iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Spencer Murch, PhD

Mel Goodale @action-brain.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Good to see that our opinion piece on grand theories of consciousness is out. #consciousness #neuroskyence #philsci #philsky🧠 #neuroscience #brain 🧪

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

www.bbc.com/news/article... "Trump - who is unilaterally attempting to rebrand AI as "super intelligence" - wrote on social media: "The Super Intelligence Force will coordinate the Federal Government's engagement with..." Not unilateral. We have in fact seen this exact phrase in posts from Meta 👇

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Having now seen what blatantly AI-generated reviews look like, I notice my own language as a peer reviewer is shifting away from """neutral and empirical""" towards a more flavourful, referee-like style. E.g. "I adore the authors' use of this method, which I note is the first in our field, but..."

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

My paper got four peer reviews. I put them into GPTzero, CopyLeaks, and Originality.ai. R1 was clearly human-written, and scores reflected this. R2 was not clearly human, with mixed AI-use indicators. R3 and R4 were rated as 100% AI-generated, and were nearly identical. Is peer review doomed..?

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

New paper: "Addictions are linked but distinct: A transdiagnostic network analysis of concurrent disorder risk" (N = 6,646) Addictions and mental health common co-occur, but what psychological factors are involved, and are they the same for different combinations? doi.org/10.1556/2006...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

♦️New Paper♦️ "Repetitive responsible gambling slogans and imagery may not be better than AI-generated content" On most metrics, RG content from AUS, CAN, UK, & USA performs about as well as content generated completely by AI. Data ✅ Materials ✅ Pre-reg ✅ Out now in IGS doi.org/10.1080/1445...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I just want to say that 1) This whole thing reads like the ominous preamble to a Frank Herbert story, and 2) Open, local tools already do all the stuff described here. The future is already free. No Mark required.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

www.meta.com/thefutureisf... I can't tell if this is stunningly malevolent, or stunningly obtuse. Either way, I'm stunned.

meta.com

The Future is for Everyone

Read Mark Zuckerberg’s piece on our values for building superintelligence for everyone.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

New paper: "The Need for Benchmarks to Advance AI-Enabled Player Risk Detection in Gambling" Out now in Journal of Gambling Studies rdcu.be/e4ulZ

rdcu.be

The Need for Benchmarks to Advance AI-Enabled Player Risk Detection in Gambling

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

#5 - In a pre-record segment, don't be afraid to ask for a redo if you really dislike your first take. The worst they can say is 'no', which lands you exactly where you already are.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

#4 - When an interview is scheduled in advance, ask the producer / journalist for a draft of questions they may ask. If they send them, prepare a tight written response and rehearse it. If they don't (usually the case), prepare to be asked to walk through the most general aspects of your topic.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

#3 - It is not your job to get clicks or make the story *sizzle*. Stick to the facts that you know best, and watch out for bait questions like: “Do you think the government is trying to get people addicted to gambling?” When asked to speculate, carefully pivot the topic back to your key points.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

#2 - Everything may be on the record, and long statements can be chopped into shorter soundbites that make you sound foolish. Be careful how you phrase things. Better yet, write down ahead of time the three points you want to make sure everyone knows, and keep each ~15 words.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

#1 - The phrase: “I’m early in my research…” is Segment Producer speak for: “We’ll chat for a while, then I’ll say 'what are the questions I SHOULD be asking’. Then I’ll take those exact questions to one of your colleagues with a more prestigious title.” You will not be quoted in this piece.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I did @bmj.com podcast and it was honestly a lovely experience, but it got me thinking about the many 'not' lovely interview experiences I've had over the years. SO, here are the top five lessons I learned the hard way in #science, #scicomm, and #media:

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

open.spotify.com/episode/6aZY... I spoke with BMJ about online gambling regulation and the need for consistency across addictive products beginning 25m35s

open.spotify.com

What access to GPs tells us about the NHS 10 year plan, and online gambling

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Reposted by Spencer Murch, PhD

CAGR Conference @cagrconference.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

📢 The call for abstracts is open for the 2026 CAGR conference! The conference is hosted by @ceacg.bsky.social, University of Helsinki on 28-29 May. Deadline for submissions is January 15, 2026. Find more information on our website: cagrconference.org/call-for-pap...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

New Analysis piece: "Online gambling requires greater government regulation" from @virvemarionneau.bsky.social , Anna van der Gaag, and me. www.bmj.com/content/392/...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS - The Alberta Gambling Research Institute's 2026 Conference, April 30th - May 2nd in Banff. research.ucalgary.ca/alberta-gamb... Deadline to submit: January 26th

research.ucalgary.ca

2026 Conference Home

April 30 - May 2, 2026 @ The Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

"The message is clear: Big Tech cannot be trusted to self-regulate. We can’t let them mark their own homework when it comes to safety. The only way to incentivize these companies to change is for Congress to pass legislation that holds them accountable if their products are found to be unsafe."

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

"Honestly, we are sick of this. We are sick of tech companies utterly neglecting safety until they’re threatened with serious consequences — and then announcing flashy, new tools as a publicity stunt, while having zero intention to implement those tools properly." thehill.com/opinion/tech...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Sources: theijf.org/article/onli... link.springer.com/article/10.1... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... igamingontario.ca/en/news/igam...

theijf.org

Public service journalism

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

IJF is reporting a 331% increase in gambling-related bankruptcies in Ontario from 2021 --> 2025. Combined with increased helpline calls (Turner., 2024), increased advertising volume (Wheaton, 2024), and increased iGaming participation (iGO, 2024) over the same period, a clear picture is emerging.

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Reposted by Spencer Murch, PhD

Dan Diamond @ddiamond.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

CDC has overhauled its website to assert that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim”

Autism and
Vaccines
QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS
PAGE 2 OF 9 | ALL PAGES J
For Everyone
NOV. 19, 2025
KEY POINTS
• The claim "vaccines do not cause autism" is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
• Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.

HHS Research on Plausible Biologic
Mechanisms between Vaccines and Autism
HHS will evaluate plausible biologic mechanisms between early childhood vaccinations and autism. Mechanisms for further investigation include the impacts of aluminum adjuvants, risks for certain children with mitochondrial disorders, harms of neuroinflammation, and more.
* The header "Vaccines do not cause autism" has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the
U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

This piece contrasts meta as worse than google ads, but Google ads is also (at least on YouTube shorts) inundated with medical scams and hoaxes. AI video is making them harder to spot, and Google actively discourages ad blockers, making sure these scams reach people. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

reuters.com

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Critics will likely argue that Leger respondents are not a random sample of Canadians, and this is true. But they represent an important segment of young adults -- those who may have income precarity. These results suggest that online gambling problems fall heavily on these young Canadians.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

www.ccsa.ca/en/online-ga... New statistics on online gambling problems among young Canadians who do gig work. Of 1,041 Canadian young adults who gamble and who participate in Leger panels, 32% report gambling online. Among them, 69% met the criteria for problem gambling (PGSI 8+).

ccsa.ca

Online Gambling Among Young Canadian Adults: A Call to Action | Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction

Highlights how young people in Canada, aged 18 to 29, are at higher risk of suffering from high levels of gambling-related harms, including financial, emotional, psychological and relationship harms. ...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

In NYT Opinion today: "...But the rising frequency of these scandals, and the public’s fading trust, points to an industry rotting from the inside — one that rewards corruption, punishes transparency and treats addiction as a business model." What do you think? www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | Gambling Is Killing Sports and Consuming America

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

A decent (but not perfectly informative re: survey composition and weighting) survey with propensity weighting to estimate self-reported use of unregulated gambling products in the USA. Could be improved by bootstrapped variance estimation, but still decent. www.americangaming.org/wp-content/u...

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

A report on the state of unregulated gambling in BC. Raises (and maybe answers) the multimillion dollar question: if most offshore gambling is on the same sites lobbying for liberalization with regulation, what benefit do they perceive? Freedom to advertise and expand? theijf.org/bc-residents...

theijf.org

B.C. residents betting billions on unregulated gambling sites, 2021 report found

Province tried to prevent release of report with details about reach of offshore betting sites

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

A Nobel prize is fine, but what academics really want is to kick the creators of manuscriptcentral one time really hard in the shin.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

This project was made possible by my excellent collaborators, Drs. Sheurich, Monson, French, and Kairouz at UConcordia and UdeSherbrooke, as well as by funding from CIHR and FRQ-SC.

media.tenor.com

a man with long hair and a beard is saying " thank you eternally "

ALT: a man with long hair and a beard is saying " thank you eternally "

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

So, how do we make models our gambling harm detection models better? 1 - We try to account for these subgroups in large-sample research, or 2 - We use a graded intervention scheme instead of a binary decision threshold, or 3 - We select a different outcome variable with better properties.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

In turn, these subgroups within the moderate-risk range varied on the specific items endorsed and several sociodemographic dimensions. This kind of within-groups variability is exactly why a ML classifier might fail to perform optimally.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

We found that possibly episodic cases (62% of sample) reported several different problems mainly occurring just sometimes, while specific problem cases (9%) reported significantly fewer problems that occurred more frequently.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

We interpreted these groups as exhibiting "possibly episodic" gambling, "intermediate cases" of responding, and "specific problems", respectively.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

We applied K-means clustering to the variance of individual PGSI responses in a large dataset of > 18,000 online gamblers. When we did this, we found a 3-cluster solution that separated groups of respondents with lower, intermediate, and higher response variance.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

To explore these possible subgroups, and to improve future ML detection systems, we took a variance clustering approach to the moderate risk group of the PGSI.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Thus, there are actually several ways one might land in the Moderate-risk range, including: -Escalating towards problem gambling -Remitting from problem gambling -Applying non-standard question interpretations -Reporting 1-2 problems very persistently, or -Reporting up to 7 problems episodically

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

When we look under the hood, we can easily see why the PGSI might have problems: it confounds (1) whether a problem is reported to occur, and (2) how often that problem occurs. This is bad because clinically-defined gambling disorder can be either persistently occurring, or *episodic*.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

It works reasonably well when it comes to separating the "non-problem" and "problem gambler" groups, but other research has shown some real issues with those in-between groups of low and moderate risk (Currie et al., 2013; Williams & Volberg, 2014).

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

The Problem Gambling Severity Index is a very popular questionnaire that has been used for more than 20 years to partition non-clinical samples into risk groups of "non-problem" (PGSI = 0), "low-risk" (1-2), "moderate risk" (3-7), or "problem gambler" (8-27) groups.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

🎉🧵 New Paper Thread 🎉🧵 Machine Learning models that aim to detect at-risk online gamblers seem to hit a performance ceiling, and exhibit serious imprecision when making positive-class predictions. WHY? Maybe it's the outcome variable, the Problem Gambling Severity Index.

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Alberta, like Ontario before it, is moving to expand and privatize online gambling. In a new OpEd, @lukeclark.bsky.social and I argue that British Columbia should not follow suit. vancouversun.com/opinion/op-e...

vancouversun.com

Opinion: Dangers of going all-in on online gambling

Opening B.C.’s online gambling to private companies would make many British Columbians' wages turn to wagers lost to private companies

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Are craving and satiety neurological opposites? Could someone experience craving while feeling sated? Is reducing craving tantamount to inducing satiety? How might semaglutide improve / inform our knowledge of naltrexone, acamprosate, sobriety, and addiction? Very exciting times in the field!

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Spencer Murch, PhD @spencermurch.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

TT faculty interviews are a singularly intense and interesting experience. There is really nothing like it.

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