How is your day?

AI in week 14 In de Tweede Kamer, een gebrek aan vibe coding en heel veel podcasts!

Skipped a week, sorry non-Dutch friends! But this week's newsletter is translated again! www.felienne.nl/2026-14/#eng...

(Including a translation of my opening remarks in The Dutch Parliament this week on AI in schools)

Also, as with music, many times an insight appearing as original may have been unconsciously picked up elsewhere, either in a different context, or in a less polished form

Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk Scientists say their work on fires and climate change could be lost as the agency moves its headquarters to Utah from Washington and shuts 57 research stations.

The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests.

I would rephrase by saying that attention is remarkable, but not very mysterious.

Best PhD job advert. Ever.

The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research | PNAS The advancement of large language models poses a severe, potentially existential threat to online survey research, a fundamental tool for data coll...

Can't you submit it as a commentary to the original article to which Strauch et al wrote their commentary, while referencing the Strauch commentary? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Interesting!

The Bots Ruining Social Science Are Not Bots at All - Shalom N. Jaffe, Aaron J. Moss, Rachel Hartman, Cheskie Rosenzweig, Richa Gautam, Jonathan Robinson, Leib Litman, 2026 Researchers who employ online data collection from human subjects currently face a conundrum: It is both essential to how behavioral science functions and threa...

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

A timely reminder that social progress doesn’t come easy. The idea of half the population not being allowed to vote might sound bizarre now but was reality until embarrassingly recently.

Johannes Fahrenfort: Subjective and Objective Approaches in the Study of Conscious Perception YouTube video by Mathematical Consciousness Science

I gave talk about subjective and objective approaches in the study of conscious perception last week in a BAMΞ workshop @uni-bamberg.de hosted by @johanneskleiner.bsky.social
@jolienfrancken.bsky.social and
@ronyhirsch.bsky.social. You can find the recording here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zB...

Good analysis! Makes you wonder why the authors (or their reviewers) did not consider it necessary to analyse RT data from a similar offline (or pre-2022 online) study using their metrics. It's not that those RT data are not available.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Do goal-directed actions minimize prediction error? Together with @haslagter.bsky.social and @fahrenfort.bsky.social I identified falsifiable predictions of active inference and reviewed the extent to which they are supported by empirical results. Read the preprint here: tinyurl.com/2by8k3h6

WHY IS NOBODY PANICKING OVER HUGE DRONES ABOVE SENSITIVE MILITARY / NUCLEAR INSTALLATIONS ACROSS NEW JERSEY, DENMARK, GERMANY, BELGIUM, THE NETHERLANDS ETC. SHOOT THEM DOWN FFS!

Drijfzand

Most of you know @suryagayet.bsky.social as a successful visual-attention researcher. But he also had an active #music career as a #rap artist. And like Jay-Z before him, he has briefly come out of retirement with a new album. Check it out—it's very good! 🎤🎶 open.spotify.com/album/7HrnAB...

it is time to make my biyearly post because I put a preprint out🎉🍾😀. we (w/ @svangaal.bsky.social, Z. van den Hurk, @timostein.bsky.social & @fahrenfort.bsky.social) attempted to replicate a classic unconscious priming study by Vorberg et al. (2003) using a single-subject Bayesian approach.

Great overview conceptualizing approaches for studying sensory conscious perception👏. I, myself, had research experience with both subjective and objective approaches, but it was nice to learn the great landscape and where I land. Table 1 is especially informative.

Pre-print 🎉 "Subjective and objective approaches in the study of conscious perception" will be a chapter in www.horizon-minds.com. We explain that subjective and objective are poorly defined constructs and provide a taxonomy.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
with @svangaal.bsky.social @timostein.bsky.social

Top US Army general says he’s using ChatGPT to help make key command decisions Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor told reporters that he’s been using ChatGPT to refine how he makes choices affecting thousands of troops.

What could possibly go wrong?!

nypost.com/2025/10/16/b...

I feel seen...

Pre-print 🎉 "Subjective and objective approaches in the study of conscious perception" will be a chapter in www.horizon-minds.com. We explain that subjective and objective are poorly defined constructs and provide a taxonomy.
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
with @svangaal.bsky.social @timostein.bsky.social

I thought we only did this on April 1st?

Connecting neural activity, perception in the visual system Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools. I asked nine experts to weigh in.

Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools, writes @neurograce.bsky.social. Hear from 10 experts in the field.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

There is no eye tracking in this paper, just pupil size and the code is specifically about how to provide the biofeedback on pupil size. This is not difficult to set up once you have an eye tracker. I don't think they have "built" an eye tracker but ok. Also, where are the analysis scripts?

Even if this is true, I think it's stupid. It's not a high-tech thing to provide feedback on pupil size, everybody can do this. The work is not the code here, the work is doing something useful/marketable with it. No mention of the analysis scripts either.

Also, where is the analysis code? Surely there is a lot more to this paper than just the biofeedback algorithm?

Code availability: The code of the pupil-based biofeedback algorithm cannot be made publicly available since it is proprietary software of ETHZurich and cannot be shared beyond the detailed description of the algorithm given in the methods section. However, researchers interested in verifying and reproducing our results can do so on location in a secured environment at the Neural Control of Movement Laboratory, ETH Zurich, upon signing a confidentiality agreement.

Who thinks this is an acceptable statement about Code Availability given the move towards Open Science? Are you out of your mind @ethz.ch? Today is 2025, not 2005. I'm also surprised that @natcomms.nature.com accepts such a statement. It is ridiculous really. Paper here: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

australian street style, 1973