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Vincent Tijms

@vtijms.eurosky.social
52 followers 147 following 33 posts

Former beer brewer and cognitive neuroscientist. Above average interest in critical thinking education. Currently educational adviser at UvA. Sifa: sifa.id/p/vtijms.eurosky.social Blog: www.connectingcells.com

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Vincent Tijms
Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 15/10/2026
Thinking still more about the AI booster discourse that tries to undermine critical work on the topic by saying "They don't even use it, how can they possibly know what they're talking about." >>
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 09/10/2026
Relatedly, at least part of the concern about treating things as people is that it really might bring you to treat people as things.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 09/10/2026
Superpower or not, I often find that if somebody's mind makes sense to me, they come in with ADHD/autism a bit later.
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Creating Fake People is a Terrible Idea. Some companies, like Tavus (www.tavus.io) are actively celebrating creating digital avatars that are indistinguishable from humans. My view: it should not be permitted, let alone celebrated. @nautilus.bsky.social nautil.us/creating-fak...
tavus.io
Tavus: The Human Computing Company
Personified Application Layers that see, hear, and respond face-to-face in real time. Build and deploy with our API, no-code PAL Maker, or enterprise Solutions. Interactive AI avatars and conversation...
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 07/10/2026
The feature I did not know I wanted.
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Reposted by Vincent Tijms
Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 06/10/2026
New preprint - "Associations between content and engagement vary across social media communities" Research on social media often seeks content features linked in general to engagement, e.g. negativity, moralisation, etc. But social media is not an uniform environment.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026
This book is really, really good.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026
A heartfelt essay on what I guess you could call ailienation
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026
www.connectingcells.com/whats-so-cri...
connectingcells.com
What's so critical about critical thinking?
What does the word "critical" actually add to critical thinking? Matthew Landers finds the answer in Dewey: the moment we suspend judgment. I agree, up to a point.
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Reposted by Vincent Tijms
De Groene Amsterdammer @groene.nl · 05/10/2026
Deze dagen is het goed boeren voor de doemdenkende AI-criticus. Maar de existentieel ‘serieuze’ risico’s die doemdenkers aankaarten, verschillen handig van de echt bestaande nadelen van AI.
groene.nl
Betekent AI het einde van de mensheid? Meegaan in dat narratief komt juist AI-bedrijven goed uit
Deze dagen is het goed boeren voor de doemdenkende AI-criticus. Maar de existentieel ‘serieuze’ risico’s die doemdenkers aankaarten, verschillen handig van de echt bestaande nadelen van AI.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 04/10/2026
Zolang het geen nieuw, verbeterd recept is, maak ik me weinig zorgen.
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Reposted by Vincent Tijms
Heleen Slagter @haslagter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
🚨 Job alert 🚨 Our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social is hiring an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience! Join our lovely community here in beautiful Amsterdam! 🧠🔥 Deadline: October 15 workingat.vu.nl/vacancies/as...
workingat.vu.nl
Vacancy — Assistant Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience
Join the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) as Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Ik heb de web-app ToetsKaart naar beta gebracht: uva-hva.gitlab.host/V.Tijms/toetska…
uva-hva.gitlab.host
Vincent Tijms / ToetsKaart · GitLab
A tool to review the assessment structure of degree programmes. Demo available at https://toetskaart.duckdns.org.
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Melissa Franch, PhD @mfranch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Excited to see this work published! We find that the brain codes semantic relationships similar to contextual LLMs (like GPT2) but unlike LLMs, uses contrastive coding to prevent confusion of highly similar words. Many thanks to the reviewers and BCM neurosurgery team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A population code for semantics in human hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Franch et al. show that human hippocampal neurons encode the meanings of the words we hear through distributed, context-sensitive population activity that mirrors some features of large language model...
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Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com · 02/10/2026
Friends: take a moment to sign european.social. There's strength in numbers and we can bring some game. This can become more than a letter.
european.social
The European Social Stack · An open declaration
An open declaration: The European Social Stack. Open Social Platforms and Private Messaging.
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Reposted by Vincent Tijms
Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 02/10/2026
Fascinating new review of what it takes for viruses to go airborne. Open access: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
Diagram of the human airway, showing what determines airborne transmission of viruses during inhalation and exhalation.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 02/10/2026
This is something all men should read. I wish I had figured out its message decades ago because yes, we all see and hear dumb shit and we don't speak up or we are unsure where the boundaries are and so we ignore, we de-escalate and we don't do the right thing. www.girlonthenet.com/blog/cornell/
girlonthenet.com
Cornell | What are you doing to challenge rape culture right now?
Protecting women from rape doesn't mean swooping with a sense of victory, it means starting a conversation that might leave you feeling like shit.
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Caleb Scoville @calebscoville.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
a student journalist asked me for a comment on “viewpoint diversity.” rather than answer their specific questions, I offered the following comment about one reason I find the terms of the debate to be frustrating and insufficient.
As a sociologist who studies partisanship in the USA, I think the terms of this debate are largely backwards. Yes, universities and campuses are mostly populated by left-of-center individuals. But I do not think it makes a lot of sense to focus this conversation exclusively on how universities have changed without asking the same question about the political parties. The partisan coalitions have transformed significantly over the past several decades, with college graduates increasingly leaving the Republican Party and sorting into the Democratic PartyIt is an empirical question, but my guess is that changes in the partisan coalitions do much more to explain the political lean of university populations today than anything universities have done in particular. Do we really think that people decide if they’re going to go to college based on politics? Or is it more likely that the kinds of people who are more likely to go to college are increasingly the kinds of people who identify as Democrats/liberals? What universities should do about this is a valid question, but we should not treat “liberal” and “conservative” as fixed or sacred identities worthy of equal representation in the academy as such. They are dynamic categories that have become increasingly associated with educational attainment in the first place. I happen to think education polarization produces bad politics (e.g., the current attacks on the public funding for science), but I am less concerned about its direct effects on education and research per se. Disagreement is alive and well in academia, even when it does not line up with the national partisan divide.
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Christoph Strauch @cstrauch.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)
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BWJones @bwjones.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is a bit of a parlor trick and is being hyped. The images are not being generated de-novo. They are being matched with a known set of prior images or text, meaning that they reconstruct the signals recorded by brain when shown images during training. Verrrry different than reading thoughts.
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Miaganga @miaganga.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 29/09/2026
I think the idea is rather that DST allows for the existence of non-computational systems. The rest would be to argue that brains or minds are that type of system. I have to say I liked Romain Brett's attempts to make that point (though it's been a while).
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 29/09/2026
"The best current evidence supports a narrow claim: AI may already be affecting the hiring margin for junior white-collar roles most exposed to AI, but this attribution is contested, and aggregate labor-market disruption has yet to appear in the data." aleximas.substack.com/p/has-ai-imp...
aleximas.substack.com
Has AI impacted the labor market yet?
Evaluating the state of the evidence
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
In thisa piece for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social I express the wish for a better level of public discourse around AI that doesn't leave us hanging on every word of the alleged tech gurus. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...
thenewworld.co.uk
Apocalyptic AI fantasies are a stupid, annoying distraction from its real problems
The people who work in AI are not gurus and most of their predictions have been wrong. Working in the industry makes them less reliable commentators, not more
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Many Minds podcast @manymindspod.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
New episode!! 🎉🎙️ A conversation w/ @samgilbert.bsky.social all about cognitive offloading. We humans have long used tools to help us remember and reason. But as new technologies emerge, it's a good time to take stock: What does offloading do for us—and to us? Listen: disi.org/cognitive-of...
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
Uiteraard kun je kiezen om racisme, ongelijkheid en uitbuiting niet erg te vinden, maar dan nog staat de cognitiewetenschappelijke kritiek op de claims van AI-bedrijven overeind.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
Daar is de stelling: al het niet onderbouwde gebazel over intelligentie, intentie, redeneren is niet alleen omdat de AI-dudes zich niet in cognitie verdiepten (wat ook zo is), maar omdat de échte problemen zo onbesproken blijven en die zijn rond racisme, ongelijkheid, uitbuiting, etc.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
Over dat alles valt veel te vertellen en is (ook onderling) nogal wat onenigheid. Maar de korte versie zet vraagtekens bij nogal wat grootse claims. Waar dat stukje "links" in het spel komt is bij een grotere en inderdaad politieke analyse van waarom het discours is zoals het is.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
En die mensen (ben er zelf trouwens ook eentje, maar niet onderzoek in gegaan) kijken op een vrij analytische manier naar wat voor cognitie LLMs voorstellen en hoe we de benchmarks kunnen interpreteren die in AI worden gebruikt.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
Ik wil wel bijten, hoor. Dat verhaal van Bregman was dom, onder andere omdat hij een rij intellectuelen groepeert als "links" terwijl de grote gemene deler is dat ze cognitiewetenschappers zijn. Zeg maar de tak van sport die al ruim een halve eeuw denken en intelligentie probeert te vatten.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 23/09/2026
Zo een formulering zegt ook dat het hem overkwam. Het is het omgekeerde van verantwoordelijkheid nemen.
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Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 22/09/2026
So… we just found out that GPT sol can complete a complex online behavioral/cognitive study producing nearly indistinguishable behavior and subjective reports… right as we are about to launch. Is this doomsday for online cognitive testing?
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026
Beide zijn aantrekkelijk bij geringe levenservaring?
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026
The difficulty with virtuous LLM use (if such a thing exists) is that it clashes with an ideology focused on output, targets, operationalisations. If you're in those waters, you can't see the problem. We wanted words and we got words, right?
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 21/09/2026
This is in my opinion (again) hitting the nail on the head and why I am having trouble with people defending the Dutch prime minister's AI use. Attention for others or work that involves others is supposed to be costly. That's the actual value of it. It provides dignity.
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Laurens Verhagen @laurensvhg.eurosky.social · 18/09/2026
Haha, het 'Klöpping-corvee' is inmiddels een serieuze ingezonden brief geworden met als afzender een hele groep bezorgde (en echte) experts www.vn.nl/klopping-cor... #kloppingcorvee
vn.nl
AI-specialisten: ‘Wij hebben het gehad met Klöpping-corvee’
In een ingezonden brief waarschuwen AI-specialisten voor De Grote Klöpping Show.
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De Groene Amsterdammer @groene.nl · 19/09/2026
De coolste scène uit Christopher Nolans kaskraker draait om een culinair object dat in Homerus’ Odyssee helemaal niet voorkomt: een stoofpot.
groene.nl
De Circe van Christopher Nolan maakt een stoofpot, maar in Homerus’ ‘Odyssee’ wordt alleen maar geroosterd
De coolste scène uit Christopher Nolans kaskraker draait om een culinair object dat in Homerus’ Odyssee helemaal niet voorkomt: een stoofpot.
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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Consciousness Needs a Subject" - commentary with @cdj.bsky.social on target article by @anilseth.bsky.social. Now published, along with all (50!) commentaries and Anil's responses! 😊 cup.org/4h0wRmg
cup.org
Consciousness needs a subject | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
Consciousness needs a subject - Volume 49
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
5/ My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/xZqFCN05NT...
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.
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Edo van der Goot @emvdg.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Nu al verslaafd aan deze tool van @jeroenwollaars.nl gehoord.de/beraadslagin...
gehoord.de
gehoord.de/beraadslagingen
Live transcriptie van debatten in de Tweede Kamer, binnen enkele seconden als tekst, met tijdstip, spreker en fractie.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
Dat herken ik dan ook wel weer. Maar ik zag wel echt op tegen werelden als de kantoorbaan, minder grip op mijn leven. Ik wilde wel dingen doen, maar keek ook heel fatalistisch naar de sleur. Mijn eerste serieuze was trouwens een comicwinkel!
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
Verder is elke nieuwe generatie lui en idealistisch volgens 40+, omdat die gewoon vergeten zijn hoe weinig zin ze er zelf in hadden om het systeem te reproduceren.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
Het concept "generatie" wordt nogal uitvergroot door mensen die wat te verkopen hebben (jij kreeg "the choice of a new generation" te drinken geloof ik), maar door context gevormd worden is natuurlijk wel echt.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
If you consider EA as a progressive-to-fascist pipeline, I guess the reception of this message depends on location in the pipeline.
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026
@gijsm.bsky.social might find this compelling!
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026
Here's a wild idea. A proposal to turn research papers into MCP servers to allow for new modes of inquiry and collaboration. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Reimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents - Nature
Paper2Agent converts research papers into interactive artificial intelligence agents by turning manuscripts, code and data into model context protocol-based tool-invoking systems that reproduce origin...
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026
Fantastic talk by Felienne Hermans (and much less about AI than title implies) youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-...
youtube.com
AI made me doubt everything about programming by Felienne Hermans - DDD Europe 2026
YouTube video by Domain-Driven Design Europe
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Peter Breedveld @frontaalnaakt.nl · 15/09/2026
Alfredo Goeloe, die niks heeft gedaan, werd besprongen door politieagenten, hij was bang, in paniek, schreeuwde om hulp. Nu is hij dood. Dood door politie.
frontaalnaakt.nl
Wie beschermt ons tegen de politie? - Frontaal Naakt
Peter Breedveld Alfredo Goeloe, die niks heeft gedaan, werd besprongen door politieagenten, hij was bang, in paniek, schreeuwde om hulp. Nu is hij dood. Dood door politie. Peter Breedveld Illustratie:...
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Vincent Tijms @vtijms.eurosky.social · 13/09/2026
This is super useful and it makes the issue much bigger than a simple 'LLMs do not have world models'-type objection does.
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