Sign in

Tom Hostler

@tomhostler.bsky.social
1.3K followers 494 following 144 posts

Senior Lecturer at MMU. Interested in (Critical) Metascience, Academic Capitalism, Open Research, and Emotion Processing.

PostsRepliesMedia
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My phone now has 'overcharge protection ' which means it only charges to 80% overnight to save long term battery health. The result is I now run out of battery by 8pm right now, rather than in two years time 🤔
000
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 15/09/2026
The question that’s dominating the field is not a causality question. It’s really, how can one sell a causal relationship while crafting the language so that there’s plausible deniability when somebody criticizes anything.
56612
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
My unpopular science reform opinion is that journal name/reputation SHOULD be a good heuristic for trust/quality, and that’s what we should be trying to achieve.
5171
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Gilad Feldman @giladfeldman.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Looking for open-science and meta-research events? Been tracking these in the past month, manual and automated. Encouraging to see that there are quite a few. If you want to see what I'm keeping track of: metaventory.vercel.app/events?view=...
3199
Reposted by Tom Hostler
badly drawn boo! 🎃👻🧛🏼‍♀️ @soapachu.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
perfect dead drop 10/10 no notes (the shrouds really make this)
1621851523
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
I don't mind paying for high quality journalism but there's so many outlets it costs too much to subscribe to all of them. More places should do micro-transactions to read individual articles OR have some kind of platform you can buy credits on to access individual articles from different outlets
020
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Great symposium this morning at the #EASP2026 conference: “Who critiques the critique? Toward a reflexive metascience,” with presenters @ameliazein.bsky.social, @mariogollwitzer.bsky.social, @fgabarrot.bsky.social, and me!
1285
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
😵‍💫
010
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Jun Otsuka @junotk.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
My article "What does it mean to understand AI?" is out now in Harvard Data Science Review! I discuss mechanistic interpretability, representation engineering, world models, and Potemkin understanding from philosophical perspectives. hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/w1tfg5lx...
hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu
What Does It Mean to Understand AI?
2149
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Fee-waived PhD available in #Forensicpsychology supervised by my collaborator Sofia Persson at Leeds Beckett University: www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/research-deg... Start: October, Deadline: May 13th. The project is about Rape Myth Interventions. Please share with any motivated psychology students!
leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Psychology | PhD Studentship | Leeds Beckett University
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences is offering five PhD fee-waiver studentships in Psychology for an October 2026 start.
100
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Really interesting post from Tom's newsletter (as always) about how AI disrupts the 'signal' of how much effort someone is putting in to communicate with you (e.g. in a job application). So, perhaps creating new signals to demonstrate you have NOT used AI is the way to make yourself stand out...
100
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Replacing expensive human workers with AI seems like a good cost cutting measure until you realise that once you've publicly announced to the world your business is now dependent on AI you're hostage to paying whatever the AI companies want to charge you
040
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
The SCORE investigation of repeatability and credibility is a lot. There are a few ways to get your head around it. 1: The Nature collection includes 3 papers from SCORE, an amazing paper from @i4replication.bsky.social and several commentaries about the work. www.nature.com/collections/... 1/
nature.com
Reliable research in the social and behavioural and sciences
Sweeping new investigations probe the replication, robustness and reproducibility of results across the behavioural and social sciences.
13328
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Excited and happy to report that we (@ccmmody.bsky.social, Ewout Meijer, Marielle Prevoo, Yannis Stravrakakis, Penelope Bollini, and I) will be able to start the new project "Invisible knowledge work and the transformation and scaling of open science practices". This is a unique project --> 1/2
openscience.nl
Open Science NL awards funding to 19 projects researching open science | Open Science NL
To promote transparency and to ensure that decisions, policies, solutions, and practices are evidence-based, it is essential to conduct research on open science itself. Therefore, Open Science NL has launched a call for proposals for “Research on Open Science” and is now awarding funding to 19 projects with a total of 4.8 million euros.
32810
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Enjoyed this episode of @hpspodcast.bsky.social from last year with Heather Douglas about the social contract of science. Interesting discussion about 6 'types' of science and how they should be funded, relevant to a lot of current #metascience discourse. More 'science courts'! shorturl.at/QSdJI
open.spotify.com
S5 E4 - Heather Douglas on Rethinking Science’s Social Contract
050
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
The School of Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University where I work is recruiting new lecturers, both research-focused (shorturl.at/zexaA) and teaching focused (shorturl.at/EhHrf) I'm not involved in the recruitment but feel free to reach out to me for a chat about working here! #academicsky
shorturl.at
Lecturer (Psychology) REC - (8981) | Manchester Metropolitan University Careers
All about Manchester Metropolitan - an exciting, modern university in the heart of one of the UK's great student cities.
011
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 18/03/2026
image of a nonsense graph from McKinsey claiming "By 2030 the metaverse could generate $4 trillion to $5 trillion across consumer and enterprise use cases
381859658
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Genuinely interested whether the UKRI Metascience Novelty indicators project considered "ideological opposition to AI and novelty indicators" in their risks to delivery, given the amount of hate im seeing towards it
020
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.
open.substack.com
Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science
What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?
15719
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Philip Oldfield @sustainabletall.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
At last an AI tool I can get behind “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.” antirender.com
629672
Reposted by Tom Hostler
404 Media @404media.co · 17/11/2025
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
404media.co
A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On
We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”
8259123
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Grant Gibson @drgrantgibson.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
There’s no ‘could’ about doing less research. Colleagues here being told they can’t go for bids that don’t cover overhead (ie all the charity funders)
135
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Really enjoyed this episode of @bjkspod.bsky.social with @mbaldwin.bsky.social talking about the history (and possible future) of peer review: www.buzzsprout.com/1390924/epis... Interesting to learn just how recent the idea that "research must be peer reviewed" is (70's), and that its original...
buzzsprout.com
115. Melinda Baldwin: A triple history of Nature, scientific journals, and peer review - BJKS Podcast
Melinda Baldwin is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. We talk about her work studying the history of Nature, scientific journals more broadly, what it means to be a scien...
2114
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...
elevanth.org
Which Kind of Science Reform
What hope is there for science reform, if we can't agree on what to reform? Right now, principles are more important than practices.
15284136
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 06/07/2025
Why I'm more optimistic than others about metascience (or metaresearch) (I wanted to write up some thoughts on #metascience2025 but I just don't have the time so this thread will have to do.)
2289
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
This is an interesting reflection on the relationship between metascience and research culture. There’s some excellent and relevant work that gets done under the banner of “research culture”, especially around things like inclusivity, recognition, and community building and I agree...
141
Reposted by Tom Hostler
samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 03/07/2025
as spectator and also participant in various metascience-informed things like prereg, github etc, I can't help but notice a parallel between metascience-as-management (rather than science) and academic-leadership-as-management (rather than academic leadership)
1183
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
If a drug company funds a study showing that their product is highly effective, we would be rightly skeptical of the results; if tech companies fund #metascience into how AI can improve science should we be equally sceptical?
4374
Reposted by Tom Hostler
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.
6253660811257
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Looking forward to being part of the panel at this online event this afternoon on critical Metascience, I'll be talking about the alignment between open research reforms and academic capitalism. Details in the post below 👇 #metascience
191
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
A sunny Friday afternoon so I'm in a beer garden working my way through my stack of "interesting papers to read" and thought I'd do a mini thread of the best. Today's paper (actually a book chapter) is Jochen Gläser's 2019 "how can governance change research content?" doi.org/10.4337/9781...
120
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
This is a great post and really underscores the need for metascience reforms to seriously consider the context of their implementation, and the impact this has on researchers - "Get to know your audience"
040
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 07/06/2025
Let's have some fun. In this NYT story, we see a picture of an OpenAI billboard on a college campus, suggesting the following prompt: "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus. In two weeks. Small steps please." What happens when we actually use ChatGPT to do this? THREAD!
13643255
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
This is a great post and was nice to see my paper on the invisible workload of open research quoted (journal.trialanderror.org/pub/the-invi...). Imposing mandates on researchers to perform time intensive open research practices is particularly unreasonable when combined with cuts to time and budgets
journal.trialanderror.org
The Invisible Workload of Open Research
062
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Center for Open Science @cos.io · 29/05/2025
🆕 COS statement on the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" Executive Order The EO names important open science principles, but their application here is counter to open science's purpose to accelerate discovery, advance treatments, & create knowledge. 📄 Read our statement: www.cos.io/about/news/c...
cos.io
COS Statement on “Restoring Gold Standard Science” Executive Order
The Executive Order issued on May 23, 2025, Restoring Gold Standard Science, references several open science practices championed by COS and the open science and metascience communities more generally...
01612
Reposted by Tom Hostler
William Carruthers @williamcarruthers.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Just astonishing: which airport book is ‘email jobs’ from, and which 1970s fantasy about everyone being in ‘production’ is this? Just utter ‘know your place’ stuff.
68722
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Nick Holmes @thehandlab.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Its just warm words - like all funding agencies, universities, journals ("excellence" etc)... Only the implementation & detail really matters to me. (Not taking 'a side' on this one!)
011
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Here's a thought experiment for you all: If a seemingly sane and science-literate government (I.e., not Trump) passed a law saying that all government policy must be based on reproducible, transparent research thats open to null findings, how would everyone react? #metascience
110
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Any researchers in the Netherlands interested in the effects of #openresearch policies/practices on academic workload or administrative burden? Please get in touch! I would love to collaborate with you on a project for this funding opportunity
010
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
There’s the weaponization of open science y’all. Basically ripped from @cos.io’s website. The ROI for leaders speaking up is the highest it will be now, and only decline over time as these policies take shape and grow teeth.
1216865
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Trying to keep up with this #metascience EO debate but this seems bang-on. To everyone saying "if it wasn't the science reform mvt it would be something else to justify this"...what else could possibly exist that would support the EO so effectively than a decade of 'science in crisis' literature?
5297
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/05/2025
1. It's Fustilarian Friday and today's drop is the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" executive order. My read is that this is designed to (1) protect far-fringe figures such as the antvaxxers now heading our health agencies, and (2) kneecap efforts to use scientific evidence in regulatory policy.
whitehouse.gov
Restoring Gold Standard Science
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 7301 of title 5, United
31632228
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 24/05/2025
Also the anti-pluralist stance embedded in the reform to further this reductionist narrative has from the getgo had authoritative, at times fascist tendencies. This isn't the time to talk about our good intentions; we're way past that. It's time to take responsibility, to be humble and accountable.
1485
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 24/05/2025
Again, this is not a blame issue for me but points to the fact that (as I have said many times) the seemingly apolitical nature of science reform works against the (imo) real issues of labour and collective organisation.
132
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
This paper is an interesting case study example to come along so soon after the equally viral discussion on "stop using the phrase 'scientific consensus' and start using 'convergent evidence' instead'" - see www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Convergence and consensus
In these days of political instability, geopolitical tensions, and social discontent around the world, there are continued threats to the principles, conduct, and findings of science. This assault on ...
021
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
Hello followers! I'm back on Bluesky after 6 months of work-free parental leave. What have I missed? Please share with me any interesting Open research/Metascience publications, blog posts, or juicy scandals I should catch up on! #openresearch #metasci
051
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
Very honoured to have written a little something for @aeon.co about zero, absence, and consciousness. It was a real pleasure to write, and very curious to know what people think! 0️⃣🧠 #PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #consci
44817
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Jelena Brankovic @jelena3121.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
If you bookmarked "Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?" but did not get to read it yet, worry not, we've got you covered with a short blog post about it Bonus track: there is a video by one of our vloggers in it 🤩
0127
Reposted by Tom Hostler
Ariel Edwards-Levy @aedwardslevy.bsky.social · 02/11/2024
this is a great piece, and I just want to propose that the *funniest* research development would be for all of the researchers involved to quit Posting at each other for 2-3 weeks, self report the effects on their mental health, and coauthor the paper
1436
Tom Hostler @tomhostler.bsky.social · 22/10/2024
Lots of new followers (hi!) so thought I would do an overdue thread on my recent paper “Open Research Reforms and the Capitalist University: Areas of Opposition and Alignment” (doi.org/10.1525/coll...) #metasci
doi.org
Open Research Reforms and the Capitalist University: Areas of Opposition and Alignment
There is a need for more nuanced and theoretically grounded analysis of the socio-political consequences of methodological reforms proposed by the open research movement. This paper contributes by uti...
1136