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Patrick S. Forscher

@psforscher.bsky.social
1.7K followers 295 following 522 posts

Senior Behavioral Scientist at Busara, a non-profit that does behavioral science to advance development. Strong interest in applied meta-research. patrickforscher.com

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Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
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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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/09/2026
"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Interesting read, in which he acknowledges that one of the (few) examples used in the main Vanderbilt report as evidence for the hopeless politicisation of anthropology is, in fact, simply science working as it should www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
chronicle.com
The Harvard Anthropologist Who’s Skewering His Own Field
Joseph Henrich, an author of a divisive report about politicization in the humanities, says, “I knew it wasn’t going to make everyone happy.”
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
One of the reason current AI discourse is frustrating is the degree to which Silicon Vallley thinking has sucked the oxygen out of the scientific funding landscape and RFPs wind up framed towards various Boom/Doom scenarios.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 23/09/2026
after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol
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moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New paper! Despite qualitative researchers claiming that generalizability is not a goal, their published work does indeed contain generalizable claims. We document this and provide recommendations for how all researchers can better calibrate their generalizability claims. doi.org/10.1177/2515...
article header for, "Qualitative Researchers Can and Do Generalize: Generalizability Claims in Qualitative Psychological Research". Metascience!
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𝙹*𝚊𝚍𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝙼𝚊𝚐𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎 🍏 @artmyoldfriend.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
“The Cobolt Passage” by Canadian Chinese artist Yehan Wang.
“The Cobolt Passage” by Canadian Chinese artist Yehan Wang.
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Pam Davis-Kean, PhD @umpamdk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
My newest Presidential Column for @psychscience.bsky.social addresses the issue of psychologists' dominant use of convenience samples for their research. Can our science stop being WEIRD if we don't consider how we sample? www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
psychologicalscience.org
Is It Too Convenient to Stay WEIRD?
APS President Pamela Davis-Kean outlines her plenary topics for the 2027 APS Annual Convention in Seattle, Washington.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 20/09/2026
“The arrangement would give Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a direct role in determining how NIH distributes its $48 billion in congressionally-appropriated money.” Bypassing the many checks and balances at NIH on grant funding decisions.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
We already have an AI kill switch: cut power to servers. Really want to talk existential threat? Fine. We humans have many ways to blow things up. Like data centers. Panicky discourse assumes the first priority is protect tech company investments and expand their businesses. But why should it be?
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paolo @paolopalma.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
OSF becoming unusable all last week because of scraping, not being able to access Google scholar, journals being inundated with low quality AI-generated papers, love how AI is accelerating science
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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 05/05/2026
Remember when y'all made this thread on Paulina Borsook go viral? Well, that resulted in her getting a deal to re-publish her book in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, Belgium, France, and Switzerland! Coming Sept. 15—with a foreword by some guy named Gil Duran. Pre-order! www.cyberselfish.com
cover for "Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech" by Paulina Borsook. Foreword by Gil Duran.
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 18/09/2026
This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.
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Gabe Wasylko @gabewasylko.com · 19/09/2026
Between Buildings in Cleveland, Ohio
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17/09/2026
i’m sorry but this entire worldview seems not just evil but deeply stupid? the far future is fake! it doesn’t exist! what matters are people here and now!
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James Benjamin @ajbenjaminjr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is a test to see if I can still find my academic people and if they can find me. I met a number of people I still deeply treasure from #SIPS in Rotterdam (2019) or virtually (2020-2021). Since Twitter became unreckognizable, I've wanted to rebuild my network.
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I am sad to share that Project Implicit, my first non-profit and foundation of my career, is closing. The IAT website will continue, managed by the next generation of leaders in implicit bias research. Here's the statement I posted to LinkedIn. It didn't vibe right as a bsky thread.
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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 13/09/2026
Faculty unions at major universities could learn a thing or two about leverage from musicians' unions
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Stephen Kinsella @stephenstroud.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Whatever you think of his politics, this story illustrates the problem of leaving redistribution to “philanthropy”. We need effective taxes on wealth so that the receipts can be allocated according to the needs of the country as a whole.  @patmillsuk.bsky.social
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The cover-up is always worse than the crime? Harvard's latest filing says that Gino manipulated a file to cover-up fabrication, hid the laptop used to do it during the discovery process, and did more [redacted] destruction of evidence after being compelled by the court to share the laptop.
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Protzko @protzko.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Do small effects really accumulate to make big effects? Not really. And certainly not when there are other causes on the thing you are looking at. Which, you know, is always. From Berggren & @jkflake.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1... #psych
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Priya Silverstein @priyasilverstein.com · 08/09/2026
SIPS [@improvingpsych.org] elections are here! Don't forget to cast your ballot. If you don't already know the candidates, I would like to put a special shout out to @aliciafrancomnez.bsky.social who is running in the graduate student and postdoc category ✨
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Altmetric @altmetric.com · 08/09/2026
Update: The academic flight from Twitter is now complete and appears permanent. April 2023, after the pandemic research surge, we recorded 2,234,307 posts sharing research on Twitter. As of April this year, "X" had 896,741 posts about research. That's a 60% drop in traffic.
Graph showing cumulative research sharing across platforms, including Twitter - April 2023Graph of April 2026 cumulative research sharing including "X". One third of what it was.
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simine vazire @simine.com · 02/09/2026
Psych Science has retracted Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002). The second author requested the retraction. Both authors agreed to it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... So grateful to @datacolada.bsky.social for these blog posts and the work behind them: datacolada.org/138 and datacolada.org/139 1/2
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 02/09/2026
Who would like to guess why UK, US and European media outlets are not publishing 3,000 articles per minute about this www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...
dukechronicle.com
‘Insane data’: Duke professor Dan Ariely accused of additional research fraud
New evidence released Monday shows that Dan Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business, likely tampered with or fabricated data in an influential research paper from ...
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Tuta @tuta.com · 31/08/2026
If you have a Gmail account, you need to read this. Google's AI now scans your emails and attachments, bank statements, tax files, medical letters, all of it. It turned on by default, and there's a class-action lawsuit over how. Here are 5 moves to shut it off, the switch is hidden in two places:
Image of Sundar Pichai and the Gmail logo
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GRAIN @grain.org · 24/08/2026
Powerful issue of @thecontinent.org zooms in on 20 years of the Bill Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and how it has backfired. Across AGRA’s 13 focus countries, the number of undernourished people rose by 58%. www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2... @timschwab.bsky.social
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Patrick S. Forscher @psforscher.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Several years ago, my organization invited Joe Henrich to give a virtual talk to the entire organization. He spent an hour lecturing to around 140 people, 95% of whom are from the Global South, about elaborate just-so stories justifying the superiority of Western culture
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Maybe, sometimes, it's also possible to read the work of people who actually have been studying the countless reasons why stuff can fail to replicate or to understand that replication is not the only method we have to learn or to verify? Idk. Just saying. But sure go ahead and ask AI why won't you.
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Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Among the many ironies of this report, I was particularly shocked that Joe Henrich - who coined the "WEIRD" acronym -was one of its 10 (all US-based) authors, making sweeping unsupported generalisations from very limited, "WEIRD" data
This over-generalisation from specific US anthropology examples is particularly shocking to me given that the sole anthropologist to coauthor the report is Joseph Henrich (who I generally greatly respect as a scholar). Henrich’s most influential academic research – cited in over 20,000 other academic research articles – demonstrates that much research on participants from the US and other societies he dubs “WEIRD”– “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic” – does not generalise to other contexts (Henrich et al., 2010). So it’s particularly ironic that Henrich of all people would coauthor such a sweeping “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” based on very limited, almost exclusively “WEIRD” data.
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/08/2026
Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
Psychological Science invites submissions that advance psychological science through careful description of psychological phenomena. Psychological research often focuses on explaining and predicting phenomena before we have a sufficiently detailed understanding of them. It can be difficult to build strong theories on incomplete empirical foundations of the phenomena themselves. Careful descriptive research helps establish shared empirical reference points developed around well-characterized phenomena. As such, descriptive research contributes to psychological science both by improving our understanding of the phenomena themselves and by providing a stronger foundation for future theory-building, explanation, and prediction.

We are interested in manuscripts that:

Deepen our understanding of psychological phenomena, including what they look like, how they vary, and how they unfold;
Draw on a variety of sources of evidence and methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches; research conducted in naturalistic settings; intensive, longitudinal, or small-sample designs; and open or large-scale datasets; 
Provide necessary context for interpreting what is being described, including who is represented in the data, the settings and circumstances in which phenomena occur, and the broader social contexts in which they are situated; and/or
Make a substantive contribution to psychological science through the quality, depth, or significance of the description provided.
The deadline for submitting regular manuscripts is April 15, 2027. Registered Reports will also be considered. The deadline for submitting Stage 1 Registered Reports is November 15, 2026. Authors should indicate in the “Comments to Editor” box during submission that the manuscript is intended for the “Descriptive Research in Psychological Science” special issue.
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Eiko Fried @eikofried.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Defending Cofnas, who had written outrageously racist stuff for years (e.g., that in a meritocracy there would be next to no Black professors because they have lower IQs), is an odd hill to die on. Yet the 100-plus academics who signed this letter are clearly willing to die on it :/
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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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Prof Julia Steinberger 🌹🌱🌍 #ClimateAction #Fightfascism @jksteinberger.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
🤔 I really wish more of the discourse around Cofnas, Yarvin, Musk, Thiel etc and their successful lynching of a Black academic would refer to @quinnslobodian.com's "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" tracing Silicon Valley's route from Ayn Rand to 'race science.'
Cover image of Quinn Slobodian's book
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/08/2026
If you just happened to pick this week to start yelling about the importance of academic freedom, I sure hope you did more than watch silently for the past 18 months as the Trump administration assaulted everything from mRNA vaccine research to gender studies to the very idea of having universities.
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Beth Clarke @bethclarke.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I’m hiring a PhD student to work with me on metascience in psychology at @zpid.bsky.social! The position is very open - could cover a wide range of topics/themes 🤸🏻‍♀️✨ If you have questions, please reach out! Applications are open until October 1st. leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/en/job/fyjwt...
leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs
PhD in Psychological Meta-Science (m/f/d)
Become part of the open science movement The Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) in Trier (Germany) is an internationally recognized research-based psychology service center located in...
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Also worth noting how many of the signatories of the letter defending Cofnas call themselves evolutionary psychologists, including those with gatekeeping roles or large public platforms. Concerning to have the discipline represented by those who, at very best, misunderstand academic freedom
drive.google.com
Statement in support of Nathan Cofnas.pdf
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.
Graph of student exam scores correlated to homework completion time for to groups, students using AI and those that did not. There is a slight spike for studens using AI who also maintained extensive homework completion time. As described in post, the number of students falling into this bucket was 20 out of 26,000.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Sasha Gusev has a great new blog post on faculty hiring during the DEI era. Remarkable how much backlash there has been to what was an tiny and temporary bump in hiring Black, Latino, and Native faculty of about 1 person per R1 campus theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-actua...
Demographics of R1 university faculty, 2001-2024
84.5% 80%
White 69.8%
60
40
20
8.9%
3.4%
2.9%
0.3%
2001
'05
'10
'15
'20
— Asian/PI 17.1%
lispanic 6.4%
Black 4.8%
'24 Other 1.9%Hiring counts for tenure-track positions at R1 universities
4,000 hires
3,797
• Non-URM 3,753
3,000
2,000
2,254
1,000
623
623
298
→ URM 788
Black 348
2018
2019
2020
322
2021
2022
2023
2024
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
New from 404 Media: we solved which AI company is buying massive shipments of rare books, scanning and destroying them to train AI. We put an Apple AirTag in a rare book, followed it. It ended up at an Amazon facility. Its logo is a dinosaur ripping through a book www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...
404media.co
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
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BlackskyNews 🗞️ @blackskynews.blacksky.app · 11/08/2026
In recent weeks, Black communities have noted a disturbing pattern of Black people dying in mysterious ways, and local officials jumping to early conclusions about the causes of death. “A Crimson Record exposes the hidden truth about modern-day lynchings, thegrio.com/2026/08/10/b... #BlackskyNews
thegrio.com
Black people are being found hanging from trees. Why are officials so quick to call it suicide?
Tasia Fortune's death is the latest in a string of cases across the country, drawing scrutiny over how officials investigate Black deaths.
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Health Nerd @gidmk.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
The Jason Arday saga made me furious and sad in equal measure so I wrote about it. The whole thing is deeply unpleasant. gidmk.substack.com/p/the-jason-...
gidmk.substack.com
The Jason Arday Saga Is Terrible And Everyone Involved Should Be Ashamed Of Themselves
The whole thing makes me furious
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
I found this piece incredibly compelling: media ownership affects content, which affects attitudes and behavior. "Smart" types like journalists are not immune to these effects. Why did Musk buy twitter and make it a worse business? For political influence. Same argument as my new working paper!
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
New working paper w/ Hanna Folsz In Jan 2025 Trump issued an executive order targeting corporate DEI programs. Many companies ended DEI fearing financial risk We find that firms that kept DEI performed just as well in financial markets, revenue, etc democracypolicylab.berkeley.edu/wp-content/u...
The Trump administration has used executive authority to influence the behavior of civil society organizations such as law firms, universities, and corporations.
Do corporations that resist executive orders perform worse financially? In January 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order directing federal
agencies to investigate and compel firms to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Some firms complied with the order, whereas other firms
resisted by reaffirming their DEI programs. We find that S&P 500 firms that
maintained their DEI programs performed just as well as compliant firms, both
in terms of stock market returns and revenue. The results are robust across various measures of maintaining DEI, including measures based on executives’ public
statements about DEI programs, interest group ratings, firm financial statements,
and shareholder rejections of anti-DEI resolutions. The results suggest that, at
least in some areas, firms can resist pressure from the executive branch with
minimal costs to financial performance.
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/08/2026
Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.
aiddata.org
Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned
Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.
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Dermot Lynott @dermotlynott.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
For reassurance, the changes to OSF have no impact on PsyArXiv (and other preprint communities hosted by the Center for Open Science), which will continue to operate as normal blog.psyarxiv.com/2026/08/11/w...
blog.psyarxiv.com
What Researchers Need to Know about PsyArXiv Given Upcoming Changes to OSF Projects – PsyArXiv Blog
In just a few short days (August 15th, 2026), PsyArXiv – the community preprint server for psychology – turns 10! 🥳 Over the past decade, our community has published over 58,000 preprints, allowing re...
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Steve Kambouris @steve-kambouris.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Further to this: the news about OSF is the perfect time to recommend @re3data.bsky.social, the Registry of Research Data Repositories - you can search for potential repositories for your data, and filter the results by a vast number of repo features (e.g., does the repo offer versioning or not)
re3data.org
Home | re3data.org
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Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Over the next several months, we will phase out some popular OSF features. These changes do not affect current public content, which remains safe and accessible. We have prepared support material to help users adapt. I am very sorry for the disruption to your work. Please read this post for details.
cos.io
OSF Changes | Center for Open Science
We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...
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Doc Vivi Leandra【 VTC 】- Real-Life Scientist VTuber 🧬🖥️ @docvivileandra.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Alright, I'm going to do a thread about this: Race science is objectively, scientifically incorrect, even if we set aside the obvious moral arguments against it. "Race realists" love to accuse anti-racists of relying on ethical arguments over "hard facts", so let's use only hard facts.
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