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Micah Goldwater

@micahgoldwater.bsky.social
126 followers 126 following 23 posts

Cognitive scientist at The University of Sydney. All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.

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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
We (USyd Psychology) are hiring a continuing position at the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level (this is equivalent to the tenure-track Assistant Prof level, but you start out with more security than pre-tenure). usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E...
usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com
Senior Lecturer/Lecturer in Psychology
1 full-time continuing position available, located on the Camperdown Campus at the School of Psychology Opportunity to contribute to research and teaching in a world leading Psychology department Base...
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
FYI: Claude will link to the right article to cite, with some correct info but wrong author list. I found citations to my papers in recent published peer reviewed articles without my or my co-authors names. I’ve seen Claude do this so I’m sure this is what the authors did. This is not going well!
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
New article by me in the Conversation on the psychology of sense-making, and its role in maintaining superstitions.
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Was great to be part of this big international collaboration.
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
The Creative Link Between Words and Ideas is Weakening in the AI Era osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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simine vazire @simine.com · 18/12/2025
What should psychology journals do about this? What’s a reasonable policy/standard to apply to research using online data collection methods?
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Apply for this postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, on a cool interdisciplinary funded project between cognitive scientists and archeologists, examining the distortion of archeological findings to support hostile nationalist narratives on social media elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
The Psychology Department in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences are seeking a full time, fixed term Post-Doctoral Research Associate. This post is available from 1st of Septemb...
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Jewish Council of Australia @jewishcouncilau.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Media release: Unity must guide the Government's response to Bondi attack, not divisive pro-Israel wishlist Full release available at the link in our bio.
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ICTA-UAB @icta-uab.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
First comprehensive investigation shows large support for core ideas of degrowth, but not the label. Conducted by ICTA-UAB researchers @giorgoskallis.bsky.social & @jasonhickel.bsky.social together with the LSE @lsepoliticsblog.bsky.social www.uab.cat/web/sala-de-...
uab.cat
First comprehensive investigation shows large support for core ideas of degrowth, but not the label
The first major study into public attitudes toward degrowth – the notion that high-income economies should prioritise wellbeing over growing...
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William Ngiam | 严祥全 @williamngiam.github.io · 24/11/2025
After seeing @micahgoldwater.bsky.social speak on memes as forms of argument-making, I've decided to livetweet what I can of the Australasian Society of Philosophy and Psychology conference #ASPP2025. Conservatives can see the effectiveness of liberal memes, whereas the reverse is not observed.
Using an epic handshake meme to convey that philosophy and psychology are joined at the Australasian Sciety of Philosophy and Psychology conference (ASPP)
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 27/10/2025
Good on Australia for doing this! It’s such a deceptive practice to tell customers their price is increasing because of AI, when the old price is still available without genAI but only if you try to cancel.
theregister.com
Australia sues Microsoft for misleading Microsoft 365 users
Asia In Brief: PLUS: China demotes tech self-sufficiency goal; Alibaba Cloud quietly quits VMware; India demands deepfake labels; and more!
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
I know we're desensitized, but it's important to note, again, that today's events would have led to the immediate impeachment & removal of any president from at least Truman to at least Obama. We're hundreds of miles on the interstate past Richard Nixon's high school prank-level crimes compared to 👇
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 22/09/2025
this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses. www.afr.com/work-and-car...
The net result is the worst of both worlds. Universities invoke the rhetoric of business discipline, but they lack the governance structures that give that discipline bite. They operate without the checks that private ownership provides, yet subject staff and students to the cost-cutting and efficiency drives that profit-maximising firms pursue. The result is waste at the top and insecurity at the bottom.
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
There is a ton of research that students ratings on aggregate do not reflect learning outcomes, but whatever biases the population has. But in the "run universities like a business" model, student ratings are customer satisfaction surveys, so reflecting learning outcomes is irrelevant.
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Tim Graham Games @timgames.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Excited to announce my first ever published game, for the @halcyonfrequency.bsky.social gamejam. ”Social Media Manager", a shady deskjob simulator with #roguelike elements. I hope you enjoy it and would love to hear any feedback #indiegames #indiedev timothyjgraham.itch.io/social-media...
timothyjgraham.itch.io
Social Media Manager by Timothy Graham
A roguelike management sim about social media manipulation and corporate
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Osman Faruqi @osmanfaruqi.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
This is a bizarre thing to publish on the day the federal court awarded a journalist $220,000 for being unfairly dismissed from an on-air role for their political views. In Australia it isn't just private companies that cave to pressure, it's the public broadcaster www.smh.com.au/national/why...
smh.com.au
Why Jimmy Kimmel would have never been cancelled in Australia
We need to be careful about how we separate true hate speech from satirical speech. In America, it seems, differentiation is out of favour.
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
If you, like me, are the parent of a neuro-atypical child dreading this autism press conference, please remember: These are the people hurting our kids. Not us. They are the ones stigmatizing and pathologizing them. They are the ones peddling untested science. And we should be very, very angry.
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mat marques, ph.d. @mdmarques.com · 13/09/2025
"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor."
futurism.com
It Turns Out That Google's AI Is Being Trained by an Army of Poorly Treated Human Grunts
Google is depending on thousands of contractors to train the AI behind its flagship chatbot Gemini.
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Swinda Falkena @swinda.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Interesting new study! They attributed heatwaves🔥 to emissions of individual companies. Companies that emit a lot of CO2 contribute to climate change, making heatwaves more intense. Can this help in pushing them to reduce emissions and hold them accountable for the damage? doi.org/10.1038/s415...
nature.com
Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors - Nature
Climate change made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed.
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Daryl Cameron @dcameron.bsky.social · 31/08/2025
As the fall semester begins, I'd like to send a call to anyone who would like to get involved in our Consortium on Moral Decision-Making. We're a dedicated network of morality and ethics researchers focused on breaking outside siloes to work together on big questions. moralconsortium.psu.edu 1/n
moralconsortium.psu.edu
Home - Consortium on Moral Decision-Making
Welcome to the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making A collaborative hub dedicated to unraveling the intricate threads of ethical choices. As a multidisciplinary alliance of scholars, thinkers, and prac...
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
I often talk about the fact that MAGA does not access the same news as the left wing. I present to you Exhibit A. Dr. Daskalakis’ resignation letter excoriated RFK Jr. and shared that RFK Jr. was lying to the public, manipulating data, and ordering unethical actions. This what Fox News served.
Screenshot from Fox News that says 

CDC official includes
'pregnant people' terminology and pronouns in resignation letter
Daskalakis accused President Trump's administration of attempting 'to erase transgender populations'
By Alex Nitzberg • Fox News
Published August 28, 2025 1:47pm EDT
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Brian Guay @brianguay.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇
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mat marques, ph.d. @mdmarques.com · 19/08/2025
"Public health campaigns should consider personality traits for more effective preventive interventions. They can target people high in openness, for example, by presenting health science as dynamic and evolving, not just a set of rules and prescriptions…"
theconversation.com
Why do smart people get hooked on wellness trends? Personality traits may play a role
Certain personality traits may help explain why some educated, well-intentioned people sometimes reject conventional medicine in favour of fringe practices.
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simine vazire @simine.com · 18/08/2025
I know it’s gauche to share good news on here, but our university’s IRB (ethics office) just declared that low risk applications will no longer be reviewed by 4 people & then go to a committee. They’ll be reviewed by 1 person. I almost can’t believe a change this positive is possible in this world.
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thomas irvine @ahermitsvino.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
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Imperfect Cognitions @imperfectcognitions.com · 14/08/2025
In June, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies hosted a workshop on conspiracy theory and story telling at the University of Birmingham, featuring five exciting academics working on the topic. Today's post presents a brief summary of each of their talks. #philsky #philpsy
imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com
Conspiracy Theories and Storytelling
A blog about imperfect cognitions, such as delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, and implicit biases.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 31/07/2025
In light of the Columbia and Brown deals, I’m bumping these slides again about the Nazi takeover of German science, which includes discussion about how they took over academia, in a manner very similar to the Brown and Columbia deals
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
New paper: we argue that an individual's propensity to compare items and discover abstract relational rules, rather than focus on surface similarity, is stable across learning tasks, and is independent of working memory capacity. link.springer.com/article/10.3...
link.springer.com
Evidence for rule versus exemplar learning strategies as stable individual differences independent from working memory - Memory & Cognition
Evidence for two qualitatively different learning strategies has emerged from the function- and category-learning literatures: a rule-based and an exemplar-based strategy. With a rule-based strategy, ...
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
bayesians gotta relax with the taking credit for the concept of infering things about the world
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 31/07/2025
Lol @micahgoldwater.bsky.social meme redux at #cogsci2025 in a cool talk about political psych via memes
Micah presenting this meme
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
In our new paper, we motivate giving community health workers the tools to support evidence-based medical decision-making that go beyond a deficit model. journals.plos.org/globalpublic...?
journals.plos.org
Community health workers’ counseling is based on a deficit model of behavior change
Author summary In 2005, India started the ASHA program to help rural communities get better healthcare and health education access. While the program has improved health services, many do not follow m...
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Tufts PhD student in child development, whose research was on the representation of refugees in children's media, was abducted by ICE; video in link. I hadn't seen this on this app, so wanted to spread at least a little. This is very far beyond suppressing free speech. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...
wgbh.org
Tufts international graduate student taken into ICE custody
The student was reportedly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and remains in federal custody, according to an email sent by the university Tuesday evening.
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Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
Ho et al. (2025) review three decades of work on social dominance orientation (SDO), which represents "individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy and inequality." BSky authors: @nourkteily.bsky.social, @jsskeffington.bsky.social, @lottethomsendk.bsky.social
researchgate.net
(PDF) Ho, Kteily, Sheehy-Skeffington, and Thomsen, Social Dominance Orientation, IN PRESS AESP
PDF | On Mar 21, 2025, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and others published Ho, Kteily, Sheehy-Skeffington, and Thomsen, Social Dominance Orientation, IN PRESS AESP | Find, read and cite all the research ...
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Kaylan_TX @kaylan.bsky.social · 09/03/2025
I hate how accurate this feels right now🫣
@jaycatt7 tweeted:

“My roommate described Republicans as the mass shooter and Democrats as Uvalde cops, and I can't get it out of my head”
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Re-upping this again as more people read about the Khalil case. More information to come, but nothing in WP and NYT so far contradicts original reporting. Again, it DOES NOT MATTER what you think about him or his cause. Either government is bound by the law for all of us or we're all at their mercy.
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Luke Butler @lucaspbutler.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
As legal permanent residents, green card holders are protected by the first amendment. Clear and pretty unambiguous precedent: firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/alie...
firstamendment.mtsu.edu
Aliens
Although the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens, the Court has not always treated these groups the same.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 25/02/2025
we just posted the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a corpus of audio & metadata. 1007 songs in many languages, for behavioral experiments, cross-cultural research, etc preprint: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/d2ftg_v1 corpus: zenodo.org/records/14927216 led by @milabertolo.bsky.social 1/
The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, aglobal corpus of vocal music

[author list]

AbstractA comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferencesabout the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, withmany available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstandinginterest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here,we report theExpanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n=1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby,dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages;and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian,and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures,principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolutionof song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. Weshow that (1) the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previouslyunstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across culturesare predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.a figure from the paper with a world map, some phylogenetic trees, and a big heatmap
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Morteza Dehghani @mdehghani.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
New research led by @zhpinkman.bsky.social investigating the impact of LLMs on the reduction of linguistic diversity and its societal implications. "We're getting the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else." George Orwell, 1984
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
What % is young women dating older men and what % is young men and young women thinking differently about the same situationship? Social psychologists: plz answer, thank you.
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Osman Faruqi @osmanfaruqi.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
It’s crazy how badly the Australian economy is doing. “Cost of living” doesn’t really capture how much things have tanked, and Albanese sharing graphs showing inflation has peaked feels like a Biden-esque move that won’t arrest his decline.
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Lew @lewsos.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Happy anniversary to all who celebrate
James Cook died today 14th February 1779
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 14/02/2025
For the entire University of California system- "secretly put spyware on all computers to track our browsing and the CIO is like ‘the mailman can look at where your mail is going if they want this is no different" What is stopping other universities from doing the same? Should we assume they are?
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Micah Goldwater @micahgoldwater.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
New paper led by Kit Double on how eliciting metacognitive judgments affects learning. Some propose that prompting reflection improves learning outcomes, but we see the opposite- these judgments shift learners away from strategies that promote knowledge transfer. link.springer.com/article/10.1...?
link.springer.com
Reactivity to confidence ratings: evidence of impaired rule-learning - Metacognition and Learning
Recent evidence has shown that eliciting confidence ratings can affect cognitive performance– a so-called reactivity effect. Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for reactivity, but curren...
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NPR @npr.org · 07/01/2025
Health officials in Louisiana say a person there has died after catching bird flu. This marks the first reported death in the U.S. from the virus during the current outbreak.
npr.org
First bird flu death reported in the U.S., according to the CDC
Health officials in Louisiana say a person there has died after catching bird flu. This marks the first reported death in the U.S. from the virus during the current outbreak.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
From my colleagues Kyle Harper and David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute: Position for two-year postdoc with background in computer science interested in working with social scientists/historians to study social evolution through computational lens. Details here: santafe.edu/about/jobs/p...
santafe.edu
sfiscience
SFIhas an opening for a two-year full-time postdoc. We are seeking a highly motivated scholar with expertise in Computer Science and a desire to apply their expertise to analyze the evolution of human...
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