Cameron Brick

Took me a long time!

Nice. Perhaps assuming the scale of difficulty is linear makes this more impressive seeming. In tennis for example, I've read that between rank beginner and #1 there are 14 matchups of 5/95% win probability. Such a steep... climb!

I just rewatched Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) because my wife had never seen it. It has been remastered and upscaled to be beautiful and crisp in high-def. Honestly, it looks amazing. The props, costumes, and sets still blow me away.

I don't teach history! Thanks for the helpful links, I will read them. My Dutch is also mediocre/ok.

Yes, great example, thank you. I teach this history of protest in Amsterdam. It is perhaps a better case than Paris to reveal the feedback loop between individual actions, policy and infrastructure change, and back to individual actions.

That's revealing. I didn't realize the rates were so modest to begin with. No wonder I always read about the change in relative rather than absolute rates!

Useful history. I think 10 years could be seen as fast for this level of transformation. I'm not surprised that policy and luck help; more, where did the political will come from?

That's illuminating, thank you.

Paris invested heavily in bike infrastructure and saw a massive increase in ridership. Does anyone know about research on where the willingness and investment came from, e.g., attitudes, priorities, city-level meetings, national conversations? How do such changes in policy and infrastructure emerge?

Yeah. It's not just bad coverage in education. The more fundamental problems I think are the lack of error correction either during peer review or after publication; there being no consequences for a paper getting it wrong.

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Shaming climate wrongdoers Shaming climate wrongdoers, Yadin, Sharon, Maibach, Edward

If ever there was a moment to shame climate wrongdoers, that moment is now. To that end, I offer a recently published article (by @sharonyadin.bsky.social & me) on how ordinary folks like you & me--plus civil society & governments--can harness the power of shame.

@ioppublishing.bsky.social

EN
Do your laundry for science from your own home! Sign up here for our Citizen Science project and collect the microplastics from your clothes.

NL
Doe thuis jou was voor de wetenschap! Meld je hier aan voor ons Citizen Science project en verzamel de microplastics van jouw kleding.

‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country For some Swedes, the question isn’t simply whether a wealth tax works, but what kind of society has been lost with its abolition.

theconversation.com/we-got-lazy-...

Lots of debate in NL right now about our wealth tax and the changing rules. There's uncertainty and I think that also causes distaste. If it was just 'the way we do it' it would be easier to be proud of what values and benefits it supports, maybe?

Picture showing the cover of the book this post is about.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Science in Resistance: The scientist rebellion for climate justice by Fernando Racimo. Maybe not very surprising, after all, it was reading a paper by Fernando that made me join Scientist Rebellion three years ago.

🧵

Greece: Aid workers cleared of human trafficking charges The former volunteers, who were facing lengthy jail terms, worked for an NGO that rescued asylum-seekers.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Good result. Took too long. Interesting article.

In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/m...

We could just wring our hands and decry autonomous lethal drones, but before judgment it's worth pausing just to recognize how much has changed in the past few years and where it leaves us, Ukraine, and the future of war.

Yawning at the apocalypse | BPS Cameron Brick and Sander van der Linden on how psychologists can help solve the largest social dilemma in history.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Stimulating. I have adapted from Buddhism as well, more for academic psychology than for politics. Agreed that compassion is not conditional on the target in moral terms. Instrumentally, I don't see rapid societal change through without winners and losers, heroes and villains, as we wrote about.

Well, I like your writing and argument.

I hear a lot on the left that we need as wide a tent as possible, but in practice championing seems to expose political vulnerability.

Maybe part of this is short vs long term success. Certainly disenfranchisement is unstable and unjust.

Certainly capital is an enemy, but I'm not even convinced that democracy is the solution. The country doing the most for the energy transition is not very democratic

There is no laissez-faire capitalism, so the only questions are where we want to lean on the wheel and how much

Traffic congestion increased this year, despite new roads - DutchNews.nl The total length and duration of traffic jams in the Netherlands increased this year, despite the opening of several new roads in Zuid Holland, figures from the ANWB show. The ANWB said traffic conges...

www.dutchnews.nl/2025/12/traf...

Couldn't have written that more clearly myself. Increase roads, increase demand for roads. How about investing more in solutions with fewer costs on society: public health, finances, environmental quality?

Interesting summary, thanks. We can reject any theory of cognition where the person is an island.

Opinion | Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.

On willpower being overrated

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/o...

Took me a long time too. Compelling

Birth Lottery If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth.

www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

no *you're* crying

Happy Christmas!

My inbox is a de-facto to-do list. When using Outlook, an email feature I really miss, was it in gmail in the past?, was to snooze a message into the future UNLESS I receive a response in the meantime. That way, items don't disappear off the list, and I don't get extra messages.

Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate.

Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains.

Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...