Millions of people are pretending to be AI chatbots — for fun Websites like youraislopbores.me have become playgrounds for people looking for light relief in a bot-heavy world.

Yay!
www.npr.org/2026/04/14/n...

We found that 10% of participants endorsed this statement (i.e., they selected “Definitely true” or “Probably true”) and that this was a strong predictor of endorsing six pre-existing conspiracy theories, including two that that directly contradicted each other.

Figure from the paper. How does social reasoning enable efficient intelligence? 1. Directs us to the information that is most important for learning. 2. Inferences about others' minds help us interpret information they provide (and provide better information for others). 3. Avoids some of the costs of direct learning like cognitive/physical effort, and negative outcomes. 4. Enables us to build on and refine the knowledge of others. 5. Provides cues that help us infer which agents' knowledge we should build on without needing to observe their behaviour directly.

Humans have a remarkable capacity for efficient, intelligent reasoning. In a new working paper, @perfors.net and I discuss how our ability to reason from *social* information is one way that we achieve this capacity. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics
ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

genuinely fascinating that we’ve hit a point where the full monetization of the internet and ai bot takeover has led to a majority of people wanting tech minimalism

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NEW study found chatbots supported violence 80% of the time—providing key details & weapon advice. Here’s the rub: there is currently no legal requirement for U.S. chatbot creators to alert law enforcement when their systems flag potential violence.

The result is real-world harm. trib.al/XRqylye

I always had the vague feeling that Scientific Reports and Nature Communications are mainly APC business models.

A paper estimated the total APC for gold/hybrid Open Access per journal 2015–2018: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Surprise, surprise - there are 2 outliers at the top😐

🔥 🔥 🔥

What they want is some path out of that, and someone who is proud and unashamed of being sincere -- who in fact points out that rejection of meaning and failure to stand for anything is the coward's way out -- provides that path.

We can't be apologetic. Standing proudly is its own proof of concept.

scenes from the MIT philosophy department

Nature Publishing Group finding more dastardly ways to lock us in, well beyond what I complained about in my letter declining reviewing for them

🖐️if only🖐️

my JND is 0.0028

👁️👄👁️

Search Efficiency Drives Reference Production Across Modalities, But Colour Is Special Abstract. When speakers refer to objects in the world, they frequently overinform. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, we hypothesise that overinformativeness is an efficient means of facil...

10/10
We propose that colour has been fast and accurate in the past, making it a reliable, low-cost strategy for efficient coordination. Experimentally reduce salience and discriminability all you want, speakers won’t ignore their past experience. Don't buy it? Check our work: go.unimelb.edu.au/h9s2

9/10
Even controlling for production costs like effort and word-frequency, we found that speakers still use the low-salience colour properties with high frequency, and far more than they do the salient orientation property. So ‘salience’ ain’t it. 🌈Colour🌈 is special. Why?

8/10
The ubiquitous explanation is that colour is special because it is ‘salient’: visually contrastive. In E2, we reduce colours’ salience and compare it with orientation: another salient, attention-guiding property. If salience is to blame, speakers should use orientation more than colour.

7/10
Despite our discriminability manipulations, speakers mentioned colour far more than material across conditions 🧐🤔 One might think this is due to differences in discriminability across the modalities, but we used psychophysical staircases to control for that. So why is colour special?

6/10
If the search-efficiency view works as a general, multi-modal theory of reference, both material (audio) and colour (visual) should produce precisely the same effects. This is exactly what we see. Search efficiency generalises across modalities! 🥳

5/10
Welcome to the baseball bat factory! Participants watched colored bats fall down the screen and crash, making an impact sound. Manipulating the perceptual discriminability of colour and material (wooden bat thunk vs metal bat clunk), we test if Search Efficiency generalizes across modalities.

a thinking smiley face has a hand on its chin ALT: a thinking smiley face has a hand on its chin

4/10
While the Search Efficiency view explains a lot of data, the experiments often manipulate search-efficiency using colour – one of few properties privileged in visual attention. Will the account still hold for non-colour properties? Will it extend all the way to other sensory modalities?

3/10
Paula Rubio-Fernandez has long shown that referential expressions track precisely with the listeners’ visual search, as if speakers are tailoring their expressions to make the listeners search faster. This ‘search-efficiency’ view was formalised by @julianje.bsky.social and Paula in 2022:

2/10
Research on visual search and reference production dovetail remarkably well. Mentioning highly discriminable yet unnecessary attributes of a target referent (the ‘small’ circle, the ‘blue/pink’ circle) guides visual search and speeds up responses (increasingly from left-to-right).

1/10
So here's a puzzle. Efficient communication perspectives argue that speakers tailor their messages to make their listener’s visual 👁️ (and auditory?👂) search faster and more accurate. However, even when visual search is tightly controlled, people really over-use 🌈colour🌈 terms. Why? 🧵

he’s been chilling in the basement for a minute

Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

I'm only partway through, but it's clear that this book by Chater & Lowenstein is one of the most important books to ever come out of psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics.

Bullshit

Writing is thinking

Outsourcing the entire task of writing to LLMs will deprive us of the essential creative task of interpreting our findings and generating a deeper theoretical understanding of the world.

first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint: