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Russ Poldrack

@russpoldrack.org
13K followers 1.6K following 775 posts

Professor at Stanford. Psychology/Neuroscience/Data Science/AI. Books include: The New Mind Readers, Handbook of fMRI Data Analysis, Hard to Break, Statistical Thinking, and Better Code, Better Science poldrack.github.io

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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 07/10/2026
"Future research on disease‐modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease should focus on other mechanisms of action." I'm sure that will totally happen. www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10....
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/09/2026
Tuesday blues
Warning: weekly limit: 25% left
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 24/09/2026
ChatGPT Images came up with a really interesting hallucination of a brain, sort of a chimera of axial and coronal slices
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/08/2026
Sid and Nori would like to introduce themselves to all of you. And no, there was absolutely no mischief going on right before this photo was taken by @jenott.bsky.social
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 26/07/2026
Next time you get excited about how your coding agent solved a really hard problem for you, splash a bit of this cold water on your face - the source (metr.org/blog/2026-05...) should be essential reading for anyone using coding agents.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 21/07/2026
Performance optimization (and why you shouldn't optimize prematurely) russpoldrack.substack.com/p/optimizing... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series, featuring this great quote from my Stanford colleague Donald Knuth
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 05/07/2026
This is an incredibly insightful article by my Stanford colleague John Ousterhout about all the ways that performance measurement can go wrong in software development. I think it could be particularly useful reading for people chasing benchmarks in AI right now. cacm.acm.org/research/alw...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 03/07/2026
Probably the most important part:
AI tools may be used for any part of the research process except for the drafting of narrative text for manuscripts. Lab members are expected to manually draft all of the text that they put into a paper; no copying and pasting of text from an LLM into a manuscript is allowed with explicit discussion and agreement.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/06/2026
Congrats to our own @markiewicz.bsky.social for winning the OHBM Open Science Award!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 10/06/2026
wow, Fable is basically useless for anything related to neuroscience. e.g., in response to the prompt "What is the neural basis of cognitive control?" it falls back to Opus with the attached message. I appreciate guardrails but this makes the model useless for science.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/05/2026
People in the AI world seem to adore the System 1/2 dichotomy. I love this quote from Gerd Gigerenzer about the concept:
“What is system one and system two? It’s a list of dichotomies. Heuristic versus calculated rationality, unconscious versus conscious, error-prone versus always right, and so on. Usually, science starts with these vague dichotomies and works out a precise model. This is the only case I know where one progresses in the other direction. We have had, and still have, precise models of heuristics, like one over N. And at the same time, we have precise models for so-called rational decision making, which are quite different: Bayesian, Neyman-Pearson, and so on. What the system one, system two story does, it lumps all of these things into two black boxes, and it’s happy just saying it’s system one, it’s system two. It can predict nothing. It can explain after the fact almost everything. I do not consider this progress." - Gerd Gigerenzer
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 27/04/2026
Claude sounds a bit like a human with a prefrontal cortex lesion here www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 08/03/2026
In case you haven't seen the latest METR performance assessment, Claude Opus 4.6 is literally off the charts. Doubling time over the last two years is just over 100 days. metr.org
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 04/03/2026
Yesterday we said goodbye to our beloved kitty Coco. We miss her terribly but I am glad I was able to immortalize her in Figures 1 and 2 of my 2021 Synthese paper. Hopefully she will meet Fodor's Greycat in kitty heaven.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 24/02/2026
To what degree do you think that transition is a feature of DL versus more generally of overparameterized models? e.g. even overparameterized regression models show this behavior - e.g. below from @mdubova.bsky.social & @sabinasloman.bsky.social - seems a bit like magic!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 12/02/2026
probably the most important lesson (similar to what www.youtube.com/@NateBJones has been saying):
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 06/01/2026
Wow, I've never seen anything like this from an LLM before (Claude Opus 4.1):
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 04/11/2025
It's really nice when people actually use software that you create. This is an updated usage figure for the MRIQC.org Web API showing continued usage for the last 7 years, with more than half a million unique BOLD images in BIDS datasets! If you aren't already using MRIQC, check it out!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 25/10/2025
Great piece by @natolambert.bsky.social on the current state of human exhaustion in the AI world. Makes this important point:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 24/10/2025
Apple's Mail.app AI summaries have officially become useless.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/10/2025
OpenNeuro @openneuro.bsky.social just hit a huge milestone: 1500 datasets! Congrats to the team on making this project so successful over the last 7 years.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 20/09/2025
I know that citation statistics are faulty indicator, but I have to say that there is something humbling in knowing that people have decided 100,000 times to cite a paper that I was involved in.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 16/09/2025
It's interesting how some instructions are really hard for coding agents to follow. Recently I have been using a problem file, in which I include an instruction to only mark a problem as fixed once I have confirmed that the fix worked (see image below). Claude Code basically refuses to do this.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 02/09/2025
*Sharing for our department’s trainees* 🧠 Looking for insight on applying to PhD programs in psychology? ✨ Apply by Sep 25th to Stanford Psychology's 9th annual Paths to a Psychology PhD info-session/workshop to have all of your questions answered! 📝 Application: tinyurl.com/pathstophd2025
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 26/08/2025
it won't tell me :-).
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 16/06/2025
I ran into a former student at the Stanford graduation today. My stats class clearly had a powerful effect!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 02/06/2025
I agree that NHST is not an optimal way to do science, but if you are going to do NHST (which many continue to do), then I do think that well-powered experiments are essential. cf. @talyarkoni.com quote from 15 years ago:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 02/06/2025
The quality of evidence in psychology publications has improved substantially over the last two decades, across all subareas. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 31/05/2025
Great piece on the need for urgent educational reform to deal with the impact of AI. @tunguz.bsky.social www.aei.org/domestic-pol...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 21/05/2025
Very important point raised by @petersalib.bsky.social and Simon Goldstein regarding AI risk and alignment: www.ai-frontiers.org/articles/tod...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 17/05/2025
Reviewing scientific papers with AI: Part 1 of a series of posts on using AI tools for peer review. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/reviewing-...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 18/03/2025
Claude 3.7 has things to say about MATLAB:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/03/2025
I am very thankful that 1) I grew up in a time when vaccines were universally recognized as the medical miracle that they are, and 2) my mother saved my childhood vaccine card so I have a record
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/02/2025
In the "words no longer mean what they say" category, this from Hulu today:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 14/02/2025
A great quote from @ylepidemiologist.bsky.social (which you should definitely be reading!) about what we need to do establish trust for science going forward open.substack.com/pub/yourloca...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 30/01/2025
Girl Talk, Austin City Limits Festival, 10/4/2009 Our first ACL after moving Austin, our friend introduced us to Girl Talk, an amazing mashup artist. Absolutely crazy show. This was also the year of the legendary ACL mud fest.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 30/01/2025
Dead Kennedys, Circle A Ranch (Dallas), December 1985 One of the scariest shows I have ever been to - skinheads were beating people up randomly outside. I would love to have seen them earlier but this was still definitely a bucket list item. But Jello Biafra was in perfect form.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/01/2025
Word.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 28/01/2025
Current guidance from Stanford leadership regarding OMB memo:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 23/01/2025
Have had a great speaking trip across Asia, giving talks in Singapore, Bangkok, and now wrapping up in Hong Kong.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 16/01/2025
Feeling this Banksy piece right about now
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 06/01/2025
largely agree, though in my talk here I have a good example of the current challenges of fully automated test development without domain knowledge: poldrack.github.io/talks-AIAssi...
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/01/2025
Here's a replotting of the decoding results from Table 1 - the "linear" baseline is equivalent to training only on specific data, though using a different model (i.e. a simple linear decoder rather than a transformer + decoder head). These seem compelling to me, though the baseline may not be fair
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/01/2025
finally was able to get it pretty much correct with a bit more prompting.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/01/2025
and interestingly, if you ask for the face back, the spelling degrades badly
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 01/01/2025
GPT-4o can fix spelling errors in generated images, but apparently it costs a face to do so.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 19/12/2024
I asked Meta AI to "generate an image that depicts the following equation: AI = neural networks + big data + GPU computing. make the image as realistic as possible and avoid any fantastic or sci-fi like imagery". I find the result really humorous for some reason.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 30/11/2024
Jen @jenott.bsky.social and I took two rides in Waymo robotaxis last night in San Francisco. The experience was seamless and the driving was impeccable, probably better than what I would expect from the average human driver. It even gunned it to go through yellow light!
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/11/2024
it gave a ton of great suggestions - e.g.:
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 29/11/2024
You might try LLM-based code review as well. In Github you can ask the copilot assistant to do a code review. I just tried this:
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