Sign in

Dustin A. Chacón

@lingdustin.bsky.social
2.6K followers 1.1K following 886 posts

Assistant Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz. {Neuro/psycho}linguistics, syntax, and South Asian languages. He/him 🏳️‍🌈. Sometimes: Horror movies, video games, cats. www.lingdustin.net

PostsRepliesMedia
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12h
I think that AI solving for complex problems is an existence proof that distributed solutions can work for those problems. We still need to undertand how both the brain AND the AI systems actually do it. And, there's also no guarantee that the way the brain solves a problem is the same way AI does.
1100
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 16h
89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.
13929
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 15h
i've obviously posted about this before, but it really is amazing. until recently it seemed totally reasonable (if a bit pessimistic) to go "other people's experiences are just an inscrutable epistemic quandry. there's literally no way to ever know if 'aphantasiacs' exist". and then, we just did it
2312
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 15h
Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."
09546
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Rachel Ryskin @ryskin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
These are great opportunities that can lead to tenure-track positions in the UC system. Happy to support a PPFP application if there’s a good research fit!
089
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Whoa my tweet went viral. I don’t have a bandcamp, but I’m trying to write an NSF grant. If you retweeted me and want to give me $2-$4 million lmk, you’d save me a lot of time and energy
3270
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Turing said if you’re conscious, then you speak Chinese
1120
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
hikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
(confused) I believe LLMs are conscious, but only Deepseek LLMs, because of the Chinese Room theory
371831272
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:
Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads: 

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
255181774795
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Parents, talk to your kids about garden paths before it's too late
A flyer for a shop on UCSC campus. The flyer reads 'Free condoms! Free lube! Free fentanyl test strips!'. There's a line break after 'fentanyl', so the flyer looks like it says 'free fentanyl' at first glance
2210
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Whoops! Thanks for the people who reposted my study links. As usually happens, we found a bug the second I posted the links :) Stay tuned...
040
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Preparing for the new academic year, and I swear that every platform for sharing course material (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard...) is perfectly designed to be as unintuitive and stress-inducing as possible to my ADHD brain
070
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com · 12/09/2026
i am incredibly excited to share our research about how paying people’s rent through mutual aid made an impact on minnesota this year we accidentally collected more data than anyone ever has for an effort like this, and can very seriously say we prevented an eviction bubble that everyone expected
3031021154
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
My impression of Elizabeth Holmes in the Nathan Fielder trailer: :) ⦂) ⵓ) ꖉ) 𐌚)
0120
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Surprise gift from my mom! 'Kind of looks like a BRAIN'
A photo of a rock with convolutions that look somewhat like the lateral view of the right hemisphere of the brain. It's laying on a note that reads 'kind of looks like a BRAIN'
040
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The Cisco hold music is the OST of a creepy underground ice level www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLpm...
youtube.com
Cisco Default Hold Music
YouTube video by Danny’s Phone Messages And Hold Music Channel!
010
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I'm recently single (lol) so I'm considering moving to San Francisco on a bit of a budget. I would not wish apartment hunting in San Francisco in this economy on my worst enemy. Would you guys visit me if I lived in the Pain house?
An image of a STORE FRONT that was posted as an apartment on Craigslist. The store front has ceiling-to-floor windows that give full view of the inside of the apartment. The windows have the word 'PAIN' painted on, with photos of people rubbing their backs in agony.
1110
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2026
For a picture of where SF could be if it NIMBYed as hard as Santa Cruz: the *median* income is below the low income cutoff, because housing is so scarce and rare that HUD has to perform an income adjustment to mean any sort of market rents.
181
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
A little late to the party but I saw the Persona 6 trailer 👀 Can't wait to play it in 2038
050
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Congratulations to PhD student Subhs Shrestha for defending her 1st QP!
130
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
'They' referring to an explicitly gendered antecedent from instagram reeler gabe.rema #linguistics
Screenshot of an Instagram reel. The image shows the face of a man speaking with a text caption above his head. The caption reads: 'Yay another weird looking guy that is allegedly attractive in media even though not a single perosn youll ever meet finds them attractive.'
1110
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
A sampling of the psycho- and neurolinguists (UCSC and NYU(AD) contingents) who are living on my Tomodachi Life island currently
A screenshot of the video game Tomodachi Island. Eight characters are shown jumping in a classroom. Each one looks like a psycho- or neurolinguist that I have worked with.
060
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Some of you are going to be on my Tomodachi Life island and not even know it
290
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
My neurologist is Bengali, so my appointment this afternoon was twice as long since he wanted to talk neuro shop with me and then ask me etymology questions about Perso-Arabic borrowings into Bangla
1220
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Maija Tervola @maijatervola.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
A very interesting research setup on grammatical differences and how brain processes them. Done with a couple of understudied languages, Hindi and Nepal. Finnish has a similar differential object marking depending on quantitative definiteness of the object. And a thorough Bsky-summary, thanks!
0103
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
In other news, the proofs are up for my new paper, with a dream team of Subhs Shrestha, @linguistbrian.bsky.social, Diogo Almeida, Alec Marantz, and Rajesh Bhatt! direct.mit.edu/nol/article/...
direct.mit.edu
Same Sentences, Different Grammars, Different Brain Responses?: An MEG Study on Case and Agreement Encoding in Hindi and Nepali Split-Ergative Structures
Abstract. At first glance, the brain’s language network appears to be universal, but languages clearly differ. Does the brain adapt to the specific details of individual grammatical systems? Here, we ...
1295
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
At UCSC, our Psycholing 2 is a crash course on sentence processing for about 5 weeks, and then a practicum to do a novel research project for another 5 weeks. The 'final' is a poster presentation where each group gets to learn about what each other did.
A photo of myself and the class (approximately 20 undergraduate linguistics students) standing in front of two posters.
171
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
GOD SUEDE YOU! BLACK EMPEROR @suede.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
The world upon seeing Pombon
media.tenor.com
a woman is holding a puppy in her arms and says i 've only had arto for a day and a half
Alt: Rosa from Brooklyn 99 holding a puppy and saying "if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself"
420286
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
RTGame 👑 @rtgame.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
I would give my life for Pombon
151089103
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
AAHHH I LOVE THIS DUMB DOG!!!
050
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Tyler @loop528.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
She’s the cousin he comes out to on one of their annual Thanksgiving walks
Sobble if he slayed Sobble
0735
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Really just the absolute floor of demands that ICE must be abolished, dismantled, and everyone involved with its creation held accountable.
112418
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Oh hey paper acceptance! I didn't see it because I couldn't log into my old UGA e-mail lol 🫠
070
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Did you know there’s a horror movie coming out about a translation error?
271
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
thicc husband and father @lukeisamazing.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
yes, Dems are 100% ok with it. if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have voted for it dozens of times or tried to hit Republicans from the right for not being “serious about the border” during the 2024 election or be totally abdicate fighting against it now. but they did all that, they’re social fascists
161631361
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Democrats already warming up there 'ICE for all *who want it*' platform for 2028
040
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Max Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
"Should we vote to give more money to the people shooting my constituents in the face?" is not a complicated political question. And yet, Democrats don't seem able to answer it.
18178561924
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Margaret Killjoy @margaret.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Another friend put it to me like this: "ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."
68167373384
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Guy Grossman @guygrossman.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
164259901
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Whoever took my gym bag at Santa Cruz Athletic Club at ~11:30 AM this morning, then spent ~$2,000 at a hardware store on my credit cards and withdrew more from the ATM, can you please at least return my cards, my weightlifting equipment, and my hearing aids please?
380
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Janet Frick @jfrickuga.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
Raise your hand if you’re doing more in-class writing and activities on paper and the whiteboard.
281
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
Minnesotan Kaiju @whisperingpines.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
It is now confirmed from multiple sources that ICE shot a legal observer dead on Portland in Minneapolis between 34th and 33rd street. The victim is dead
16345812191
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
tooken
2101
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
geoffrey @parsnip.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
andy cohen's "am i excited about 2026? [pregnant pause] yeah. i... yeah. i mean, what's the alternative?" is the realest thing i've seen all night
31125155
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
Strict/sloppy ambiguity from Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper on CNN’s NYE event: “Agree or disagree, if I went to the gym every I’d have an ass like the guys on Heated Rivalry” Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, and BJ Novak all hold up signs that say “disagree”
380
Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón
PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
Multilingualism WithOut Words: A non-lexicalist model of bilingualism: osf.io/a5e3u
061
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
why don't they make dental treats for humans
081
Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
What if instead of computers having mice they had RATS
110