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Emily M. Sanford

@emilymsanford.bsky.social
537 followers 214 following 21 posts

Cognitive Scientist Postdoc at UC Berkeley Studying the evolution & development of quantitative reasoning

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Reposted by Emily M. Sanford
Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
It’s so cool that every American elite is desperate to stop having to think for themselves or learn anything
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Pieter T. L. Beck @ptrbck.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
We have written a statement in support of Ghent Uni's decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. We resist attempts to frame this as a punishment for "whistleblowing" or censorship of "controversial research". We invite all academics who share our views to sign our letter. forms.gle/qwN8xzEM5C7Q...
forms.gle
Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University
We, colleagues of Nathan Cofnas - supported by many colleagues internationally - want to respond to the negative and incorrect framing of Ghent University’s decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. With th...
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
op-ed columnists should have to submit to an annual quiz of some basic facts about the world and be fired if they fail
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 13/08/2026
I feel like an issue that would connect well with voters would be doing anything at all to slow the current progression toward "absolutely everything now is a scam"
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 06/08/2026
Killing off the Social and Behavioral Sciences directorate for this…
The NSF Unlocking Dataset Value for AI-Enabled Scientific Discovery program will invest up to $100 million to help research communities increase the value of existing scientific datasets. The program seeks to 1) apply AI-based capabilities to feature extraction and metadata generation, and the integration of multiple datasets. 2) Develop robust data pipelines necessary for automated analysis of existing datasets and similar use-cases by AI tools and systems. 3) Augment and/or harmonize existing datasets to better enable use by AI data pipelines and automated analysis
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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I don’t really want to get into this with people who feel this way, but i don’t think this is a good thing! We don’t need to behave this way! It’s not healthy to approach academic discourse as an exercise in harshness!
Screenshot of a post that reads “It's incredible is how little folks understand about academe. Peer review is brutal. Academic Q+A is Troy level slaughter. Bros attacking a lady academic for a fair review would shit themselves on stage after a paper and break down into toddler tears after their first conference paper w a mean Q+A.
12:35 PM • Aug 1, 2026 ® Everybody can reply
12 reposts 5 quotes 75 likes 1 save”
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
It was inevitable that reactionary centrists would turn against harm reduction and call for a return to mass incarceration
theatlantic.com
The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs
Policies that gave addicts clean needles and places to use drugs were intended to reduce harm. They created a “zombie apocalypse.”
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
The New York Times wouldn't let me write about the Age of Diarrhea so I had to do it myself.
stringinamaze.net
Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea
The future is not knowing what ails you
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
"No moral panic is more unoriginal than the fear that contemporary men are no longer as manly as the heroes who preceded them."
statnews.com
Pete Hegseth, ‘The Odyssey,’ and the testosterone myth
The poet didn’t say “sing to me, Muse, of a man with optimized endocrine panels," writes urologist Elizabeth Dray.
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CantlonLab @cantlonlab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Geometry is not something humans invented from scratch —congratulations to Jialin Li on her first, first author paper. More to come from this team… @spiantado.bsky.social @wenjieli.bsky.social @jialin21.bsky.social @emilymsanford.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
It is absolutely true that Dems need to win swing voters to win elections. The misdiagnosis is that swing voters are “moderates.” They are not. They have almost entirely incoherent politics. You don’t win them from the middle. You appeal to your base with conviction and hope swings like the vibes.
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Amy @lolennui.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
guy has a trillion dollars, 0 friends, and has never landed a joke. I know a pact with the devil when I see one.
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Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Psychotic way to characterize taxing rich people to help the disadvantaged.
Forget weighty collectivist ideals or seizing the means of production. Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine. Climate change and race, preoccupations of the 2010s and early 2020s, are now much more peripheral concerns. So are social issues, barring Gaza. Angst about inflation, housing and artificial intelligence have replaced all that with something cruder. “This country is awash in wealth,” says Avi Lewis, freshly elected leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, a country where productivity has been all but flat for a decade. “We can have nice things.” Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message.
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Mat Johnson @matjohnson.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Congratulations to everyone who said it would get this bad. Your prize is watching everyone who disagreed now claim no one could have predicted it would get this bad.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Borjas and Breznau have a recent paper in Science claiming to find that researchers’ lib ideology produced biased results in favor of immigration, but it looks like that finding was based on a coding error and strange weighting strategy osf.io/preprints/me...
SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Ideological bias in the production of research findings
George J. Borjas 2* and Nate Breznau'
When studying policy-relevant topics, researchers' policy preferences may shape analytical decisions and results interpretations. Detecting this bias is challenging because the research process is not normally part of an observed experimental setting. Our study exploits an opportunity to observe 158 researchers working independently in 71 teams during an experiment. After being asked their position on immigration policy, they used the same data to answer the same empirical question: Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? The researchers estimated 1253 alternative regression models, and the estimated impacts ranged from strongly negative to strongly positive. We find that teams composed of pro-immigration researchers estimated more positive impacts of immigration on public support for social programs, while anti-immigration teams estimated more negative im-pacts. The differences arise because different teams adopted different model specifications. The underlying research design decisions are the mechanism through which ideology enters the process of producing parameter estimates.
Copyright © 2026 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S.
Government Works.
Distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution
NonCommercial
License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).Fragile Evidence for an Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings:
Comment on Borjas and Breznau
Katrin Auspurg,'" Josef Brüderl
April, 2026
1 LMU Munich.
* Corresponding author: katrin.auspurg@Imu.de.
Abstract: Borjas and Breznau (1; hereafter referred to as B&B) recently reported that researchers' ideology influences their empirical findings. Although we were able to reproduce B&B's numerical results, our reanalysis shows that the reported association is not robust.
Specifically, the association hinges on a coding error. Data from four teams that contradict the ideology hypothesis were excluded from the analysis due to idiosyncratic variable coding.
Correcting this error renders the ideology effect no longer statistically significant. Also, B&B employed a different outcome variable and weighting scheme to that used in a previous paper based on the same data. These two analytical decisions further contribute to the observed ideology effect. Correcting the coding error or using the same specification as in the previous paper renders the ideology effect indistinguishable from zero. Therefore, we conclude that B&B do not provide robust evidence of ideological bias in this context. Instead, the reported association appears to be a statistical artefact resulting from questionable modelling decisions.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 22/05/2026
“Units of the NIH are privately directing grantees to request permission in advance for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, even if all the work was done in the United States.” Grantees also told to remove papers with foreign authors from progress reports.
science.org
U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
NIH, NASA grantees are confused and concerned amid agencies’ piecemeal communication
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🐈‍⬛🎃🔪 Adam Jay 🍁💀👻 @bullgooseparty.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
I can’t stress enough that deciding a law is “no longer needed” is so far outside the realm of what any court should be doing
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
My latest newsletter is about how the media defines "political violence" as something that happens exclusively to politicians, and ignores its primary victims: everyone else.
stringinamaze.net
What's Political Violence?
When the media talks about political violence, they're only telling part of the story
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Chenxin Li, PhD @chenxinli2.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
$900 million to pay companies to not do wind energy and $400 million for the ballroom, that’s $1.3 billion or ~1,300 3 to 4-year NSF awards.
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Chris Krupenye @chriskrupenye.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Thrilled to be featured alongside a number of colleagues I admire in this beautiful piece in @theguardian.com on stunning discoveries about the minds of our closest ape relatives! @gloriadickie.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
Bonobos enjoy pretend tea parties and chimps think rationally: why apes are more like us than we ever thought
A series of stunning findings about great apes’ mental capabilities in recent years has transformed how we see our closest relatives
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability
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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
The NYT is being disingenuous here. The AMA has *always* said that gender-affirming surgeries should generally be reserved for adults. That's part of why so few kids get them! The AMA reiterated this position and the NYT is characterizing it as a policy change. It's not.
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onion person @junlper.beer · 19/03/2026
it’s incredibly blackpilling to me that it takes rising gas prices and rising gas prices alone to have people turn against the war in iran, and not the american government murdering thousands of children and civilians in iran. americans are incredibly selfish
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Physically incapable of analyzing politics outside of this insipid frame. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Why MAGA Wants You to Think Slavery Wasn’t That Bad
Both the left and the right try to co-opt it, but the real story of American slavery doesn’t serve any one faction.

By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
“Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?” There are no words to adequately describe the evil here.
aljazeera.com
Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate
US-made thermal weapons burning at 3,500C caused 2,842 people to "evaporate" in Gaza, Al Jazeera investigation finds.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date): academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868 An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.
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The Conversation U.S. @us.theconversation.com · 10/02/2026
The idea that humans sit atop an evolutionary hierarchy dates back to 1866, when a scientist drew the first tree of life with "Man" at the top. This inaccurate view still shapes how we think of the animal world, despite decades of genomic evidence proving evolution has no hierarchy. buff.ly/dpXwi1r
buff.ly
No animal alive today is ‘primitive’ – why are so many still labeled that way?
All species alive today, from chimpanzees to bacteria, are cousins that each have equally long lineages, rather than ancestors or descendants of one another.
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Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 09/02/2026
So uh Ring just up and said they've got a huge centralized private surveillance network they can leverage all at once huh
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mechanical twerk @ruhee.ca · 08/02/2026
No Kings includes Draft Kings
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance.

But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain.

He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again.

He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.
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Chris Krupenye @chriskrupenye.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko
youtu.be
Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine
YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University
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Dan Kaszeta FRHistS @dankaszeta.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Y’all didn’t realize they were using “Democracy dies in darkness” as a mission statement, not a salutary motto
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 03/02/2026
guy turns out to be exactly who a bunch of us Black women said he was: an American story
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tagerai.bsky.social @tagerai.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
hindsight is 20/20 but maybe selecting university presidents on their willingness to debase themselves for private donor money is related to the current difficulties in defending academia from fascism
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
It's disturbing to see many of the the major figures in moral cognition all over the Epstein files He was friendly with a huge number of the leading figures in the field, including giving millions to their labs, long after he pled guilty to sexually abusing young girls www.justice.gov/epstein
justice.gov
 
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
And Epstein was an explicit eugenicist! Even in the (unlikely) scenario that the academics writing him chummy emails didn't know about the pedophilia charges, they were seeking funding because they thought their work aligned with his interests, which were monstrous.
Interest in eugenics and transhumanism
Beginning in the early-2000s Epstein developed an interest in "improving" the human race through genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, including using his own sperm. He addressed the scientific community at various events and occasions and communicated his fascination with eugenics.[395] It was reported in 2019 that Epstein had planned to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnating up to 20 women using his New Mexico compound as a "baby ranch", where mothers would give birth to his offspring. He was an advocate of cryonics and his idiosyncratic version of transhumanism, and said he intended to have his penis and head frozen.[396][397]
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Cheryl T. @g8rgrrlcheryl.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
The guy on the right is New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, photographed at the Kennedy Center premiere of “Melania.” #GoSeahawks!
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 31/01/2026
straight up Gestapo shit
DHS: Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area. Call 866-DHS-2-ICE.

If you are an illegal alien, you can take control of your departure using DHS.GOV/CBPHOME.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 01/02/2026
Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
I wonder if the New York Times will go after any of the prominent academics in the Epstein files for being rapists as hard as they went after Claudine Gay for being kind of sloppy with citations in her graduate thesis. If not, why not?
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
it’s a good day to be a Bari Weiss hater
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 30/01/2026
the arrest of journalists in minneapolis, including don lemon, is more evidence that the only move the administration knows how to make is to use force, and does not know how to respond when that force is met with defiance and indifference.
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Jonathan W. Gray @elmcitytree.blacksky.app · 30/01/2026
These are all Black people. The regime is betting that you wont care Jamael & Trahern the way you care about Alex & Renée
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
friend of mine is an undocumented immigrant and has been hiding in Melania theaters bc he knows people assume no one is in there
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
This is an important paper on social class barriers among faculty in academia. First-generation college grads earn less and are placed at lower prestige institutions despite being just as productive as other faculty. Faculty from upper class backgrounds are overplaced for their research records.
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