Reranking The World’s Billionaires By Wealth – And Altruism Forbes recalculated the wealth of the richest billionaires to add back in what they gave to charity. Here’s who moves up the ranks.

I hate league tables but... Reranking The World’s Billionaires By Wealth – And [Their Movement Of Money To The Accounts Of Organisations Identified As Charities] www.forbes.com/sites/mattdu...

Yes is winning on 58%

Mail is running a poll on whether the UK should rejoin the EU.

Takes seconds to vote and it's going hilariously well...

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Wild chimpanzees recorded waging ‘civil war’ with coordinated attacks between two groups New study describes what may be the first case of a unified community of chimps turning on itself

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Thread

photo showing the rescuers saving the dog, next to the statue commemorating them

closeup on the base of the statue, showing a dog and a man in a ball cap

the top of the statue, where the person at the top of the slope has his hand outstretched so the viewer can "help" pull him up

in 2016 a group of strangers in Kazakhstan saved a dog from drowning by forming a human chain to reach him. they just unveiled a statue commemorating the event and I'm genuinely about to start sobbing

New from our @cognizelab.bsky.social in Advanced Science:

Beneath the Big Five, personality consistently organises into two dimensions, each with distinct brain signatures.

Amazing work by postdoc @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social and thanks to all our collaborators! doi.org/10.1002/advs...

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org

It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

16 facial expressions

(And here's a terrific piece of art I was unaware of: 16 faces expressing the human passions, J. Pass, 1821).

wellcomecollection.org/works/a4yen3...

Excellent Mindscape episode with @neddo.bsky.social and @seanmcarroll.bsky.social - recommended! With a bonus reminder of this must-read scifi story by Terry Bisson "They're made of meat".

users.manchester.edu/Facstaff/SSN...

And then he [sic] would feel the need to take to social media to condemn others’ failings and flaunt his martyrdom.

Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections - Biology & Philosophy This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and i...

If chimps had diswashers:
Fitzpatrick, S. (2020). Chimpanzee normativity: Evidence and objections. Biology & Philosophy, 35(4), 45. doi.org/10.1007/s105...

Horney (1950) discussed 'the tyranny of the shoulds'. Ellis (1977) talked about 'musturbatory thinking'. I am amazed that no one seems to have used the term 'petty ought-o-crats'!

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex - Nature Neuroscience Using quantitative brain imaging, the authors show opposite fMRI BOLD signal to metabolic activity due to variable oxygen extraction across the human cortex. This questions the canonical interpretatio...

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The online published version. Couldn’t find a link to supplementary materials

Good taste as well as good research! Also, old 😉

Looks great, congrats. How much of a fool am I in not being able to find a way to access the supplementary materials after about 10 minutes' trying?

AI can pick up cultural values by mimicking how kids learn A new University of Washington study suggests that AI could learn cultural values by observing human behavior, similar to how children learn by watching and interacting with adults. Researchers had AI...

"AI can ... mimick"
Oliveira et al (2025). Culturally-attuned AI: Implicit learning of altruistic cultural values through inverse reinforcement learning. PLoS One, 20(12), e0337914. doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Press release: www.washington.edu/news/2025/12...

A jar of pickle beetroot:

2/10 wobble dobble
4/10 jimmy jam

My inner cynic says this has about as much construct validity as the average psychological rating scale…

Dog Skull Analysis Rewrites Evolution of Humanity's Best Friend A surprising diversity of dog shapes and sizes evolved long before the Victorians began making modern breeds

A surprising diversity of dog shapes and sizes evolved long before the Victorians began making modern breeds

KAFKA AND THE DOLL | Read Along Story Time | YouTube video by Audiobook Story Time for Children with Viola

"In 1923, Franz Kafka encountered a distraught little girl who had lost her doll and was inconsolable. Kafka told her the doll wasn't lost but traveling the world having grand adventures! To reassure her, Kafka began delivering letters from the doll ..." www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvNZ...

Two years after 7 October and the kidnap of my parents, hate is in fashion. For all our sakes, we need compassion | Sharone Lifschitz So many were killed – yet on her release, my mother said ‘shalom’ to her captors. Let’s learn from that moment of grace, says Sharone Lifschitz, London-based film-maker and academic

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Commentary: The health crisis in the USSR: looking behind the facade My first visit to the USSR was in February 1981, by coincidence at exactly the same time that Nick Eberstadt published a commentary on ‘The health crisis i

In a strange circularity, it seems that all the work I was doing in the early 1990s on concealment/distortion of statistics by USSR & DDR is becoming very relevant now

academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

Final part of the contents page from my PhD report, in which I complain about poor conceptual specification in a major social psychological theory.

As I move into the “Recycling the last hard copy of my PhD” stage of clearing my office, it gives me pause to see just how unrelenting my malcontent and snark have been. 🤪

The image is a black-and-white cartoon showing a bull sitting on a couch in a therapist’s office, speaking to a woman therapist who is taking notes. The bull appears frustrated, gesturing with one hand. The therapist is seated across from him with a notepad in her lap. A lamp sits between them. The caption underneath reads: “I mean, I know it’s coming and I think to myself ‘hold it together, man…’ But then he waves that red cape and I just lose it!”

Silly psy cartoon for the weekend!

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

Modern theories of emotion (especially “interoceptive inference”) often cite William James as a key inspiration. But what did James actually say about emotion, and is it supported by the data? Here’s a brief look at the core arguments and classic evidence. 🧵

Is it “brash” to be concerned if societies foster freedom of thought or insist on the “narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless … maniacs”?

What a wonderful book review!

GiveWell sought an independent check on the evidence supporting >$1 billion it has granted to its top charities. This fall, Alex Cohen asked whether we could obtain the datasets needed to reproduce the underlying RCTs. We said yes; charging only a modest fee to cover our time.

🧵 + 🐀 + blog post!

Excerpt from the Introduction to Until Darwin: Science & the Origins of Race Classification Species Darwin Degeneration Evolution History of Science, Sociology, Sciences of Life, Human Variety, Natural History, Ecology

[Blog Archive]
Excerpt from the Introduction to
Until Darwin: Science & the Origins of Race (2010)
[UNCORRECTED PROOF]
"Introduction: Ecce Homo or Slavery and Human Variety"
#UntilDarwinBibliography #HistSTM #HistSci #CharlesDarwin