iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

Is #icanhazpdf still a thing? Looking to get hold of this headline-grabber 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2026.4339 jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediat…

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Björn Brembs @brembs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Mark you calendars: #zurich Wednesday, October 21, 3.30pm, keynote presentation: "Replacing Academic Journals" Open Access Week | Lib4RI www.lib4ri.ch/open-access-week #openaccess #openscience

lib4ri.ch

Open Access Week | Lib4RI

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Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Also related: Jordan Dworkin summarises some recent talking points on the future of the university www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/califo… "Ben posits that the university’s problem is that it combines too many unrelated jobs into one institution […]

mastodon.online

Original post on mastodon.online

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

This open access collection of papers by Edward S. Reed is a fantastic new resource. Reed was brilliant, and his vision of the science of #psychology (effectively put forward in a "trilogy" of books published around the time of his untimely death) is both inspring and liberating. Really looking […]

sciences.social

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Mike Taylor 🦕 @mike.sauropods.win.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

RE: thecanadian.social/@MostlyHarmless/… Dear all Billionaires, THIS is what you want the world's reaction to be when you die.

thecanadian.social

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Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

No need for an inner critic when you have the replies on social media, am I right?

Reply on X "you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out"

Original : https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1613622386150211584

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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Three years after Raja Ampat’s walking shark won full legal protection, researchers off Sawinggrai village counted 2,462 per square kilometre, the densest population ever recorded for the genus. These reef-crawlers barely move, which makes them easy to wipe out but quick to recover where habitat […]

wandering.shop

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Björn Brembs @brembs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2026

#Variability is often treated as noise to be minimized — an inconvenience that obscures the "true" signal in biological data. Yet a growing body of evidence across every level of #complexity tells a strikingly different story: the capacity to vary is not a bug, but a feature: a deeply conserved […]

mastodon.social

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Terence Eden @edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2025

The BMJ's cocktail list is *wild*!

In our study we mixed Coca-Cola with human semen (5:1 ratio) and reported that sperm were immobilised within one minute. A subsequent toxicology …

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Björn Brembs @brembs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

After the Council of the EU demanded to address the "Hazards of Scholarly publishing" www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/pr… a whitepaper was published that outlined the plans […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Scott Francis @darkuncle.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 11/04/2026

This is really well stated: “I guess what I’m saying is great consumer products don’t make young people feel anger and despair the more they use them.” — Nilay Patel on AI

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.scholar.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/03/2026

CAIL = prerequisite knowledge for a critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims. For example, the idea that human-like systems are a sensible or possible goal is the result of circular reasoning and anthropomorphism […]

scholar.social

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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/01/2026

We have the strongest evidence yet that life once existed on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance Rover drilled into Mars’s Jezero crater and pulled up a piece of mudstone covered in markings that resemble those left behind by metabolizing microbes on Earth. Obviously more investigation is needed before […]

wandering.shop

Original post on wandering.shop

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

Responsibility precludes scientists from using AI products whose use is irresponsible, e.g. harmful to people, animals, and the environment, or otherwise in violation of legal guidelines (e.g. copyright, data privacy, labour laws, Butterick 2025; Cole 2025; Rijo 2025; Tafani 2024a). Minimizing harm is vital for both engineers (ACM Code 2018 Task Force 2018) and theoreticians (Guest 2024).

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 5/5

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five preoccupied to protect the human ecosystem 4/5

Independence means that scientists ensure that their research is unbiased by AI companies agendas, and that any potential conflicts of interest are declared in publications and other public communications (this also follows from Honesty and Transparency; cf. Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021; Atkin 2025; Forbes and Guest 2025; Knoester et al. 2025).

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem 3/5

Transparency requires that the AI technologies are open source and computationally reproducible.
Here we must recall the technology industry’s obfuscatory tactics: “the name of the current producer of ChatGPT. ‘OpenAI’ sounds like it is engaged in open science, but as we have now seen, ‘open’ never really means what you think it does.” (Mirowski 2023, p. 738; see also Dingemanse 2025; Hao 2025; Jackson 2024; Liesenfeld and Dingemanse 2024; Liesenfeld, Lopez, et al. 2023;
Maffulli 2023; Maris 2025; Nolan 2025; Solaiman 2023; Thorne 2009; Widder et al. 2024)

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem. 2/5

Scrupulousness demands, among other things, that scientists only use AI products whose functionality is well-specified and validated for its specific scientific usage (cf. Kwisthout 2024; Kwisthout andRenooij2025).Thisincludesterminologicalprecisionaboutwhatformalisms,models,and/or technologies are used (recall Figure 1) and rigorous argumentation to motivate why these technologies are appropriate for the scientific purposes at hand.

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the human knowledge ecosystem. 2/5

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Five principles to protect the ecosystem of human knowledge. 1/5 @tomstafford has argued that the infoglut we live in is like when densely populated cities made plagues more likely. We need to normalise new hygienic practices. @olivia et al set some out.

Honesty implies that we do not secretly use AI technologies without disclosure, and that one does not make unfounded claims about the presumed capabilities of AI technologies (this also follows from Responsibility; see example from MIT Economics 2025, where perhaps too little too late was done).

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

"But AI tools will be just like calculators..."

we ban calculators when teaching children addition and other basic arithmetic operations for a reason (cf. Lodge et al. 2023). Otherwise, they would not learn these arithmetic operations, and calculators do not help to understand the basic mathematical rules. For the same reasons, we also do not allow the use of spellcheck software for children learning to spell, or keyboard typing when learning to write by hand

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Students aren't generally looking to cheat, and most think LLM use should not be allowed in college education. Let's not allow salespeople to speak for them.

Technology companies are not shy of falsely claiming that students are lazy or lack writing skills. Such a mantra serves only to sell products — or coverupandexcuseoverworkingthembyourcolleagues—withnoreflectiononreality.We condemn those claims and reassert students’ agency vis-à-vis corporate control.

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

Why higher ed teaching is hard, and always will be. But we don't do it because it is easy, and we are trusted to do it well because we have hard earned expertise in our fields. Let's not undervalue that, hey?

Students have always cheated. Bending and breaking the rules is human nature. And by the same token, educators are not police. We are not here to obsessively surveil our students — education is based on mutual trust. Therefore, our duty is to build mutually shared values with our students and colleagues.

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

It is vital that we don't overestimate our understanding of human cognition. Yes, there is reason to believe we have a better grasp of some things than when AI hype first appeared in the 1950s, but that better understanding is not clear, and almost certainly isn't on the basis of simple computation

Although we do not fully understand human thinking, this does not licence attributing thinking to whichever machine or technology, uncritically and through anthropomorphisation. Such arguments from ignorance lack all scientific rigour. The only argument from ignorance that science permits is caution, more research, and care as appropriate actions when something is truly unknown.

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Marek McGann @marekmcgann.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2025

The more I learn about history, the more I understand how important learning about history is. This is doubly important in my own professional field. @olivia and colleagues driving home the point against the inevitability of AI reminding us of this.

When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia (Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates “the AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute fictionforscience.”(Heffernan, 2025,n.p. Duarte etal.2024).

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Bjørn Sætrevik @satrevik.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2025

I'm putting together a short bibliography of recent papers about #BigTeamScience, with emphasis on challenges and solutions for large social science projects. Am I missing any important papers? I'm in particular looking for any tools or checklists to use when […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

A screen shot of a bullet list containing the following items:
Teasley, S., & Wolinsky, S. (2001). Scientific collaborations at a distance. Science, 292(5525), 2254-2255.
Bammer, G. (2008). Enhancing research collaborations: Three key management challenges. Research policy, 37(5), 875-887.
Vogel, A. L., Hall, K. L., Fiore, S. M., Klein, J. T., Bennett, L. M., Gadlin, H., ... & Falk-Krzesinski, H. J. (2013). The team science toolkit: enhancing research collaboration through online knowledge sharing. American journal of preventive medicine, 45(6), 787-789.
Yao, B. (2021). International research collaboration: Challenges and opportunities. Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography, 37(2), 107-108.
Coles, N. A., Hamlin, J. K., Sullivan, L. L., Parker, T. H., & Altschul, D. (2022). Build up big-team science. Nature, 601(7894), 505-507.
Baumgartner, H. A., Alessandroni, N., Byers-Heinlein, K., Frank, M. C., Hamlin, J. K., Soderstrom, M., ... & Coles, N. A. (2023). How to build up big team science: A practical guide for large-scale collaborations. Royal Society Open Science, 10(6), 230235.
Forscher, P. S., Wagenmakers, E. J., Coles, N. A., Silan, M. A., Dutra, N., Basnight-Brown, D., & IJzerman, H. (2023). The benefits, barriers, and risks of bi

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Kee Hinckley @nazgul.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2025

❝ The crazy thing is not that garlic isn’t grown from seeds; it’s that, for the most part, it can’t be. Ever since people began cultivating garlic — six millennia ago by some estimates, 10 by others — it’s primarily been done through asexual reproduction. In all those thousands of years […]

infosec.exchange

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Sam Rose @samwho.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2025

Email addresses are very simple, and you will score highly in this quiz. e-mail.wtf

e-mail.wtf

Email is Easy

Everyone knows what an email address is, right?

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Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2025

New newsletter! "To not get distracted by the dizzying competence of the new AI models, we need to keep a steady eye on their surprising failures too." open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p…

tomstafford.substack.com

AI has weird edges

The surprising failures of AI models help see how unlike human intelligence it is

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Chris Marcum 📖 @csmarcum.sciences.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2025

One of the reasons I have been a strong advocate for the use of persistent digital identifiers, especially ORCIDs, is because they facilitate trust in authorship while simultaneously supporting the personal life decisions of authors to change their name. #openscience @eLife […]

sciences.social

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Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2025

New off-topic newsletter from me! tomstafford.substack.com/p/annals-o… "I have collected three triumphant examples of scholarly profanity, pieces of writing with a swear word in the title which fill an important gap in our conceptual universe, not despite but […]

mastodon.online

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Sebastian Kübeck @skuebeck.graz.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2025

Microsoft marketing: “Your data stays in Europe.” Microsoft’s Legal Director (under oath, in French Parliament): “No, I cannot guarantee that.” Still think Microsoft Teams is a sovereign solution? Credit @ponceto91 for the meme […] [Original post on graz.social]

Ab boat labeled FRENCH GOVERNMENT with a fishermen about to rescue a girl (labeled MICROSOFT). The part of the girl that's under water shows that she is actually a sea monster labeled UNITED STATES.

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Jon Shell @jonshell.mastodon.energy.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2025

It seems pretty clear that we're well along the technology learning curve for batteries now. The Chinese government's single-minded focus on renewables, mostly solar and some wind, is going to change the global energy landscape in ways we can scarcely imagine. @TheAtlantic just published a […]

mastodon.energy

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Samantha Rose @samantha42.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2025

Nice, DuckDuckGo now has noai.duckduckgo.com so you can entirely avoid their AI Search even when you regularly delete cookies. AI "search" not existing would be my preference, but functional opt-out is a solid second given current state of tech. (It's possible it's not new, but I only […]

infosec.exchange

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Terence Eden @edent.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2025

This wasn't quite the effect I was going for, but it turned out rather nice.

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Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2025

JOB : Join RoRI as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Metascience researchonresearch.org/join-rori-as… Closing 9th of July, based in London/hybrid. Full time, fixed term until 31/12/2027 (apologies for late notice, full […]

mastodon.online

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