iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 8h

FOR THE WEDNESDAY CROWD

011

Reposted by Will Gervais

Theo Priestley @theopriestley.net · 29/09/2026

Every AI CEO sounds like this.

61028294

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 22h

Correction, it was actually a Hawkwind show

092

Reposted by Will Gervais

weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We were all worried about the singularity, nobody expected the doublarity

1012217

Reposted by Will Gervais

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 29/09/2026

🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨 @aiyanakoka.bsky.social Meara Geraty and I revisited religious priming, breaking the causal claim into links that we robustly tested. Do God Primes Prime God? Converging Evidence Against the Efficacy of Experimental Religious Priming osf.io/preprints/ps... #PsychSciSky #metascience

Do God Primes Prime God? Convergint evidence against the efficacy of experimental religious priming.

WIll Gervais, MEara Geraty, Aiyana Willard

then the rest of the image is a screenshot of the table of contents.

plot summarising bayes factor results testing:
Prime -> Religious concepts (overt primes yield positive evidence, scrambled sentence negative)

Prime -> prosociality: universaly evidence strongly favoring the null result across 4 primes and 2 operationalisations of prosociality

Prime -> suspicion: fairly universal evidence in favor of priming methods causing suspicion

Religious concepts -> $$$: four independent sets of evidence favoring the null

11714

Reposted by Will Gervais

M @captainmeg.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

[runs in, panting] SHAMCHESTER CITY FOOTBALL CLUB

114228

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 29/09/2026

4 priming methods, 2 operationalisations of prosociality, measuring the proposed mediator. and a robust bayesian meta-analysis?!? 😮

design specs showing that 4 prime types (scramble, picture, essay, directions) are connected to measures of cognitive activation of religion, dictator giving, cognitive activation of prosocial concepts, and suspicion.

stefon sexily telling us that this place has everything

010

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 29/09/2026

11714

Reposted by Will Gervais

Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I wonder what it would be like to write the same column, over and over again, endlessly. Seems like it’d be boring. But maybe it brings one comfort, like having your parents read you the same story every night before you go to bed.

Opinion
Opinion by Megan McArdle
The Great Awokening is over.
This lesbian bar shows why.
A meltdown over masking shows where cancel culture is now.
Today at 07:00 ET

1996242509

Reposted by Will Gervais

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 25/09/2026

Researchers, did you know that if you feed ancient Greek texts into an LLM, then use that LLM to fabricate data for studies you didn't run about how ancient Greeks thought, this technology (machine learning) gives you the exciting opportunity to create your very own Scientific Trojan Horse

2153

Reposted by Will Gervais

ceej @ceej.online · 25/09/2026

Be serious. Bert and Ernie are not “in love.” Maybe they used to be, once

913298395

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 25/09/2026

The funny thing is your resulting papers will almost certainly be reviewed by people who really want a new horse, and don't care if there's anything sensible inside it -- your h-index will absolutely go up. so if you care more about that than understanding what's happening in our world, go for it

091

Reposted by Will Gervais

Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/

Image: A graph with lots of red dots clustered together in a curve. The are all looking upwards at a single red dot wearing sunglasses.

Caption: Mike was an outlier and would probably be excluded from the study, but all the other data points secretly thought he was really cool.

332863727

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 25/09/2026

2153

Reposted by Will Gervais

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

the main thing AI is showing is that an awful lot of people have nothing to say about the world or themselves.

15844105

Reposted by Will Gervais

weeder @weeder.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can and incredible new powers to change the things I can't.

63106512518

Reposted by Will Gervais

dan mentos @danmentos.com · 22/09/2026

[job interview] interviewer: so god killed all your kids? job: that's right

3069241690

Reposted by Will Gervais

Pat-HEX-myth (love, with a routing number) @patri.xyz · 21/09/2026

Freud was an ass, but I definitely have a 'give me what I want', 'what if someone gets mad at me', and 'i'm going to fucking save the world' brain.

031

Reposted by Will Gervais

𝙹*𝚊𝚍𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝙼𝚊𝚐𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚎 🍏 @artmyoldfriend.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

“The Cobolt Passage” by Canadian Chinese artist Yehan Wang.

393152459

Reposted by Will Gervais

Digital Brain @yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

This clip is so unexpected it leaves you speechless before you can even say "damn

1503838909

Reposted by Will Gervais

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

i've read from many that "gold standard science" sounds good in principle and that could not be farther from my truth. there is no such thing, there cannot be such a thing, and the sheer thought that it could actually be a good idea betrays a complete ignorance about science and scholarship.

34110

Reposted by Will Gervais

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 19/09/2026

I'm so tired of interacting with those who think that parasitic industries aren't vile: ones that depend on services we all own collectively to fail, e.g. so-called AI for supposedly helping the underserved educationally. I hate companies who steal labour for profit too. Or damage the environment.

210522

Reposted by Will Gervais

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/09/2026

i am genuinely bewildered by people who say that the rise of white nationalism in the republican party is a response to the "woke left." like, did the woke left cause pat buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign? is the woke left why steve king had a long career in congress?

430103801921

Reposted by Will Gervais

Gabby HC @scriblit.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The person with the music written on their arse from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights has pulled out of Ed Sheeran's tour

A bare bum with music written on it. Someone is pointing at it all 'look! Arse music!'

3257511533

Reposted by Will Gervais

Thomas Talhelm @thomastalhelm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🚨 It's published! 🚨 This is the big one. 100 cultures, 12,000 people, 108 researchers. Why people (and our most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.nature.com

312460

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 11/09/2026

My blog is still slop 😏 💅

030

Reposted by Will Gervais

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Also led to the famous exchange Earl of Sandwich: "I don’t know whether you’ll die upon the gallows or of the pox." Wilkes: "That depends, my lord, whether I first embrace your lordship’s principles or your lordship’s mistresses."

615917

Reposted by Will Gervais

Alex Andreou @sturdyalex.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This German comedy sketch (with English subtitles) perfectly captures so much of what is going on right now in the UK, the US, and across Europe. "Playing the 'Nazi Card' in the Third Reich", by Browser Ballett.

5330021271

Reposted by Will Gervais

Adam Rogers @jetjocko.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

A good place to start would be a simple rule an LLMs should never use the first-person pronoun to refer to itself. Let's see what we think about them after that. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/s...

nytimes.com

Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. (Gift Article)

Given access to email, A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them.

2273

Reposted by Will Gervais

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Science will always appear to be in a crisis if we insist on comparing it to an ideal that has never existed and can never exist. It is delusional to claim that science cannot produce useful knowledge unless it matches a confabulation made up by those who refuse to understand it as a social process.

210425

Reposted by Will Gervais

Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

A thread of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that look like record covers... because that's EXACTLY what the world needs 1. Huey Lewis and the News: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

11319107

Reposted by Will Gervais

Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

We need to stop this nonsense of insisting on viewing scientific error as a problem to be eliminated. Scientific error is the fuel we need for scientific progress. Without uncertainty, we don't need science. With forced certainty and required faith, we get religion

311026

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 27/08/2026

We need more Kool-aid manning!

010

Reposted by Will Gervais

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Just updated my critique of Lynn's 'national IQ' data; a core plank of scientific racism for decades. Includes a response to recent defences of the datasets. Conclusion remains the same: ‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability worldwide

Abstract of the critique:

In 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen produced a dataset which claimed to provide average ‘national IQs’ for nation-states worldwide. Despite extensive critique, this dataset, and subsequent updated versions, have been used in many empirical publications. Here I evaluate the latest version, produced in 2019 by Lynn and Becker, and show that this dataset is not fit for purpose. The primary data sources are inadequate for calculating ‘national IQs’. Most data originates from samples which are wholly unrepresentative of their national populations. Many are convenience samples with small sample sizes, collected over a wide date range (the oldest from the 1940s), often including only children and often including individuals selected because they had particular characteristics (i.e., were deliberately chosen to be unrepresentative). The transformation of cognitive test data from these sources into ‘national IQs’ involved a series of questionable assumptions and arbitrary adjustments. Some of these assumptions were based on Lynn and Becker’s prior beliefs about intelligence, including that regional and racial differences in IQ exist. These methods will result not just in error in the dataset but systematic bias. Even if representative data and appropriate methods were available for constructing ‘national IQs’, it is impossible to generate comparable measures of cognitive ability from culturally diverse populations across the globe. ‘National IQ’ datasets therefore do not provide comparable, accurate and unbiased measures of cognitive ability worldwide, and should not be used to draw inferences about global variation in intelligence.

218463

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 24/08/2026

Fringe weirdos making racist claims from long-discredited pseudoscience are part of a *decades long political project* cosplaying science. Those predictably turning up with an "academic freedom" red herring to shield racism every time the diaper blows out? Another important part of the project!

0111

Reposted by Will Gervais

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 24/08/2026

If you’re not potty trained by now you don’t get to be in the pool with the rest of us and we’re not gonna have a civilized debate about it while the water fills up with your filth.

152308349

Reposted by Will Gervais

Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 24/08/2026

Sometimes society at large rejects certain ideas because they’ve been thoroughly shown to be wrong and also because they suck and the people who espouse them suck and when someone comes around arguing those ideas should be part of some edgy modern debate we can and should shun them and move on.

7266941360

Reposted by Will Gervais

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Scientific racism is now mainstream again but Andrew Winston explains here why treating it as mainstream science is a mistake - tackling it with the ordinary scientific methods of peer review won’t be enough to stop it because it’s a “community project”, not science

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

13817

Reposted by Will Gervais

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Recommended read, if you want to understand the harm that race science does. Ethics are a core part of research integrity, and so have to be taken into account when considering whether something should be protected by “academic freedom”. Research which is clearly harmful should not be protected

34114

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 23/08/2026

Academic freedom is not an ingredient you can substitute for academic integrity. That's not how this recipe works

0201

Reposted by Will Gervais

SlenderSherbet @slendersherbet.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Don't start what you can't finish.

269241101

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 20/08/2026

YESSSSSSSS! Knew you'd be my guy! We're early days tinkering with some stuff contrasting moral vs epistemic trust & epistemic trust feels like a very worthy cause nowadays

110

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 20/08/2026

doesn't have to be academic but can be. really just trying to harvest an interdisciplinary zoomed out take on all the different ways this shows up/is thought about in different fields.

000

Will Gervais @willgervais.com · 20/08/2026

looking for book recommendations, esp from my cultural evolution, critical 🧠, philosophy peeps: I'm thinking about *epistemic trust*, how we go about choosing to whom we defer on information. cool overlaps with learning, cultural evo, misinfo, etc. any cool books hitting this from diff directions?

684

Reposted by Will Gervais

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 29/07/2026

"finally, we have created Fahrenheit 451 from the cautionary tale,"

7669265

Reposted by Will Gervais

Martin Modrák @modrakm.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Multiverse analysis, abdication of responsibility and manufacturing of doubt: I have written on some downsides I see with multiverse analysis (which I like in principle): arxiv.org/abs/2607.14623 I was inspired/provoked to write it by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci (thanks!)

Abstract: I argue that multiverse analysis is highly suited to two undesirable uses: abdication of researcher's responsibility for their conclusion and manufacturing of doubt. A review of multiverse analyses published in 2025 provides tentative empirical support that abdication of responsibility is present in the literature and I mention anecdotal evidence that multiverse has been used for manufacturing of doubt about Covid-19 precautions. To mitigate negative effects if multiverse analysis becomes widely used I suggest the community adopts two conventions for evaluating multiverse analyzes: evaluating multiverses by the single worst universe they contain and considering large size of a multiverse as a sign of weakness rather than a praiseworthy achievement.

45818