Sign in

Simon van Baal

@svanbaal.bsky.social
340 followers 644 following 199 posts

Lecturer in Decision Making at University of Leeds. Main interests: time preferences, impulsivity, self-control. Incl applications like gambling, consumption/saving, difficult decisions. Check out the behavioural science feed I made, and tag #BehSci.

PostsRepliesMedia
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
- Me: "write a small function that does one thing" - LLM: would you like me to add a calculation for the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything? - Me: [deletes, includes print("42")].
020
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Anabel Büchner @anabelbuechner.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Self-control in daily life is more than willpower — but how well do commonly used trait scales capture this recent, broader view on self-control? New preprint with @kaihorstmann.bsky.social & @mhennecke.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps... Short summary below.
osf.io
OSF
22210
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
So true. Good to avoid unnecessary suffering!
030
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Kevin Lala @kevinlala.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.
17432
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Jacob Edenhofer @jacobedenhofer.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
@madselk.bsky.social, @benansell.bsky.social, Laure Bokobza, @aslicansunar.bsky.social, @mhaslberger.bsky.social, and @jacobnyrup.bsky.social. 2025. ‘Why Is It so Hard to Counteract Wealth Inequality? Evidence from the United Kingdom’. World Politics. 77(3): 515–61. muse.jhu.edu/article/964464
1254
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Giles Wilkes @gilesyb.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Sitting here bleary after another poor night's sleep, disinclined to engage in a day of cognitive effort, this chart from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com really strikes home on.ft.com/4eFZG4l
Shows death rates in US and eu cities by temperature, air con being the decisive factor
30362102
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Great PSA! To echo: please don't use the chat window (your research decisions are being made for you). Send me a message and I will happily provide you with code to prompt OpenAI's model endpoints and store the conversational context throughout.
020
Reposted by Simon van Baal
WIRED @wired.com · 29/06/2025
WIRED loves Fairphone and everything it stands for—but people just aren’t buying its devices, and the few who have don’t need to upgrade. www.wired.com/story/fairph...
wired.com
Fairphone Has a New Plan to Get You to Care
WIRED loves Fairphone and everything it stands for—but people just aren’t buying its devices, and the few who have don’t need to upgrade.
1815830
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Great article linked below. I was unaware journals could negotiate and inflate the metric by excluding article types. I suppose that is part of the reason why there are always a bunch of different article types. Yet another example of Goodhart's Law! journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...
journals.plos.org
The Impact Factor Game
The PLoS Medicine editors argue that we need a better measure than the impact factor for assessing the biomedical literature.
030
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Matteo Lisi @mlisi.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Registration is open for the Summer School on Computational Decision Sciences, 8–12 Sept Join us in London for a week of cutting-edge research on decision-making, AI, cognitive science and more! (free, register by 11Aug) center-decision-sciences.com/cds-summer-s... #PsychSciSky 🧠 #neuroskyence🧪
center-decision-sciences.com
CDS Summer School
Program Registration Schedule Directions 8th – 12th September, 2025 The Center for Decision Sciences will be hosting a summer school during the second week of September, 2025 and taking place…
1128
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 19/06/2025
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
6263661411259
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Centre for Decision Research @cdrleeds.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
#CDRLeeds 's Simon Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social and colleagues have received an AFSG Minor Exploratory Grant (afsg.org) to improve use of the Problem Gambling Severity Index. They'll attempt identifying different problematic gambling profiles using the score and natural language processing tools.
151
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Warwick Psychology @warwickpsych.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
New work by Sudeep Bhatia @sdpbht.bsky.social, Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang, and @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social Lukasz Walasek -- now out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
083
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Centre for Decision Research @cdrleeds.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Would you like to extract and exploit textual data from the internet? No matter whether you want to analyse product reviews, or political opinions, #CDRLeeds 4-day workshop Webtext2Insight will teach you how to do it. 9-12 June 2025 in Leeds. More info and registration: shorturl.at/JCiKT
002
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
We're running a workshop - Webtext2Insight Intro workshop: Scraping, NLP, and GenAI for Business & Research. 📅 Dates: 9-12 June 📍 Location: Leeds University Business School, UK 👩‍🏫 Instructors: @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social , @xingjiewei.bsky.social, and I. 💻 Python (AI tools: Hugging Face, OpenAI API)
111
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Pleased to announce that @sdpbht.bsky.social, @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang and I published this work in @pnas.org last month. A particularly intricate project I'm thankful to have been part of! Going from unstructured text to an attribute repr. of decisions. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Computational analysis of 100 K choice dilemmas: Decision attributes, trade-off structures, and model-based prediction | PNAS
We present a dataset of over 100 K textual descriptions of real-life choice dilemmas, obtained from social media posts and large-scale survey data....
385
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Léo Fitouchi @lfitouchi.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
🧵New paper out in Cognition Why do people moralize harmless carnal sins (e.g. gluttony, masturbation)? @danielnettle.bsky.social & I find that these behaviors activate reciprocity-based moral judgment—no need for a distinct "purity" module. 50 days free link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l18D2Hx2-...
47727
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
We will soon be announcing a workshop 9-12 June at the Centre for Decision Research in Leeds, UK on webscraping, natural language processing and generative AI for research and business. Watch this space! #behsci #ai #scraping #nlp
130
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
Thrilled to share @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Philip Newall, and I were selected for an AFSG exploratory grant! We'll study how gambling experiences relate to the main gambling harm measuring tool—the PGSI. Understanding the person behind PGSI scores will enable better harm detection/prevention.
171
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Interesting new work on fatigue and self-control! We must keep developing our understanding of when lapses of self-control are likely to occur. The replication failure of ego depletion still leaves a lot to explore.
052
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Jakob Hohwy @hohwy.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
A new amazing episode of the Minds Matter podcast - built enviromenment and well-being! #philosophy #neuroskyence
061
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Katie Cunneen @katiecunneen.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
Participant Recruitment! Looking for workers within the healthcare sector to take part in a 15-minute survey about workers' health and engagement in workplace mental health support (Prize draw to win up to £150 worth of shopping vouchers). Survey link - warwick.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
Poster participant recruitment for workers within the healthcare sector to take part in a 15-minute survey around workers' health and engagement in workplace mental health support.
136
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
🚨 Out in Decision: are you interested in research on impulsivity, self-control, or time preferences, but are not quite sure how they fit together - look no further! @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social @hohwy.bsky.social A. Verdejo-Garcia and I offer a conceptual analysis with empirical evidence. #behsci
172
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
@lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, Philip Newall and I wrote a blog about our recent paper on the lived experiences of gambling harm. The discussions on online gambling fora are striking. From gambling operators reopening accounts after closure to ruined marriages.
162
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
@lukaszwalasek.bsky.social, @hohwy.bsky.social, Antonio Verdejo-Garcia and I published an article in Decision on the relationships between time preferences, impulsivity, and self-control. We were invited by the APA to write a non-technical snippet about it here: www.growkudos.com/publications...
growkudos.com
Are impatient people impulsive and patient people self-controlled?
Academic research often frames impatience as a result of our impulses and patience as a sign of self-control. We trace this connection back to a 1970s explanation of why we fail to control ourselves: ...
132
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Rod Dacombe @rod-dacombe.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
We have two posts open at lecturer level to candidates working in any subfield of political theory (please note: you need only apply for one of the advertised posts to be considered for both) 2/ www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMA319/l...
jobs.ac.uk
Lecturer in Political Theory at King's College London
Looking for a new job opportunity in academia? Check out this job opening for a Lecturer in Political Theory on jobs.ac.uk!
135
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Does anybody know when the UK is supposed to be insulated from natural gas determining the marginal price of electricity? Coming off the back of the 6.4% cap increase by Ofgem, it seems consumers are worried about when we will start to see the benefits of all that cheap energy generation.
100
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
The custom Behavioral Science feed has reached 100 followers! Testament to the fact that this platform is gaining traction with social scientists bsky.app/profile/did:...
010
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Daniel P. Moriarity @dpmoriarity.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
33996462
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
“Our findings highlight that both self-report accuracy and selective participation are competing biases and sources of poor reproducibility for biobank-scale research” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The impact of self-report inaccuracy in the UK Biobank and its interplay with selective participation - Nature Human Behaviour
Biobank data are extensively used. Schoeler and colleagues show that self-report inaccuracy and selective participation are sources of poor reproducibility for biobank-scale research.
0198
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
More PhD positions advertised via the ESRC: lssi.leeds.ac.uk/engagement-p...
lssi.leeds.ac.uk
ESRC WRDTP Studentships at the University of Leeds - Leeds Social Sciences Institute
000
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Hi folks! PhD opportunities are available in Leeds University Business School, and three of those are for our department (ATOD): phd.leeds.ac.uk/funding/393-.... Please apply or circulate to those who may be interested!
phd.leeds.ac.uk
Leeds University Business School PhD Excellence Scholarships 2025/26
Project opportunity - Leeds University Business School PhD Excellence Scholarships 2025/26 at the University of Leeds
002
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Great rundown - Thank you for compiling this! The usethis::use_github() command was new for me. The last thing I would add is: when you are finished with your GitHub repo, and think it should be repro-ready, _always_ clone it and run it. See whether it runs (sometimes renv lockfile is incomplete).
110
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Dax Kellie @daxkellie.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
If you missed my talk but still want to learn how to make your R code more reproducible, my slides are here 🙂: daxkellie.quarto.pub/will-your-co... All the links to packages and resources I mentioned are there, so hopefully this can be a nice reference, too! #ESAus2024 #rstats #quartopub 🧪🌏
Title slide: Will your code run again? Tips for making code reproducible in R
15347107
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Rotem Perach @drrotemperach.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Strong background in social psychology/behavioral science? Fresh ideas about public health messaging? Call for funded #PhD with me now live ⬇️
095
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Promoting these cool PhD scholarship opportunities by the brand new UNRISK Centre for Doctoral Training: unrisk-cdt.ac.uk/projects/ We have a project proposal under review too, so fingers crossed, but there is already so much worth applying to on there!
unrisk-cdt.ac.uk
Research Opportunities – Understanding Uncertainty to Reduce Climate Risks
010
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
RAG models have lots of awesome real-world applications. One I can think of is to build a database of grants and fellowships within your institution. Users (e.g., faculty and phd students) chat with a chatbot, which then provides the 10 most relevant funding opportunities in the database.
130
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Evan Westra @evanwestra.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Bluesky isn't an echo chamber - it's an epistemic bubble: it excludes some voices by omission. It has poor coverage reliability. X/Twitter is more like an echo chamber: it doesn't exclude any voices, but nobody there treats voices they disagree with as credible. aeon.co/essays/why-i...
Two kinds of problematic networks:
•
Nguyen distinguishes between two kinds of problematic networks: epistemic bubbles and echo chambers
•
Epistemic Bubble an epistemic network from which relevant voices have been excludedby omission
•
Echo chamber: an epistemic network from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.
•
Nguyen notes that people sometimes use these terms interchangeably, but he thinks it’s important to draw a distinction between the two problematic structures, because they require different kinds of solutions
•
Burstingan epistemic bubble is easier than escapingan echo chamber.
0134
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Max Roser @maxroser.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
We've just made it much easier to reuse the data on Our World in Data. Here is an overview of our new features: enhanced data downloads and the Chart Data API. ourworldindata.org/easier-to-re...
ourworldindata.org
We've made it much easier to reuse our data
An overview of our new features: enhanced data downloads and the Chart Data API.
9380106
Reposted by Simon van Baal
koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Scientist recommends pseudoscience. In Nature. 🤔😱 Molecular biologist suggests “Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and DISC assessment are popular[…]starting points for […] providing insight into your behaviour patterns and decision-making style”: buff.ly/4fXqAnP
3142
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Intro: I’m a behavioural scientist, interested in impulsivity, self-control, and time preferences, especially in naturalistic contexts. I am currently working predominantly with Natural Language Processing tools to uncover how people make decisions in everyday life. #behaviouralscience
010
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Gareth Hollands @gjhollands.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
FAO anyone who uses or wants to use the Behavioural Science feed here, @svanbaal.bsky.social has now helpfully modified it so it also picks up #BehaviouralScience, #BehavioralScience, as well as those terms in standard text. See the description in the linked feed: bsky.app/profile/did:...
073
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Lusine Grigoryan @grigolus.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
I think there is already a behavioral science feed 🙂 bsky.app/profile/did:...
161
Reposted by Simon van Baal
erin mccann @mccanner.bsky.social · 12/11/2024
NYT starter pack? NYT starter pack. bsky.app/starter-pack...
12369
Reposted by Simon van Baal
Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 12/11/2024
I made a @washingtonpost.com journalist: • starter pack (easy way to follow buncha people): bsky.app/starter-pack... • feed (lets you scroll through everyone at once): bsky.app/profile/drew...
1614240
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
I'm getting several requests for research assistant jobs (esp remote). I don't have anything at the moment. Are there people on here who are hiring/looking, or can point me towards a good aggregator - esp global?
220
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Always nice when reminders tell you something new!
020
Reposted by Simon van Baal
koenfucius @koenfucius.bsky.social · 10/11/2024
Criteria, waarderingen, gewichtsfactoren—dat is niet hoe we beslissen. Maar de slimme, snelle, pragmatische methode die we gebruiken is inadequaat wanneer de opties onaanvaardbaar zijn (zoals in zekere recente verkiezingen): Mijn @apache_be stukje: buff.ly/48Lq3D1
011
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/11/2024
What a special surprise! Glad to report it’s totally legit and that I will be feeding the “less privilege” with the power of organization.
A scam telling me I’ve been selected for the great illuminati elite conscription.
010
Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/11/2024
Does anybody have contacts at the Amazon Research team who I can talk to about using their reviews for a project?
000