Jean Piaget sits in his home-office in Pinchat, near Geneva, where he is surrounded by stacks of papers

When I worked at the Jean Piaget Archives in the University of Geneva, the family donated the intellectual contents of his home. Fortunately, my supervisor decided to retain the locations of the papers. Because Piaget's own "filing system" was to add new desks and shelves when the old ones filled up

They had to switch the hand that was holding the cup on a string

I used the word "moreover" in my history of Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology as seen from the perspective of his American patron: the Rockefeller Foundation. That was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. I also used it in my PhD, my MA, and my HonBSc theses
research.rug.nl/en/publicati...

Been chatting with colleagues about AI's use of water. It seems mainly to be a problem where water is scarce: if humans have to compete for drinking water, then contracts might conceivably cause serious problems. So where is water scarce? See this: "England 2055"
www.surrey.ac.uk/sites/defaul...

This is great! I'd like to encourage you to share it via the Division 26 poster program at the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, DC. Obviously we'd love to meet you. But there's the possibility for a Virtual Poster Session too.
convention.apa.org/proposals/di...

One of the things I like about doing invited talks at the University of Groningen is that there's always a chocolate treat at the end. Thank you to the Teaching Academy Groningen, University of… |... One of the things I like about doing invited talks at the University of Groningen is that there's always a chocolate treat at the end. Thank you to the Teaching Academy Groningen, University of Gronin...

I gave a presentation yesterday about how we can protect the thesis, in the AI Age, by shifting from a final text to a portfolio; from a product approach to a process approach. And they gave me a quite tasty chocolate bar. Would you like to know more?

www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy...

Mitch McConnell doesn’t care what you think. He just wants to win. “He’s a man of few words and I think that creates a mystery that works to his advantage,” one senator says.

Win at any cost: a guiding principle that McConnell also followed

www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/st...

Echoes of Eugenics: Tracing the Ideological Persistence of Scientific Racism in Scholarly Discourse | Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimiza...

"Drawing on a corpus of over 15,000 scholarly articles published between 1800 and 2024, we map the linguistic landscape of eugenics in scholarly discourse to reveal its institutional, scientific, and sociopolitical entrenchment"

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Nuremberg trial records made available online after painstaking 25-year project Launch of digitisation project marks 80th anniversary of start of legal effort to bring Nazi leaders to justice

Important #archive news: "750,000 pages of transcripts, briefs and evidence exhibits from across the total of 13 cases, which between 1945 and 1949 were brought against Nazi military and political leaders held responsible for atrocities against humanity" #history
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Als het om esthetiek gaat, kunnen we de hele dag discussiëren. Maar niet als er iemand gewond kan raken door vallend beton.

Ik twijfel er niet aan dat het beton aan het rotten is. Dat zien we. Maar ik kan me voorstellen dat iemand die dit zegt uiteindelijk charmant wordt: onze eigen versie van Romeinse ruïnes. Dus de veiligheidskwestie lijkt relevant.

Ik kan de veiligheid niet beoordelen. Ik ben geen ingenieur. Maar dat lijkt me wel een belangrijke vraag voor degenen die verantwoordelijk zijn voor de openbare veiligheid.

Zijn de pijlers veilig? Soms degradeert beton en valt het naar beneden, waardoor overhangende delen gerenoveerd moeten worden in plaats van te blijven staan.

One of my students "mispronounced" the name of @anthropic.com's LLM today, and it sounded so right that I immediately wondered if it wasn't exactly what they intended all along. What do you think?

"Cloud"

Yes, I failed to hear the capitals on "Scientific Revolution." But never once have I ever claimed that 1543–1687 was my period. (I think I was only a year or two out of my master....)

Pay attention to red flags. Don't ignore them because of "an opportunity." It's very rarely worth it. And when you are able to hire your own assistant, don't "kick down." Lift them up, instead, as almost everyone else I've worked with has done. Actively.

Dear reader, this is someone I respected. I was happy for having had the invitation, and felt playful, but then was also really hurt by the rebuke. With that start, I should never have agreed to work for them. I eventually regretted it.

A prof I liked in another department once invited me to TA for their course on "the scientific revolution." Delighted, I laughed and said, "which one?"

Their reply has haunted me for nearly twenty years: "That's cute. But it only goes to show that you don't know as much as I thought you did."

a man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched .. Alt: A man in a superhero costume is standing in front of a cross with his arms outstretched, and flies over an adoring crowd

In last night's vivid dream, I was at SNL pitching a skit for Antony Starr: Homelander is interviewing Vought staff about their loyalty, and tells one of them to eat a basketball. I then demonstrate. First by deflating it. Then by nibbling at the seams. All the producers look horrified: "Yes!"

Scientists say X (formerly Twitter) has lost its professional edge — and Bluesky is taking its place After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, many scientists report the platform is no longer suitable for professional use. A recent survey indicates that researchers are increasingly turning to Bluesky...

Yep. Forward this to those who haven't yet made the move

www.psypost.org/scientists-s...

Conference title: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin, and image of Lewontin in Black and White with intense expression in front of a chalkboard holding up a fist, When and Where Friday, October 10, 2025 11:30 am to Sunday, October 12, 2025 2:00 pm Music Room (218) Goldring Student Centre 150 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 1K5 | and online via Zoom

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin.

It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

And funding agencies

Inviting thoughts about AI in education | Mindwise

On Friday, I asked a question at LinkedIn about what everyone is doing with their writing assignments to respond to the crisis of AI in education. By yesterday afternoon, it was a fully worked-out invitation to share anchored in my own experiences. What say you?
mindwise-groningen.nl/inviting-tho...

The dilemma that could test the AfD's rising popularity | DW News YouTube video by DW News

Germany's far-right "remigration" movement is probably giving a preview of future Republican rhetoric in the US. For those with an interest in such things, this report is worth watching. It's from the German public state-owned international broadcaster: Deutsche Welle (DW).

youtu.be/MOrTIB8JVe8?...

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

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

I am not ready for it to be September. I am, however, ready for it to be July. Who do I speak to about this inconsistency?

The Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University invites applications for a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of “Science, Technology, and Governance.” #HPS #STS #PhilJobs
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30301

Once, when I lived in Toronto, a pair of police officers knocked on my apartment door. I was so surprised to see them that I just blurted out the first thought that entered my head: I invited them in for tea. They decided I wasn't who they were looking for, thanked me for the offer, and left.

A light skinned man with white hair and beard, and glasses, studies intently without realising that he has accidentally taken his own picture while putting down his phone

The archive where I'm working for the next two weeks has the largest single collection I've ever heard of: 15 shelf-kms! That's almost 50,000 linear feet!! (It's the complete property records going back to the 1820s for the entire province of Noord-Holland, which includes Amsterdam.)

I'm part of an enclave of historians who work inside a Psychology Institute, which is part of the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. It's fantastic. We even have a grad programme. Please send me your weird, interesting, thinky students. (We have a lot of fun!)

www.rug.nl/masters/theo...