I am excited beyond description to lift the veil on what we have been working on in 2026:
Please meet ggsql! A new extension of the SQL language for creating visualisations using the grammar of graphics. Read all about it in the blog post or visit the website at ggsql.org
If you use #claude code, you may find this Claude Code Cheat Sheet very handy.
(Only gripe: There's a Print button, but all that does is gives a B/W version. Had to use a screenshot to print a hardcopy.)
cc.storyfox.cz
There’s some cool recent research on this phenomenon! It turns out vision language models excel at image benchmarks *even when the actual images aren’t provided,* because the answers are implicit in the questions!
arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687
I was reading Adam Gopnik's book review of "The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy" (by Richard Vague), and I strongly suspect it is a 4-page exercise to sneak this one line in the middle.
I’d’ve been okay with including the whole chapter just for that line too
This whole article is fantastic and full of acute observations on LLMs swamping AI, but I think this part captures the main issue best - LLMs are *fragile*. When you decide to trust a process (individual or group or machine), the best performance can be MUCH less important than the worst mistakes
Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123
What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition?
In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture
can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect.
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Chinese world culltural trend
How can we study human development over two thousand years?
For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary.
Thread 👇 🧵
New paper led by SJ Shao in @commspsychol.nature.com. Across 20 days of EMA (5x daily), momentary loneliness prospectively predicted heightened social threat perception and social withdrawal. Trait loneliness amplified loneliness–rejection coupling and social disengagement @emoriebeck.bsky.social
🧑💻 New paper at #chi2026 w @lorenzspreen.eurosky.social and @stefanherzog.bsky.social
Are you worried about how social media algorithms affect people’s beliefs? We are, so we tested engagement-based ranking algorithms against alternatives in a pre-reg’d collaborative filtering experiment... 🧵
With very large numbers of n’s you don’t need randomization, and with LLM’s we can generate very large numbers of n’s, so I think all of science is solved by now. I don’t see any problems with this.
This post really put together the pieces in a way that floored me. Everything is about to change and we have to confront that reality causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...
A related point is that confounding can both increase and decrease effects sizes. When people say "there could be a confounder," it is equally likely a priori that the confounder results in bias *in a conservative direction.*
I have almost never seen this discussed in published research.
Our new short piece in TiCS on intuitive theories of truth: how people judge whether statements could be true, whether statements are true, and whether to assert them as true. A great collab with @keremoktar.bsky.social
@ihandleyminer.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social
I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.
I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.
🧵/
sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...
A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:
The Deliberation Taboo
Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/
osf.io/preprints/ps...
lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc.
One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole.
to explain:
> and while under some conditions universities could react to save the value of the diploma, they’re already under duress in other ways, and reputation is lost much more quickly than gained so it would probably be too little too late > (*some sort of unspecifiable collapse of H.E. as we know it*)
Probably a catastrophizing spiral, but: if we go from 3-5% cheaters to 10-20% cheaters, and the cheating itself is really hard for profs to verify in a way admin will trust > admin will stop punishing cheaters > employers will see diploma’d students lacking skills > perceived diploma value plummets
From the guy that gave you "Agricultural revolution happened because of changes in Earth axial tilt" & "Serfdom in Russia happened because defending low-yield steppe from nomad attackers steppes requires it", take a sit for "bacteria made WWII victory possible".
I promise it will be worth the ride.
Controls for selection by examining movers between places (some similar studies have not) and even compares movers between similar kinds of places (no effect). Seems well designed.
What’s this cool workout app the infers load across exercises?!
Also, I wouldn’t trust a workout app that infers a person’s front squat from their back squat as much as that person’s own judgement or a general rule (eg try 60% and add 10% until you can’t). The limiters on FS are waaay different
New blogpost about a teaching experiment I'm doing this quarter: a "socratic tutor" bot to help students gain understanding of specific reading assignments.
babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-l...
It's not worth debating "does the MVT predict Dems should moderate." The MVT says that *if* the issue space is continuous & 1-dimensional you *must* moderate to win. It's a mechanical relationship.
We don't rely on the MVT because elections are never about a single and easily-divisible issue.
Ahhh, I’m thinking I read this differently than it was intended - “trust others” from a neutral position vs when we have reason to believe otherwise
Really? Because of the “only”, or because of the “evidence”? I thought I’d read the higher order evidence lit relatively closely and would have expected most to accept it with qualifications
Institutions are the social technologies that power our world, allowing us to rely on complete strangers every day of our lives. But how do we ensure that this trust isn’t misplaced? In this Essay, the game theorist Julien Lie-Panis explores what makes institutions function @jliep.bsky.social
Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...
🧵
