Marek

Lecturer in Philosophy of Cognitive Science at University of Sheffield Apply for the Lecturer in Philosophy of Cognitive Science role on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board for academic positions in higher education. View details and apply now.

Philosophy of cog sci job at Sheffield - 3yr post. Get in touch if you have questions! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQU853/l...
#philsky #Philosophy

The Supreme Court doesn't care if you want to copyright your AI-generated art The highest court in the US declined to review a case about copyrighting artwork created with the help of AI.

*Well, if it's slop and it can't have the IP, does this encourage LESS slop or MORE slop

*Nice of the artist to press the legal issue all the way to the Trumpistan Supreme Court, that must have been a lot more labor than generating that art

www.engadget.com/ai/the-supre...

Cool demonstration that using multiple tasks (diversity is important) may be more informative than resting state for uncovering individual functional connectivity patterns

A little offended Grammarly didn't make a sloppelganger of me

Why does cheating matter? A personal anecdote and an appeal to junior colleagues.

Olivia @olivia.science hits it out of the park again with a post on cheating and why you shouldn't rob yourself of learning opportunities olivia.science/cheating/

The dictionary woke up this morning and chose violence.

Reality is not a controlled hallucination <p><em>The idea that 'reality is a controlled hallucination' has been recently popularised by figures such as philosopher Anil Seth. But this claim, which purports to be hard, down-to-earth science, i...

"Reality Is Not a Controlled Hallucination" by yours truly iai.tv/articles/rea...

*I really wonder how much of that is due to the dynamics *of the platforms*

*How much AI nuttiness is actually social-media nuttiness, I think rather a lot

*If they had to write each other postcards by Pony Express, they would all simmer down about it

“Why are men afraid of women?”
“If your strength is only the other's weakness, you live in fear,” Ged said.
“Yes; but women seem to fear their own strength, to be afraid of themselves.”
“Are they ever taught to trust themselves?” Ged asked
“No,” she said.

Gonna double down with a reminder that if you post a screenshot of text from an article you should alt text it & link to the fucking article!!!! If you found it on the internet you should share the link!!! Do not force me to Nancy Drew my way back to the source by triangulating fonts w/news outlets.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

WTF. I think I will make it explicit policy on my OS projects that bots cannot be contributors (sole or joint). They are tools, not contributors!

theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

RECENSION: Bobo Stenson trio skapar mening på svindlande höjder När jazzimprovisation funkar som bäst är musicerande både spontant och mycket målmedvetet.

Never expected to be "cited' in a jazz concert review:

"Cognitive scientists Steve Torrance and Frank Schumann believe that at the core of an improviser's expertise is what they call "a higher-level meaning-making" that spontaneously.."

www.sydsvenskan.se/kultur/bobo-...

Hot tip: if you're tired or distracted and having trouble following a paper you're reading, this trick can also help a great deal with that.

(Not always a good idea if you're sitting in a library of course...)

I started copying @conjh.bsky.social's version of this trick for writing science papers: sit down with the other lead authors and one person reads the manuscript draft out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, then perform live surgery together on shared doc. Incredibly good way to improve the text

Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.

If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires Founded by Keir Starmer’s comms chief, Portland helps rich clients ‘protect their reputation’ – with a shady, off-the-books service

Our investigation actually shows how *difficult* it is to make paid edits on Wikipedia, even when PR firms try. As we wrote in the piece: “To put it simply: it is hard to publish misinformation on Wikipedia.”

The truth matters. (2/2)

www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026...

Even if they did so in compliance with all laws and the Term of Service, this will bite Proton hard. Their sales is you can trust them and accounts are private.

On a practical level however, a reminder for email as a service that can’t be true.

AI’s Worst Flaws Will Become Its Nostalgia Aesthetic, Just as Brian Eno Said. On the aesthetics of refusal, and the difference between flaws inherent in a medium vs. in the institution.

*Interesting aesthetic assessment there -- when contemporary AI slop becomes nostalgic dead-media, as of course it will

medium.com/ai-in-plain-...

This is a good analogy. Very useful in carefully controlled settings for specific usages, but unfortunately being widely inserted into everything and used without training or PPE and poisoning a lot of things and people and we’re going to pay a tonne of money to remove it safely in the future

Great post on the emergence of clinical trials!
This section makes me wonder about "professionalization" in science in general. I do feel like many parts of the research process in my field are...surprisingly dilettantish.>

Over the past decade, the robustness of the ego-depletion effect has been widely questioned. Possible reasons for variations in the ego-depletion effect may be participant expectations of the demand of the upcoming task and experimenter expectations or demand bias. In three experiments we tested the hypothesis that the ego-depletion effect is partly or exclusively attributable to (i) participants’ expectations of the task (Studies 1a and b) and (ii) experimental demand bias (Study 2). In all studies we did not observe a robust ego-depletion effect, and only participants informed that the task was tiring exhibited the effect. Taken together, our findings suggest that participant and experimenter expectations can influence performance in ego-depletion paradigms. However, more research is necessary to determine the extent to which these expectations—rather than other social-motivational factors—drive the effect.

New study finds demand and experimenter bias partly explain the ego-depletion effect

Journal:
doi.org/10.1007/s121...

Open access: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

By @oulmann.bsky.social, @martinhagger.bsky.social, et al.

⚒️ #WavyWednesday

“Two figures showing a pencil drawn map with points A and B and a mountain range. On the left, the mountain range is in between points A and B. On the right, the part containing the mountain range has been cut out, showing the author’s desk through the hole cut in the map.” Figure 12 in: van de Braak, L., van Rooij, I., Dingemanse, M., Toni, I., & Blokpoel, M. (2025). Understanding misunderstanding: How quick-fix solutions undermine explanation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17152893

New preprint from the lab!

🗣️ 🤔 💻 🗺️

📝 van de Braak, van Rooij, Dingemanse, Toni & Blokpoel (2025). Understanding misunderstanding: How quick-fix solutions undermine explanation. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 📝

cc @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @dingemansemark.bsky.social @blokpoel.bsky.social

*You may notice that, even though I read a whole lotta David Gerard, I don't presume to *be* David Gerard. #MargaretCavendishSyndrome #dontdothat #really #scifiwriters

Three ecological psychologists on the right and wrong ways to use the field’s principles in neuroscience Matthieu de Wit, Luis H. Favela and Vicente Raja weigh in on the recent trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, the study of how an organism’s interactions with its…

@braininspired.bsky.social talks to @dewitmm.bsky.social, Luis Favela and @diovicen.bsky.social about the trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, how an organism’s interactions with its environment explains perception and action.

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/3OyNEkp

This is exactly right. The Onion quietly left Twitter a month ago and... our weekly subscribers went up. It's because we're doing well here, on Instagram and on YouTube.

As a business, being on Twitter is somewhere between useless or detrimental, unless you're selling boner pills.

Our journal portfolio - PLOS Discover our diverse portfolio of research journals dedicated to advancing science with integrity and rigor.

quick shout out to @plos.org
They got rid of their X button: "Share" now lists: facebook, reddit, linkedin and bluesky
Look how easy it is! Now get the hell off X. Delete the icon. Our scientific community has already mostly abandoned the "Nazi bar"
plos.org/our-journals/

*There's something to this, but the "us" is problematic because events have taken a genuine "posthuman turn"

*The "intentional thoughtfulness" is more LLM than it's human; they hallucinate a lot, but they're all about analyzing, compressing and mimicking that form of behavior

Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming Marcela Suarez, Olivia Guest and I co-organise a Summer School Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming, June 22-26, 2026, at Radboud University, in The Netherlands. The Summer School is…

Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/18/s... cc @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it