iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

So you know previous waves of technological fabulism the tech companies threw a little loose change at social behavioral research and user interface experience. whats interesting about AI interesting is that they aren’t even pretending to care about how people use the technology.

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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

nyti.ms

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I love that you can see now if people follow you from a starter pack. And I love even more the fact that most of my new follows come from one called "Science Shitposters".

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

❇️ I've updated Data Skills for Reproducible Research to v6.1. The Iteration & Functions chapter has been split in two and I've added some material on unit testing. It's a living textbook, so please submit issues if you find a mistake or something unclear. psyteachr.github.io/reprores-v6/...

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Survey of German academics finds restrictions on academic freedom are rare and not associated with academic position, discipline or gender, but expectations of restrictions are higher among precarious academics. Hope this paper gets attention, as it does not confirm media stereotypes of academia

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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Journals should stop offering to store supplemental information. Everything that is shared with a paper should have it's own DOI, and live in a proper repository. As authors, link to files (e.g., Zenodo), but never add them as supplemental files.

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Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Machine learning and generative LLMs are subject to many of the same drawbacks and issues as general empirical research in the typical publishing system. In this piece now published at NHB we argue that, like for empirical research, ML and LLMs can benefit from the use of Registered Reports.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This poster hits a little different in the Glasgow underground…

Subway poster reading:

3 new posts lined up before you change lines
With an abstract subway map
Loomly |

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Ana Martinovici @anamartinovici.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Workshop done 😀 since I anyway put together a list of resources, I'm going to share it in this thread. So here we go, my top recommendations for how to improve computational reproducibility of your work

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Caspar van Lissa 🟥 @cjvanlissa.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

`webexercises` creates interactive exercises for pkgdown, Rmarkdown, and with this update, Quarto (books), Latex output, and #R package vignettes! My hope is that this will support open educational materials, especially in R-package documentation. cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

cran.r-project.org

webexercises: Create Interactive Web Exercises

Functions for easily creating interactive web exercises in 'R Markdown', 'Quarto', and package vignettes that students can use in self-guided learning.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I like this clear overview of ai use in preparing a resource (by @hadley.nz) but am really struck by the difference in language used to talk about tasks done with Claude versus other programs. How does this anthropomorphism change how we take responsibility? tidydesign.substack.com/p/y-code-whe...

1. I started by asking Claude to download the video from youtube, since I can never remember how to do it myself.

2. Then I used MacWhisper to create a transcript, and saved the slides from my keynote presentation as individual PNGs.

3. Next I did a few rounds of cleanup with Claude, first asking it to read my slides (so it know what terms I’m saying), then asking it to fix transcription errors, break it into paragraphs, and remove disfluencies (like “ah”, “um”, etc). I used git and committed each step so I could see exactly what it was doing.

4. Then I turned the plaintext transcript in to markdown, enriching it with links and asking it to insert the slides at the appropriate place (which it did remarkably well).

5. At this point, I realised I gave a live demo, so there was a long chunk of text with no slides. So I asked Claude to extract screenshots from the video, based on the original timestamps from the transcript.

6. I finished it off with a thorough personal read, lightly tweaking the text to ensure it captured what I actually meant not what I said.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My local chicken place’s chaotic pricing scheme winds me up an unreasonable amount.

Menu with per-piece prices written in manually

Chicken
1 piece - £1.90/per - £1.90 total
2 piece - 1.75 - £3.50
3 piece - 1.80 - £5.40
6 piece - 1.85 - £11.10
12 piece - 1.17 - £14.00

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I was pleased when most of my cool academic colleagues got on here and there was more interesting content, but lately every time I log on, I end up depressed about the world and contemplating just giving up and joining a commune with my extended polycule.

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Giles @gdeejay.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I heard someone say "Glad I didn't bother learning to program now that LLMs can do it." And my first thought was "Wait, wouldn't that same argument apply to learning to read too?" 🤨

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Institute for Replication @i4replication.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

1/ What is the prevalence of personally identifiable information (PII) in author-collected data publicly shared in the social sciences? We audited 327 replication packages from 11 leading journals in economics, political science, and psychology Answer: surprisingly high 🧵

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I love the concrete examples of how to avoid anthropomorphism in this article: artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation image recognition → image labeling speech recognition → automatic transcription shows bias → reflects bias hallucination → undesirable output goal → success condition

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Q. McLamore @ghawinriver.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

This is, incidentally, ALWAYS where the anti-trans playbook was going to lead, because they fundamentally conceptualized being trans as having a mental disability, and every last scrap of ableism they were covert with there, they're mask off on now. They must be rejected--in whole. Hobbes is right.

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Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you know the details of the Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Jason Arday (Cambridge) controversies but little about the Marc Tessier-Lavigne (Stanford) controversy, you should ask yourself why. [And, yes, the answer is as simple as you think it is. This isn’t 3-dimensional chess...]

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I got small town southern Ontario, which I guess is pretty accurate as I lived in Hamilton, ON for three years.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I could support a requirement that your co-authorship team will provide the same number of reviews your paper requires (presumably 2) over the next year, and that if you don’t do this you need to explain in the cover letter of your next submission (with a policy to only punish egregious abuses)

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Jenny Bryan @jennybryan.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

👉 "But in this new era, we must delete code even harder, because if we don’t constantly remove complexity, we are going to drown in generated kudzu slop that overtakes codebases." 🌿

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

So much this! How do we solve it? Is there an existing good explainer (for Mac and PC) especially for new coders? Should we make one if there isn’t? This is how we address it in the #PsyTeachR Applied Data Skills book: psyteachr.github.io/ads-v3/02-re...

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Wow. This is incredibly convincing evidence of falsification with clear intent. Huge props to Klaus Wertenbroch, who is probably having a pretty stressful time.

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

Occam's razor says that the reason autocorrect sucks so much now, is that they have been scraping raw typo-laden text to train it on.

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Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

How fast to things change in academia? I wrote this as a new lecturer in 14 years ago, clearly optimistic about how web 2.0 would change scientific publishing, but it's only gotten much, much worse. darrendahly.github.io/post/2012-02...

darrendahly.github.io

How can we fix scientific publishing? |

Principal Statistician | Senior Lecturer

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Fietser Brandon @americanfietser.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It takes years of studies and community debate to approve a single bike lane, but data centers are going in left and right with the footprint of a small natural disaster and almost no bureaucracy gets in the way.

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Left-wing authoritarianism is when you understand scientific evidence

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Dermot Lynott @dermotlynott.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

For the avoidance of doubt, this is complete BS. if you are a post-doc (or worker of any description frankly) and you have the option of joining a union, you absolutely should.

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Podcasting is Praxis @praxiscast.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

This remains the entire point of the Cass Review; enough scientific looking nonsense thrown together in bad faith that gives terfs enough cover and simultaneously traps trans people and allies in a discussion about methodology and process.

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Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 27/08/2026

Someone told me today they don’t need to defend academic freedom in “easy” cases like in Texas or at West Point because everyone knows they are bad so they only speak up about “hard” cases like Cofnas. I said it sounds like you’re only willing to defend racism and they made a face and walked away 🤦‍♂️

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Some days I think about how we’ve been carefully developing and validating metacheck for two years now, with limited and always-optional local LLM use, and worry it’s just going to be lumped in with quickly vibe-coded AI agents.

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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 26/08/2026

Friends, I think Ghent University should hear from us as the eugenicists are out in full force. This letter is from academics there to counter the ridiculous letter supporting the white supremacist now being called a "whistleblower" by his ilk You can add your name👇🏽 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University

***Version française en dessous*** We, colleagues of Nathan Cofnas - supported by many colleagues internationally - want to respond to the negative and incorrect framing of Ghent University’s decisio...

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Just updated my critique of Lynn's 'national IQ' data; a core plank of scientific racism for decades. Includes a response to recent defences of the datasets. Conclusion remains the same: ‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability worldwide

Abstract of the critique:

In 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen produced a dataset which claimed to provide average ‘national IQs’ for nation-states worldwide. Despite extensive critique, this dataset, and subsequent updated versions, have been used in many empirical publications. Here I evaluate the latest version, produced in 2019 by Lynn and Becker, and show that this dataset is not fit for purpose. The primary data sources are inadequate for calculating ‘national IQs’. Most data originates from samples which are wholly unrepresentative of their national populations. Many are convenience samples with small sample sizes, collected over a wide date range (the oldest from the 1940s), often including only children and often including individuals selected because they had particular characteristics (i.e., were deliberately chosen to be unrepresentative). The transformation of cognitive test data from these sources into ‘national IQs’ involved a series of questionable assumptions and arbitrary adjustments. Some of these assumptions were based on Lynn and Becker’s prior beliefs about intelligence, including that regional and racial differences in IQ exist. These methods will result not just in error in the dataset but systematic bias. Even if representative data and appropriate methods were available for constructing ‘national IQs’, it is impossible to generate comparable measures of cognitive ability from culturally diverse populations across the globe. ‘National IQ’ datasets therefore do not provide comparable, accurate and unbiased measures of cognitive ability worldwide, and should not be used to draw inferences about global variation in intelligence.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I can’t believe there isn’t a comic book character named Brain Storm whose nemesis, Green Needle, is eventually revealed to be either their long lost twin or an alternate personality. youtu.be/cwINf4cvUmA

youtu.be

“Brainstorm” or “Green Needle” Original video

YouTube video by LW D2003

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

A list of scholars either incompetent to understand the suspension letter or who support racism. I can’t see any innocent way to sign this.

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Josh Grubbs @joshuagrubbsphd.com · 24/08/2026

And that is how you end up in a situation where your “whistleblowing“ leads to consequences. Not because of the whistleblowing, but because you decided to become the main character of the Internet and lacked both the talent and the integrity to survive it.

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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 09/10/2025

Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme

tweet from childish branzino @absflora:
timothée chalamet is the new benedict cumberbatch in the sense that you can say ANYTHING and we know who you mean. tiffany chevrolet. timpanogos charlemagne. symphony cabernet. jiminy castaway.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

This book by @felienne.bsky.social has been on my to-read list for awhile, and this blog post convinced me to bump it up the list.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Ugh, I am not surprised about all of the names I recognise on this (a Cofnas controversy pre-dating the current one), but it reaffirms my decision to step away from the evpsych community. I'm thankful there are evolution-minded researchers like @rebeccasear.bsky.social who model better values.

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Lisa DeBruine @debruine.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

So who's part of the lucky 11% (18/158) funded applications for the UKRI Metascience round 2 grants? (not me 😢)

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 19/08/2026

Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, *if* you're a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and *if* you integrate AI judiciously so it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to outputs and apply discernment to them: pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/h... 5/

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: Discernment (28 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) @improvingpsych.org · 17/08/2026

Congratulations to the project “RegCheck,” which received🏆2026 SIPS commendation! RegCheck is a tool that makes it easier and quicker for researchers to compare published papers with their associated study registrations. regcheck.app

regcheck.app

RegCheck

RegCheck is an AI tool to compare preregistrations with papers instantly.

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 17/08/2026

7. It's yet another thing that AI has stolen away from the current generation of scientists. Yet again, AI proves to be an anti-egalitarian force in that these abuses force us to abandon the Mertonian norm of universalism for increased reliance on credentials, reputation, and personal connections.

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Lynda Boothroyd @drboothroyd.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Stapel faked years of data, got prosecuted, and went on to write a bloody memoir about it. Hauser and Wansink got to resign and then *not* disappear into obscurity. Gino got fired but Ariely is still in post. Zimbardo was famous for being a foundational case study in ethical failure.

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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My favorite Metascience conference will land in Copenhagen next year. The 9th (!) edition of the Perspectives on Science Error conference will be from January 27 to 29. Block your calendar, and see you there! errorsin.science

errorsin.science

Perspectives on Scientific Error 2027 · PSE9

Johanna Einsiedler, University of Copenhagen & University of Basel, johanna.einsiedler@sodas.ku.dk

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