Despite threats to freedom of speech from both sides of the political spectrum, US academics enjoy freer speech than is generally assumed—self-censorship, often irrational, is a much larger problem, argues Burgess:

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The consumer price elasticity of snacks means price shifts cause demand shifts. Chips/crisps manufacturers have a box of tricks to maintain volumes, nicely explained here:

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TL;DR:🧵 buff.ly/Wdu4XRL

How do we evaluate how kind a person is?

Research by @oliverscottcurry.bsky.social et al finds the principal indicator is the *benefits* they provide to someone else, regardless of the relationship; *cost* is less indicative (and not at all for strangers):

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As consumers, we rarely welcome price increases, but we acknowledge their inevitability.

Yet price increases are about more than just their magnitude, and the way they present may provoke an irrational reaction.

Or might it actually be rational?

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Als de prijs voor een product op een zekere website met 9% is verhoogd, maar wel de laagste op de markt blijft, dan is het rationeel er verder geen tijd aan te besteden en het daar meteen te kopen.

Toch?

Mijn @apache.be stukje, Betalen voor je gelijk

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Earthset.

Reid Wiseman caught this video of the Earth setting over the lunar horizon on his phone, from the “most foreign seat in the cosmos”:

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What’s the colour of our universe?

Some scientists worked out the colour of the combined light of all the galaxies visible from Earth. But they made a mistake with their free software. 🤔

Other scientists repeated the exercise—properly—and, well…

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Flexible working—what’s not to like?

All else being equal, sure. But not all else is equal, and hybrid work involves many tradeoffs—not all of which are clear and unambiguous.

@docgrawitch puts the finger on why hybrid work feels harder than it should:

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If the price of a product at a certain retailer has increased by 9%, yet remains the cheapest on the market, the rational thing to do is to waste no more time, and buy it right there and then.

Or is it?

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Research by Molnar & Loewenstein suggests it’s not so much divergence of beliefs that segregates people, but the conviction others’ beliefs are *false*—negative feelings are much stronger when we think someone’s view is wrong rather than just different:

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Kan het lonen je verontwaardiging te uiten, ook al kost het je geld en tijd, ziet geen mens er iets van, en trekt niemand zich er een bal van aan?

Mijn @apache_be stukje, Betalen voor je gelijk

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Behavioural Science is typically practised in stable situations.

Conflict settings present peculiar challenges—and this is the terrain of the International Rescue Committee’s Britt Titus, who shares some of her experience:

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Via @behscientist

Conveyor belts—core to many factories—are a powerful metaphor for efficiency.

But they don’t turn mediocre products into tailored products that stand out—for those, you don’t want a conveyor belt, writes @davetrott.

True in advertising and elsewhere:

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Hepach & Daniel synthesize recent research on the development of altruism in children: it rests on intrinsic, extrinsic, and strategic motivations for (costly) prosocial behaviour building on one another through externalisation and recalibration:

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Doubt feels unpleasant—and for a reason.

New research suggests that, rather than metacognitive evaluation, it is the emotion of doubt that triggers us to shift thinking gears, from more intuitive to more deliberative, critical thinking :

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via @psypost.bsky.social

Magpies have a reputation for thieving shiny objects, but that’s nothing compared to these kleptoparasite birds in Hawaii, which steal twigs from other nests to build their own:

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Ik kan niet zeggen dat het me verrast…

How come most people see a square in this image?

We are not the only animals who see illusory contours—so do mice. And new research using these rodents provides new insights on this phenomenon:

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An international team of mathematicians says that they have once-and-for-all determined that our reality is, in fact, real.

Others find the argument “superficially compelling,” but guilty of a “profound category error”.

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The (universal) philosophy of Boo!

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People less than enthusiastic about AI are easily dismissed as luddites.

Apart from the movement in early 18th C England that adopted the name, have there been more cases?

@porlando has identified and described >100—check it out, improve and add!

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According to Reputational Rationality Theory, which integrates key conditions and contextual factors shaping when and why reputational outcomes tend to reinforce decision biases, apparent errors and biases can be reputationally rational, argues Dorison:

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In which an accidental behavioural economist experiences a profound urge to put right what is wrong, and sacrifices time and money to do so:

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A book review cannot replace the book it reviews, but the best ones can offer much the same reading enjoyment.

In a similar vein (but much rarer) are authors’ accounts of the background to their book. Exhibit A: @kph3k’s ‘preview’ of “Original Sin”.

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Are habitual behaviours goal-driven?

Research by @profwendywood et al shows through numerous counter examples in several domains that habits do not depend on goals (even implicit ones)—but can be performed in concert with goals:

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Musicians have better spatial cognition—the ability to locate their body relative to other objects—even without visual cues, thanks to the intensely multi-sensory nature of the training, new research suggests:

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“unless some wild, exotic, new physics (for which there is no evidence) is invoked, inside a black hole, a singularity is all but inevitable.”
@startswithabang.bsky.social explains why every black hole must harbour a singularity, where space-time is undefined:

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It’s hard not to feel a little worn down and fed up these days.

But I went out this afternoon, saw the Japanese cherry trees in blossom, and people enjoying the sunshine.

And despite everything, I thought to myself…,

What a wonderful world.

Enjoy!

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Many profoundly useful inventions rest heavily on information that, until it was applied, was often pretty useless.
Tim Harford considers the usefulness of such useless information:

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