Drew Altschul
@dremalt.bsky.social
1.2K followers 180 following 210 posts
Lecturer in Psychology @ Newcastle University. Studying the evolution of hierarchies and hierarchical thinking, mostly in primates. Open science, BTS, ManyPrimates/ManyManys. Living organism. Psoriatic arthritic. Age dyschronic. Writer. Buddhist.
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dremalt.bsky.social
This is so cool. Thanks for watching!
btscon.bsky.social
We received this dispatch from a @uop-ccep.bsky.social @uopcidd.bsky.social BTSCON viewing party. Look at all the Big Team Science FUN they're having! WE LOVE TO SEE IT!!

(👀 @dremalt.bsky.social @manyprimates.bsky.social)
A group of 10 smiling people pose for a photo in front of a large monitor. On the monitor, you can see the title slide from Drew Altschul's Big Team Science Conference talk about ManyPrimates. Everyone is having a GREAT TIME!
Reposted by Drew Altschul
btscon.bsky.social
We received this dispatch from a @uop-ccep.bsky.social @uopcidd.bsky.social BTSCON viewing party. Look at all the Big Team Science FUN they're having! WE LOVE TO SEE IT!!

(👀 @dremalt.bsky.social @manyprimates.bsky.social)
A group of 10 smiling people pose for a photo in front of a large monitor. On the monitor, you can see the title slide from Drew Altschul's Big Team Science Conference talk about ManyPrimates. Everyone is having a GREAT TIME!
dremalt.bsky.social
Other minds are foreign countries
dremalt.bsky.social
Or maybe just an attempt to write Hari Seldon's seminal paper on Psychohistory, in a grounded, non-fictional way
dremalt.bsky.social
Most entertaining entry - "Cliodynamics 100 years on: Psychology's integral role in the study of predicting the future, in the future"
dremalt.bsky.social
100 years? This might as well be a short story collection of speculative fiction. "This issue is about scientific foresight, not science fiction." Okay, I mean, good luck?

I think it'd be more valuable *and* enjoyable to read something like David Eagleman's "Sum"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum:_Fo...
dremalt.bsky.social
Such a loss. Hard to understate how much Jane Goodall did for the field of primatology, and probably all of comparative psychology, animal cognition, animal behaviour... We are very much in her debt.

And its also just great that still to this day she would describe herself as an ethologist.
janegoodallcan.bsky.social
The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away due to natural causes.

She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.
dremalt.bsky.social
Thanks to Liza Muscovice & @goatswhostare.bsky.social for organizing, and to my co-presenter @bernhardvoelkl.bsky.social
dremalt.bsky.social
I have a theory about this as well, which is that the US, stupid as it can be, has a big population, still quite liberal for the world stage, and overweighted online pull. So there are lots of US pro therapy progressive types online, they do get surfaced a lot, and that gives the impression
dremalt.bsky.social
That its gone up so rapidly is quite interesting I think, and I could again imagine some reasons, but who can say why.
dremalt.bsky.social
I wouldn't say this is an outlier, its just at the top of the range - Iceland probably proscribes them more (Aus isn't far off either - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...). I could come up with a few other reasons why the US would be likely to have more anti-dep use, some of which you've named.
List of countries by antidepressant consumption - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
dremalt.bsky.social
How is that implicitly suggested?
Or maybe what I'm wondering is how do you define 'true need'?
Reposted by Drew Altschul
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
dremalt.bsky.social
Bringing in new reviewers after the first back-and-forth has got to be one of the biggest misuses of everybody's time
Reposted by Drew Altschul
vedranaslipogor.bsky.social
📣 New paper out (and my first one on ravens)! ❤️ "Startling ravens Corvux corax at foraging: Differences in anti-predator behaviour can be explained by age rather than personality" by Janina Weißenborn, @pesumas.bsky.social, Thomas Bugnyar and myself, out now in Journal of Avian Biology! ✨️😊
klf-univienna.bsky.social
Do ravens have personalities?
We tested how free-flying ravens respond to predator calls & gunshots. No consistent boldness across individuals, but:
🖤 Juveniles fed sooner than adults
🦅 All reacted more cautiously to raptors than gunshots
doi.org/10.1002/jav....
@avianbiology.bsky.social #univienna
dremalt.bsky.social
Hah, I've not seen this before.

Probably comes from some sort of self-compassion or gratitude practice that people who came through a more enlightened educational pipeline learned.
Reposted by Drew Altschul
reeserichardson.bsky.social
Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...
A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise
Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”
reeserichardson.blog
Reposted by Drew Altschul
jowolff.bsky.social
Richard Wollheim on Bertrand Russell.
Russell twice lost his position on account of his social views. He was twice imprisoned for them. His last sustained political action, the Tribunal on American War Crimes in Vietnam, was met by a conspiracy of silence round the world. The fact that he was an intellectual genius made it easier for those who purveyed a more comfortable view of life to present him as a simpleton. He endured this too. He continued in the belief that, the desire for power aside, the most socially dangerous conditions of mind were boredom and the love of excitement.
Reposted by Drew Altschul
nomascus.bsky.social
We are currently testing highly underrated and understudied colobus monkeys for @manyprimates.bsky.social at Zoo Krefeld.
It's a start - but ManyPrimates needs more colobines (and gibbons) for fair representation!
Colobus monkey (Colobus guereza) approaching a two-choice set up to test for its ability to infer the hiding location of a bait by exclusion.
dremalt.bsky.social
confirm this as my experience as well
Reposted by Drew Altschul
biotay.bsky.social
1/3 First evidence of anxiety in snails

They exhibit fear responses hours after the source of their anxiety is removed. These responses can be reduced with an anxiolytic, such as alprazolam. They have also demonstrated high-level learning.

(paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
https://www.garnelio.de/spitzschlammschnecken-lymnaea-stagnalis
Reposted by Drew Altschul
ivojacobs.bsky.social
Our letter is out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

We argue against a recent claim that animals cannot make mental simulations because they supposedly do not reliably memorize sequences. The evidence for model-based animal cognition is too overwhelming. 🧪
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lKMt_V1r-...
authors.elsevier.com
dremalt.bsky.social
oh wow, thank you for writing this. The original article irked me so much on basically this exact issue.