iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 13h

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

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Katie Hoemann @katiehoemann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Come join me in the Emotions in Context Lab at the University of Kansas! I will be taking PhD students in Fall 2027.

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

👀 Florida attorney general to OpenAI: (www.myfloridalegal.com/sites/defaul...)

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Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

as a satire on so-called late stage capitalism how could one beat investors pouring a trillion into a company offering to wipe out humankind

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ProPublica @propublica.org · 26/09/2026

Hey, ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson here. I’m taking over the account to tell you about my new story. For months, I posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to test the company's "responsible gaming" safeguards. Spoiler alert: They made me a VIP — and I lost $10K. Here's how it all went down. 🧵

Selfie taken by ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson, a man wearing a backwards baseball cap and an orange T-shirt.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 28/10/2023

If you missed my Sonoma State University Center for Ethics, Law, and Justice seminar series talk "On Bullshit Engines: The Socioethical and Epistemic Status of GPTs and other 'AI.'" (or if you just want to dig into it again), the youtube link is now up: youtu.be/9DpM_TXq2ws

youtu.be

On Bullshit Engines: The Socioethical and Epistemic Status of GPTs and other AI. Dr. Williams.

Forum for Law Ethics and Society (FiLES). Dr. Williams takes a deep dive into the propensity for GPT style AIs to not merely present falsehoods but to perpe...

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 19/09/2026

When we talk about the costs that LLMs impose on society we should not forget the fact that nothing works anymore because everyone is so scared of getting their shit scraped. I can't even use google scholar from my university or starlink because they send too much traffic.

Google
Sorry...
We're sorry...

... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
See Google Help for more information.

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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

If my company killed 123 children, the U.S. government would shut us down and send me to jail

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026

Remember folks, take notes here: ✅ When your company hacking another one helps with marketing, its "OMG rogue models gone wild hacking other companies." 😱 ❌ When a hacking incident doesn't raise your valuation but shows you to be massive thieves, it's an internal "ah nice"

Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
OpenAI's President Greg Brockman, when told his company had hacked the NYT paywall to scrape the site, responded with "ah nice."

That's a straightforward criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. OpenAI executives in jail.

quote tweeting Jason Kint @jason_kint

Jason Kint
@jason_kint
·
8h
woah. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft.
Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1
Image

Jason Kint
@jason_kint
·
8h
Straight from OpenAI's Brockman and Microsoft's Nadella - 'doom loop' for the entire web [as they vacuum up and substitute the work of journalism and threaten their economic foundations]. /2
Image

Jason Kint
@jason_kint
·
7h
Not good, OpenAI. "Read this NYTimes" article.. "Summarize" this NYTimes article... (NYT content in red). /3
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Jason Kint
@jason_kint
Blood boiling. Not a good look for OpenAI or Greg Brockman here:
"ah nice" in response to "a hack to get around nytimes paywall" in his efforts "to scrape" The Times website. After many points on his bragging about OpenAI's substitution for news. /4

Screenshot
mil
The character of Defendants' conduct weighs further against fair use.
The transgressive and deceptive nature of Defendants' efforts to acquire Plaintiffs' content confirms that their purpose in doing so was fundamentally to avoid the cost of acquiring lawful
copies. OpenAI employees devised and implemented strategies to circumvent paywalls without
detection when scraping websites. For example, when Nick Ryder informed Mr. Brockman about
, hack to get around nytimes paywall" to help with Mr. Brockman's efforts to "scrape[]" The
Times's site, Mr. Brockman responded "ah nice." SF791. OpenAI's corporate representative on
the subject was unaware of any "method for detecting paywalled content" in its da…

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

More than any higher ed development in recent memory, institutional subsidies for AI at R1 universities prove that austerity is a choice. It is not “too expensive” to invest in a humanities research infrastructure; rather, it is a choice that R1 universities make not to & subsidize AI instead.

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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I was pretty chuffed about science when the doctors at NYU figured out why my face had gone numb and I had lost the ability to speak and swallow. They turned to the scientific literature, which guided them through keeping me from dying from a rare disorder and regaining the ability to speak and eat.

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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Who is advising students to automate these messages? Why the mass delusion that professors want to read these? What makes me saddest is the erosion of trust. Even the students who take the time to write will now meet readers who are skeptical they wrote the words themselves. Everyone loses.

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Bill Chopik @chops310.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm giving an overview presentation of what my lab does and I think this meme accurately captures it.

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Lisa Starr @lisastarr.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I’m pleased to share that I’ll be considering grad students for Fall 2027 admissions to the University of Rochester’s clinical psychology program. I’m working on updating my website (more to come)— check it out to learn more about who we are and what we do www.psych.rochester.edu/research/sta...

psych.rochester.edu

Starr Lab – Internalizing Disorder Research at the University of Rochester

Starr Lab

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Dr. Allison G. Harvey @allisonharvey.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Reviewing applications for the Clinical Psych PhD at UC Berkeley this fall! We develop and test transdiagnostic treatments (soon including sleep-interfering media use) and study how to get them into real-world care. #ClinicalPsychology #PhD #SleepResearch #UCBerkeley

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

One of my big academic rules: only write papers you really care about on topics you really care about. I try to follow this rule 99% of the time. This paper is one of the best examples of that, and I’m stoked it’s one step closer to being in the world. We’ve corrected proofs & you’ll have it soon!

First page of article proofs for “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception”

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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Prompted by the scandal around Navier-Stokes, Andreas Thom raises the possibility that OpenAI may also have stolen the work on non-sofic groups:

1/3 I want to record a number of points that I realized after reading up on the controversy. In fact it recalls an exchange I had with OpenAI after its non-sofic-group announcement. It exposes a serious, unanswered question about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished mathematics.

I wrote in an email to Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck shortly after the surprising finding of a non-sofic group using the methods of Kun and myself:
“Another point is that I and a colleague in Dresden were discussing the expander matching problem and various extensions of the work with Gabor Kun actively over the last months with ChatGPT, so that we are of course curious if that was part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process. There is a certain (frankly unacceptable) lack of transparency here; and I fear it will damage the communal process of math more than the new AI-generated results will benefit the subject.”

Mark Sellke’s complete answer was: “Regarding your conversations with ChatGPT: that did not happen.”

I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. The categorical answer now looks as though it addressed only direct access under (2). No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given. I take this as dishonesty to say the least.
OpenAI now says in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but adds that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

2/3 OpenAI is drawing a distinction that its answer to me erased, despite the fact that my question explicitly made that distinction.
We are not required to reverse-engineer OpenAI’s internal training pipeline to establish what happened. Only OpenAI has the relevant data for that. If Sellke and Bubeck give a categorical denial, it must disclose the basis: product and privacy settings, relevant datasets and checkpoints, and what “de-identified data derived from usage” means.
I disabled model training on 29 June. That control is still only a promise whose implementation users cannot audit, and it is prospective: it does not answer what happened to earlier conversations or to derivatives already selected. OpenAI’s answer did not mention the setting or any account-specific check.
There is also a mathematical parallel, though a less explicit one. The approach of Kun and myself was not the main line of attack on non-soficity, in fact there were other more promising approaches along the line of quantum games etc. OpenAI’s detailed command of our techniques therefore made me wonder how the model found this route. If nonpublic research supplied by users improved a model and the provider then used that model to race those users to publication - without informed consent, disclosure, or credit - that would be ethically indefensible. De-identification may remove a name; it does not remove the intellectual content of a mathematical idea. Sellke and Bubeck seem to be blind to this simple moral aspect.

3/3 Sellke’s categorical answer was, at minimum, unjustifiably broad and materially misleading; looking back it was plainly dishonest. Bubeck’s acknowledged attacks and his attempt to exclude Alpöge from a proposed OpenAI-proof paper deepen the concern that there is a loss of moral compass. Taken together, this raises serious questions about their judgment and personal integrity.

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

1) Yes 2) Wesleyan University; UC Berkeley 3) 2009, 2015

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Elle Cordova @ellecordova.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I am the very model of a modern day typographer A font take on the tune “Modern Major General” by Gilbert & Sullivan #typography #fonts #graphicdesign

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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Dancing very very VERY close to saying “OpenAI stole our almost-complete proof of Navier-Stokes from internal access to our ChatGPT sessions because they were desperate to scoop Anthropic” which is absolutely 100% a believable thing OpenAI would do right now cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

It seems like there's a new round of "stochastic parrots has been proven wrong" discourse going on, so I'm going to re-up this: medium.com/@emilymenonb... >>

medium.com

Stochastic Parrots 🦜: Frequently Unasked Questions

It’s been a bit over five years since the Stochastic Parrots paper (Bender, Gebru et al 2021) was published (and somewhat longer since…

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Chokely Carmichael🥋 @stewartcoles.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

UW-Madison professor engages in multiple sexual relationships with students, disparages another over their sexual orientation and appearance, creates hostile environment, and department leadership covers it all up. And in true “pass the trash” fashion, moves on to ASU once forced to resign.

captimes.com

UW-Madison students, records detail investigation of professor

Dietram Scheufele resigned after investigators determined he had sexual relationships with two students and engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct with one.

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Dan Preston @danpreston.com · 05/09/2026

“Steinem made my life better. Yes, my life as a cis hetero male. I couldn’t have my career and my life without the professional women I’ve learned from, worked with, and worked for.” — Elie Mystal @elienyc.bsky.social Ditto.

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Born in 535 CE near Hyderabad. Died at 90 of typhoid.

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Tom Rodebaugh @drrodebaugh.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Buckle your seatbelts before you read this one, it's a wild ride (along the rough road of apparent data fabrication): datacolada.org/139 It would be sublime comedy if it weren't in science; I joke above because I'm frankly annoyed. But, silver lining seeing journal and @simine.com act quickly.

datacolada.org

[139] Artificial Deadlines (Part 2): Retrograding Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002)

As described in our previous post (.htm), back in 2006 ariely@mit.edu sent three Excel spreadsheets, each “last saved” by user “Dan Ariely”, to then-PhD-student-but-now-full…

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Welp, straight into the reading list this goes. Looks fabulous!

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Lauren Forrest @laurenforrest.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I’m accepting a clinical psychology PhD student for Fall 2027 at University of Oregon!🌲 Applicants interested in suicide, eating disorders, and/or quant-y things, esp as related to LGBTQ+ people, would be a good fit. My website includes tons of info and pro tips for applicants. Good luck! ✨💪

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Aylwyn Scally @aylwyn-scally.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Why, or even how, would we expect the universe to reflect the kind of society we desire or ought to live in? Human genetics in itself cannot validate our political or ethical views, or invalidate those of our opponents. We have to argue for those based on how they will affect our fellow humans.

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Aylwyn Scally @aylwyn-scally.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

They argue for these social changes because they want them to happen, regardless of genetics. Despite their claims, biological evidence is in fact relatively unimportant to hereditarians. This is why they are so uninterested in genuinely understanding the complexities of human genetics & evolution.

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Josh Grubbs @joshuagrubbsphd.com · 28/08/2026

1/43 Ok folks, after much teasing and anticipation, I'm THRILLED to share our new paper in Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. Not gonna lie: I'm proud of this one, and I hope it makes an impact on the field (so please share!). A thread 🧵👇

To Be a Mental Disorder: Revisiting Behavioral Addictions
Joshua B. Grubbs, * Nicholas C. Borgogna, Beáta Bőthe, Hyoun S. Kim, Rory A. Pfund, Shane W. Kraus

Manuscript to appear in the 2027 edition of Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, this preprint may not
exactly represent the final printed copy.

Grubbs, J.B., Borgogna, N.C., Bőthe, Beáta, Kim, H.S., Pfund, R.A., & Kraus, S.W. (2027) To Be a Mental Disorder: Revisiting Behavioral Addictions. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-061225-045608

Behavioral addictions have been recognized in various forms for centuries, yet only three—Gambling Disorder, Gaming Disorder, and Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder—are currently included in formal diagnostic systems. In the past decade, research on these conditions has expanded dramatically in both volume and methodological rigor, drawing on longitudinal, neurobiological, and cross-cultural designs and evolving into a truly global science. Even so, the field remains beset by unresolved controversies. Chief among these is a persistent tendency to import substance use disorder concepts—tolerance, withdrawal, and dependence—that lack conceptual and empirical support when applied to behavior. Related challenges concern the over-pathologizing of normal engagement and a reliance on confirmatory, self-report measurement of uncertain validity. We argue that advancing the field requires sustained funding, theory grounded in the disorders themselves, objective and intensive-longitudinal methods, greater diversity, and public health and regulatory attention to increasingly technological environments.

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Thomas Lecaque @tlecaque.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I started my PhD program with an eight week old at home, sole income being my doctoral stipend, in a history program, in Knoxville, TN. And every month we got a new book to read to my son, free, mailed to us, so my kid, my kids, grew up in rooms full of books even when I had no money. That's Dolly.

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I have searched the eyeroll gifs and concluded that none of them are rolling hard enough to convey the depths of my combined derision and exhaustion

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 24/08/2026

Wild that this shit is still going on -- university administrators just plowing money into AI, with no particular vision or goal, against the wishes of most professors & students, even as money is desperately needed for other things.

sfgate.com

Calif. colleges bought everyone ChatGPT. No one knows what to do with it.

California professors say they are left improvising as the CSU partners with OpenAI.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

refuting every claim anybody makes is not in fact how science, or any discipline, works discarding approaches that have proven fruitless or wrongheaded, not stopping to re-litigate them every time someone digs up a junk data set or a retracted article they wish were true, is how disciplines move

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

how many times must academics demonstrate why Cofnas and his fellow IQ-truthers are wrong? They've been doing so for decades. At some point, you have to admit that Cofnas and his ilk (and you) are not looking for "academic debate" but to give academic credence to rank prejudice.

Sam Freedman
@samfr.bsky.social
· 10h
Why not answer his Q? I'm also curious. How do you want us to engage academically with this claim? Or Cofnas's claim that black people hold too many positions of influence in the US?

Patrick Sturgis
@patricksturg.bsky.social
· 7h
How about refuting them on theoretical and empirical grounds? That is kind of how science works. It doesn’t work by calling people names, refusing to engage with their claims and attempting to get them fired.

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D. Hicks @danhicks.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is an incomplete understanding of academic freedom, and partly confuses academic freedom with freedom of speech. (🧵 adapting some things from this paper, esp. §5: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28499/. Highly recommend the papers by Dea and Kronfeldner that I cite there!)

philsci-archive.pitt.edu

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Josh Grubbs @joshuagrubbsphd.com · 23/08/2026

Anyway, the not condescending version of the post is that you are never gonna convince me that I need to stand up for an evil person doing evil things under the cover of academic freedom as a means of ensuring the integrity of academic thought It is a stupid argument that betrays your biased

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The Drift @thedriftmag.com · 19/08/2026

Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

newsletter.thedriftmag.com

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

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Veli-Matti Karhulahti @mkarhulahti.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

new short paper "High-Impact Psychology Journals Fail to Publish Qualitative Studies"-- there's been a lot of discussion about possible bias against qual work in psychology & related fields but limited evidence, so we took a closer look at what's out there 1/ swisspsychologyopen.com/articles/10....

swisspsychologyopen.com

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David Chester @davidchester.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

AggreScale, part of the ManyScale project of @datingdecisions.bsky.social, is now live! It's the place to go for aggression scales and we hope to update it and grow it in the days to come. Huge thanks to Emily Pappalardo and James Marchment! www.manyscale.org/aggression/

manyscale.org

AggreScale

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Gabriel S. Pumpkins 🎃 @gsjphd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

let's be real: plagiarism scandals in academia happen all the time (not because academics plagiarize a lot, but just because of how many millions of faculty there are around the world) and it is never general-public news unless the culprit is a member of a minority.

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I really wish this Alex Blechman post weren't quite so evergreen...

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Benjamin Swerdlow @baswerdlow.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Really looking forward to reading this! The question "symptom of what?" nags me everytime I think about "symptom measures."

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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Really proud of this work that came together as a pet peeve project of a few NSMD PhD candidates, and now ended up in New Ideas in Psychology. What are symptoms? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

Rethinking ‘symptom’: A critical look at terminology in mental health research

The term symptom pervades mental health research, yet its meaning remains ambiguous. In this paper, we argue that the lack of clarity and consensus on…

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