iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Ah fair! Ah I must have misread your bio, apologies.

Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Thanks for sharing! As scams go, this is quite well-done. The ones academics get are MUCH more obviously scams. If this one got a domain name that made more sense, one could easily be fooled. Have you seen an uptick in better-written scams since the widespread adoption of LLMs?

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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")].

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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

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Great to see this work! Also I love this angle on how impulsivity and self-control come apart (and are not opposite ends of a spectrum).

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

So true. Good to avoid unnecessary suffering!

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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.

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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

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

100% agreed. So frustrating. Sometimes I’m unsure whether it’s just rhetoric or politicians truly don’t understand the ramifications.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

We need this badly. Unfortunately, there's also too little attention to cold-related deaths. Way more people die of the cold in Europe, and that nearly never makes the news. Though that balance will probably flip in a few decades.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Love to see it. Thoughtful piece too :)

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

I love a good traffic violation (especially if you don't operate heavy machinery for your travel), so I will grab the popcorn for this conversation. Imo if many pedestrians are crossing where/when they "shouldn't", it's a design error - they're deprioritised for automobile traffic flow.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Added it to the list! Re your point: not to mention the history of the term jaywalking!

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

I can hear a faint echo of: “Rotgänger, totgänger!!!”

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

First, that’s so valid. Second, sorry but I have to say that’s the most German complaint you could make 😂 I’m so here for it!!

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

That’s definitely part of it. Another point is that we get a lot of negative press about gun violence, lack of public transportation, expensive healthcare etc. From the outside, it’s difficult to see how localised some of these things are.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Oh absolutely, arguably even more so in the US! Especially in the North East and the West Coast. But the US market has a finite supply for faculty positions… Also probation is usually less intense than tenure, so that could contribute!

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Though US & CA pay much better, the pay in the UK is commensurate with many EU countries, so it’s a straightforward option if you wish to stay within reach of family and friends.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Also the higher education market in the UK has always benefited from a prestige privilege, inflating funding for faculty positions via intl student fees. This creates network effects, making it more attractive to work here due to big departments w more colleagues in one’s own field

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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.

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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

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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)

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Cheers Lenni - I appreciate it!

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Thanks for making it to the end of the thread. We also have an open access version here: osf.io/preprints/ps... #behsci #psych #psychsci

osf.io

OSF

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

A demographic-based model, and a bag-of-words model, to see if we can predict people's choices if we know the attribute representation and outcome of their last choice. Though this is a first attempt at such modelling, we think this is a promising technique for understanding and predicting choices.

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

others (⬆️ family closeness & security, justice, warmth & morality perception; ⬇️ career, finance, risk). We then see how these attributes are traded off and which tend to co-occur an option for such difficult decisions. Finally, we compare using a simplified model based on these attributes against

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

The GPT can code: option 1: "expensive treatment for cat", option 2: "cheaper treatment with less likelihood of cat surviving". Pros for 1: more time with the cat you care about, better animal welfare, peace of mind you did everything you could. These pros will be high on some attributes and low on

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

The result: we have 100K choices with 2 options, each with pros and cons, and for each pro/con we create a 207 attribute representation. E.g.: "Our cat is really ill. The doctor says treatment is expensive but there is a much cheaper option available with less chance of survival. What should I do?"

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Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

We wanted to see if we could create a rich understanding of the vast number of difficult decisions discussed in online fora. To do this, we used a combination of large language model content coding and natural language processing techniques to extract structure from advice-seeking posts.

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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-...

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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

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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.

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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.

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Jakob Hohwy @hohwy.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

A new amazing episode of the Minds Matter podcast - built enviromenment and well-being! #philosophy #neuroskyence

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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.

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