iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda @alejandrofabregastejeda.com · 21h

I am really happy to share that I have started as PI of an @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social-funded 3-year project @clpskuleuven.bsky.social. I'll investigate how scientists conceptualize, model & measure environments across the life, cognitive, social & Earth sciences! #philsci #philsky #evosky #envhum 🧪

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 05/10/2026

The prophesy said that the utilitarians' prosperity would take the perpetual misery of a single child. (But what about the ones who walk away? Joke's on them: they will be left behind!)

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Dr. Adam Stein @astein.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism.

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Nvidie @dervine7.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"Swords United" meme, where on the table is the quoted tween and the knights are labled "Pragmatists", "Hume", "Kant", "The Vienna Circle", "Ordinary Language Philosophers"

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 01/10/2026

Oh, good luck! My experience is that each one is very different, so it always feels new. This might help to start a conversation about mutual expectations. drannelee.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

drannelee.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My short viewpoint article "The Enshittification of Mathematics" is out now in the Mathematical Intelligencer! link.springer.com/article/10.1... Gift link here: rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a Check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested! 💩🥳

link.springer.com

The Enshittification of Mathematics - The Mathematical Intelligencer

The Mathematical Intelligencer -

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Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda @alejandrofabregastejeda.com · 30/09/2026

Have you been thinking about the main challenges or theoretical frameworks of #ALife? Do you want to discuss the current directions & future prospects of the field? Then come to Leuven & join us in a great interdisciplinary environment open to both scientists & philosophers #philsky #MolBiol #HPS 🧪

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 29/09/2026

either she wants to keep it platonic or she's not ready to take it to the next level

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

The Ramsey Lab @theramseylab.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Are you interested in the past, present & future of Artificial Life (ALife) as a scientific field? 🚨 We are hosting an interdisciplinary minisymposium this December, so send us your work & come along! Please share widely! 🔗 hiw.kuleuven.be/clps/events/... #philsci #academicsky #evobio #AI #HPS

Promotional graphic for a mini-symposium titled “Life As It Could Be: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Life,” taking place 7–8 December 2026 at Aula Symbiosis, BioScience Center, KU Leuven. The text appears over a blue-and-orange honeycomb-like cellular pattern.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 25/09/2026

I still hope their book will be translated into Dutch.

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Wonderful to see that Helen De Cruz has won the International Society for Science & Religion's General Readership Book Prize for her work, Wonderstruck! This illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living. Learn more: buff.ly/IYNfe0Q

Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think by Helen De Cruz

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 23/09/2026

My two brains: (1) Putnam's two brains: getting a bit crowded in this vat. (2) Boltzmann's two brains: poof! (and they're gone)

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 23/09/2026

Maar niet alles van waarde heeft (economisch) nut! Dus vertelde ik ook over de knoestige boom van Zhuangzhi. Ik dacht natuurlijk aan @helendecruz.net, die dit verhaal meermaals illustreerde. helendecruz.substack.com/p/drawing-zh... Dit fragment is ook apart te beluisteren www.vrt.be/vrtmax/luist...

Tekening in kleurpotlood van een knoestige boom waar iemand onder ligt te rusten. Illustratie door Helen De Cruz.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 23/09/2026

De Wereld van Sofie hoorde dat wiskundigen dobbelstenen hebben gemaakt waarmee je met één worp kunt bepalen wie een spel mag beginnen. Een nutteloze uitvinding, vonden ze. Ik mocht vertellen over het nut van schijnbaar nutteloos onderzoek. Vanaf 39:07: www.vrt.be/vrtmax/luist...

vrt.be

De wereld van Sofie - woensdag 23 september 2026 om 10:00 | VRT MAX

De wereld van Sofie - Beluister De wereld van Sofie met VRT MAX via de site of app.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 23/09/2026

Hadn't seen this one, powerful and quite the punch line!

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 23/09/2026

Unlikely that you've never seen it, but I thought of you when I first saw this one shared recently. By Jim Benton.

Four-panel comic with red birds. Or is it?

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 22/09/2026

Earlier this year, Alicja Kwade had a magnificent solo-exhibition in museum M Leuven. In the catalogue, I compare her sculptures with scientific models: "In the sway of a simple model; A philosophical reflection on Alicja Kwade’s pendulum". Pdf: www.sylviawenmackers.be/documents/We... #Art #PhilSci

Exhibition catalogue of Alicja Kwade, called Dusty Die. The cover shows a white door.

Double-page photo of ParaPosition, in which a heavy rock balances above a chair. The wall in the background shows a photo of gray clouds; a real window shows the inner garden.

Fragment of my chapter. Scientists usually think and communicate about fictional systems by means of equations and specific names, such as the ‘simple pendulum’, ‘frictionless plane’ or ‘ideal gas’. In doing so, they simulate these abstract model systems mentally. At best, they leave behind cryptic squiggles on a blackboard. In Kwade’s work we encounter similar conceptual abstractions, but she renders them as physical, material objects. She presents us with massive rocks that appear to defy gravity in works like Superheavy Skies and ParaPosition, which make tangible the kind of configurations that scientists only imagine.
It’s like Kwade read Godfrey-Smith’s concept of scientific models as ‘imagined concrete systems’ that ‘would be concrete if real’ (or ‘fictional concreta’) and called his bluff. As if Kwade decided: let’s make them real, then!

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 21/09/2026

Vorige Eos-column nu ook op mijn blog geplaatst: bron van kwantumkansen. www.sylviawenmackers.be/blog/2026092... Honderd zomers geleden deden kansen hun intrede in de kwantummechanica, zonder veel fanfare. Von Neumann verankerde de regel (uit een voetnoot) van Born in de postulaten die we nu kennen.

sylviawenmackers.be

Sylvia’s blog

Persoonlijk weblog van Sylvia Wenmackers

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 19/09/2026

Column voor Eos: Dat mag niet! Over de Doomsday-formule, delen door nul en extrapolaties. www.sylviawenmackers.be/blog/2026091...

Foto van de column, met citaat: "Ik kwam erachter dat sommige wetenschappers het nog steeds proberen: delen door nul". Link naar volledige tekst staat in de skeet.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 17/09/2026

Experimental access to counterfactual mathematics, that would be very interesting!

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 17/09/2026

I would love to see that done! But I think it's not necessarily representative, because the corpus grows exponentially. And it turns out to be very hard to filter the data; they tried it for general relativity, as reported by @philipcball.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/d41....

nature.com

The Einstein test: what happens when AI tries to rediscover relativity?

Scientists are probing whether language models trained on historical data can reproduce creative breakthroughs.

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Postdoc in history of physics @ Radboud University in The Netherlands on "Origins of Irreversibility" part of larger grant to explore fundamental questions concerning entropy, chaos, & irreversibility #HPS ⚛️ Deadline: 14 October 2026 Duration: 2 years, starting 2027 www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

ru.nl

Postdoc Positions: Origins of Irreversibility | Radboud University

Do you want to work as a Postdoc at the Faculty of Science? Check our vacancy!

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

VSC | Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum @vschpc.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🔬 RESEARCH SHOWCASE | Is scientific research really becoming less disruptive? VUB & KU Leuven researchers uncovered how missing citation data exaggerated the reported decline, using VSC high-memory computing to analyse millions of papers. 👉 www.vscentrum.be/post/a-hidde... #HPC #Research

vscentrum.be

A hidden peak behind the decline in scientific disruption

A new Nature study by researchers from VUB and KU Leuven challenges the reported decline in scientific disruption. Using VSC’s high-memory CPU nodes to analyse citation networks with hundreds of milli...

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Reposted by Sylvia Wenmackers

Horizons Magazine @horizons-en.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Both basic and applied research suffer from overpromising rhetoric, says integrity researcher and psychiatrist Joeri Tijdink. He calls for more honest communication in which #reliability, #rigour and #reproducibility are the main product of science. 👇 www.horizons-mag.ch/2026/09/03/a...

horizons-mag.ch

Admitting uncertainty is the real breakthrough

Horizons (EN) - Back to basic research

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

Agreed about the asteroids example, I was even doubting whether to put it in, but it's indeed a scale. Asteroid-related risks even come in the region where numerical probability estimates are reasonably informative. 😅

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

You forgot to include the lever... 😈 🤺📍 🪜▶️▶️▶️▶️ 👹 🧌 🧱 🐍 🚧 🔽 🪜 🔽 🎉 🌈 💫 ◀️◀️◀️◀️

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

It would be really interesting to compare these estimates with other groups of experts who focus on other possible disasters (climate, asteroids, nuclear, biohazard, ...). I would expect that most experts estimate risks in their own domain higher than outsiders (unless when based on models perhaps).

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

But the numbers on the list are remarkably round...

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

AFAIK: mostly subjective probability estimates. Psychology found that these are influenced by multiple cognitive biases, which all apply here: fear, vividness, size of the possible effect, loss (vs gain), perceived lack of control,... Focusing on one possible negative future leads to overestimation.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 15/09/2026

I don't think probability is the right formalism to represent the relevant uncertainty here, mainly because 'doom' is too nebulous. See also: bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 13/09/2026

I agree, probabilities presuppose a well-defined event space. See also: Marco Grossi "What are the odds? Risk and uncertainty about AI existential risk" arxiv.org/abs/2510.23453 Andrew Lohn "Beyond P(doom) for AI Risk: Quantifying Uncertainty Without Probability" cset.georgetown.edu/publication/...

cset.georgetown.edu

Beyond P(doom) for AI Risk: Quantifying Uncertainty Without Probability | Center for Security and Emerging Technology Georgetown AI

As artificial intelligence introduces new risks, some potentially catastrophic or even existential, there is little data or detailed theory to assess them. Policymakers often resort to expert best gue...

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Elizabeth Hargrave @elizhargrave.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Charming weekend scavenger hunt from twigandtoad.com

The weekend whimsy. Find any six before Monday.
Something clearly having a better day than you
A rock that looks worthy of promotion
Something that deserves a stern look
Evidence of an animal with opinions
A place you could reasonably lose track of 10 minutes( or 3 hours... Either way)
A tree keeping a secret
A plant that seems to have made a poor decision
A leaf worthy of the refrigerator
A shadow with an excellent temperament
Something falling beautifully
A bug dressed better than expected
Something that could reasonably be called" the incident"
A snack you hide from everyone else

Prize: one slightly More interesting weekend, and a very entertaining comments section.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 11/09/2026

In English, I would say something close to 'while'; in German context, w closer to v.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

Different food analogy, same sentiment. 😅 bsky.app/profile/sylv...

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

Hahaha, yes! Perhaps I should have added #AI4Math (or #eggbros 🤭)

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

There was no cake baking competition the next year. Nobody could afford the eggs. Perhaps Sally still made her mulberry cake, but if she did, she didn't invite anyone (especially not Sammy).

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

He expected applause, and sure, some people cheered. "You must have used at least a hundred eggs," said Jimmy full of awe. "Make that a million," said Sammy. Even Jimmy was taken aback by this. And Tina said that it still smelled like a gym shoe that had already been worn, but she was just jealous.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

It was quite the ruckus. Nobody quite knew what was happening (least of all Sammy). So many eggs hit the wall, so much milk ran over the floor. The flour shrouded the whole scene in dust. But 88 hours later, Sammy came out with his cake. It was a 100-layered chocolate cake, with a cherry on top.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

Still, some people believed that one day they would make Something Amazing (especially Sammy). So, Sammy decided to enter the cake baking competition. He filled his factory hall with pulleys and catapults, mixers and ovens. The machines slung ingredients in all kinds of directions, all at once.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

But even her failures tasted delicious! Rumour had it that she was working on a 3-layered chocolate cake. And then there was Sammy. Sammy owned the largest factory in town. It could make anything! Their latest product was a gym shoe that smelt like it had already been worn, straight from the box.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 09/09/2026

It was the yearly cake baking competition. Sally made her usual: a mulberry cake without eggs, because she was allergic. Jimmy made cakes in creative shapes, like a dinosaur. And Tina just liked to try new things. She didn't enter the competition last year, because her experiments usually failed.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 08/09/2026

Back in 2015, my footnotes in "Children of the Cosmos" were mentioned in the jury report of the @fqxi.org essay competition. I still believe it was mainly due to this one. 🤠💃

Footnote 9: Here, I recommend humming a Shania Twain song: “So, you’re a rocket scientist. That don’t impress me much.” If you are too young to know this song, consult your inner teenager for the appropriate dose of underwhelmedness.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 08/09/2026

Inside you are 2 kinesin motor proteins... Oh, wait, new result just in. Inside you are 200,000,000,000,000,000 kinesin motor proteins (give or take).

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Grin & Bear It @michelesliger.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Love this quote: “I have really always thought of science fiction - from Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley onwards, through Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and, of course, Margaret Atwood - as a women’s genre. It is a way of talking about the world as it could be, not as it is.

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Sylvia Wenmackers @sylviawenmackers.be · 07/09/2026

That's wonderful! (My specialty is philosophy of probability, and I'm still terrible at dealing with uncertainty. 🙈)

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