would touch off.

slate.com

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 8d

my latest is expanding on the observation that your view of the politics of opposition to the administration depend largely on your view of the election (gift link)

Opinion | Trump Has No Mandate to Destroy America

www.nytimes.com

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Fernanda Ferreira @fernandaedi.bsky.social · 8d

Posting on behalf of Tamar Gollan, who is not on Bluesky:

A postdoc position is open and available immediately in Dr. Tamar Gollan’s Laboratory of Aging Bilingualism at the University of California, San Diego, funded by NIH & NSF. See link for details!

psychiatry.ucsd.edu/about/LAB_Go...

psychiatry.ucsd.edu

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 8d

Tomorrow, in my science writing seminar, we're discussing "Daryl Bem Proved ESP is Real—Which Means Science is Broken". I highly recommend this piece if you haven't read it. Writer Dan Engber turns a story about shoddy research methods into something absolutely captivating. slate.com/health-and-s...

Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real. Which Means Science Is Broken.

The scientist couldn't have foreseen the crisis his research would touch off.

slate.com

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Reposted by Dan Lametti

The LAB Lab 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @thelablab.bsky.social · Aug 27

Inner speech and the neurobiology of psychosis

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

With @daniellametti.com and David Green

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Peter Sterne @petersterne.com · 15d

More from the Suffolk University poll: www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suff...

Do you support or oppose "defund the police"?
Support - 21%
Oppose - 74%

Would you support or oppose cutting some of the police budget and using the money for social services?
Support - 54%
Oppose - 41%

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Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 15d

Health and science reporters should lead the coverage of all these health-related conspiracy theories & newsroom leaders should keep their both-sides political reporters out of their way.

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Kinlika @kinlika.bsky.social · 17d

'Tylenol' is known in the civilised world as Paracetamol

2.4 million children born in Sweden between 1995 and 2019. Studied 186,000 children whose mothers were treated with paracetamol during pregnancy.

news.ki.se/no-link-betw...

No link between paracetamol use during pregnancy and autism or ADHD in children

In the largest epidemiologic study to date of the risk of giving birth to a child with autism, ADHD or intellectual disability following acetaminophen use during pregnancy, researchers found no associ...

news.ki.se

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 18d

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

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Barack Obama @barackobama.bsky.social · 20d

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

Let’s be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel

Trump’s most brazen attack on free speech yet.

www.yahoo.com

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 21d

An adaptation that, I think, has resulted in something much better.

Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 21d

This is an adaptation for AI. These assignments used to be done entirely at home.

Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 21d

Trying some new pedagogy. Without the internet or notes, students complete short assignments in-class as part of a small group. We then, as an entire class, answer the two questions deemed the hardest. Students have a week to submit their answers individually via Moodle. Pretty fun so far!

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · 21d

Trying some new pedagogy. Without the internet or notes, students complete short assignments in-class as part of a small group. We then, as an entire class, answer the two questions deemed the hardest. Students have a week to submit their answers individually via Moodle. Pretty fun so far!

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Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · 23d

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · Sep 7

GPT-5 answers PhD-level problems and, yet, when I give it my uni's academic calendar and ask it to play advisor (an aspect of my job I would love to automate!) it makes trivial mistakes. Generalization of learning is a challenge long noted in psych, and still a real limitation of LLMs.

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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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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · Aug 29

Universities forcing profs to incorporate AI into their pedagogy so students can "learn how to use it" is bananas—there's nothing to learn. I showed my 75-year-old mom how to effectively use ChatGPT in like 20 minutes. Now she's a prompt engineer.

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · Aug 28

Gave my now annual lecture to new Acadia U undergrads on how AI works, how students should and should NOT use it (if they decide to use it), and the ethical implications of AI use. It was a full house with loads of interesting questions!

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Justin Ling @justinling.ca · Aug 27

imagine actually writing the sentence "Hamas propaganda lines such as 'stop killing children'"

CBC News has repeatedly relied on Gaza-based videographer Mohamed El Saife, a known anti-Israel propagandist in Gaza, to supply footage and shape its reporting on the Hamas-Israel war. On August 21, CBC Kids News published a video and article, produced with El Saife’s material, featuring Gazan children echoing Hamas propaganda lines such as “stop killing children” and “there’s no food in Gaza.”

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Jay Rosen @jayrosen.bsky.social · Aug 27

"The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state." — Dan Froomkin @froomkin.bsky.social

presswatchers.org/2025/08/we-h...

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · Aug 20

We added a preregistered study to our paper, Affiliation in Human-AI Interactions Based on Shared Psychological Traits. We created bespoke LLMs that exactly mirrored participants' personalities or the opposite. Participants greatly preferred chats with their mirror AI: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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Dan Lametti @daniellametti.com · Aug 20

We added a preregistered study to our paper, Affiliation in Human-AI Interactions Based on Shared Psychological Traits. We created bespoke LLMs that exactly mirrored participants' personalities or the opposite. Participants greatly preferred chats with their mirror AI: osf.io/preprints/ps...

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