Liz Renner

Liz Renner

@lrrenner.bsky.social

Academic; cats, culture, child development, cultural evolution, social learning; she/her #BiInSci

682 followers996 following1.1K posts

Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

Wow can I transmit this response directly into university higher-ups' brains? "you get better results (and people are happier and likely to stay with the company longer) when people feel that their work is seen and appreciated"

Ask a Manager@askamanager.org

askamanager.orgmy boss says I give too much praise to my employeesA reader writes: Recently, we had a tough situation where a new employee, Sam, rubbed my boss, Alex, the wrong way in their first two weeks, and since then I have not been able to successfully turn that ship around. I won’t deny that Sam has had challenges, but overall they are largely competent with […] The post my boss says I give too much praise to my employees appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Liz Renner reposted

Kara McNair
@karamcnair.bsky.social

The 👏 Point 👏 Of 👏 Education 👏 Is 👏 Not 👏 To 👏 Make 👏 Sure 👏 Enough 👏 Essays 👏 Are 👏 Produced 👏!!

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

"AI can draft an essay for you, especially if you give it a high quality prompt." Really? This is what MIT thinks high schoolers should learn? MIT's "Day of AI" dayofai.org provides materials for K-12 teachers and claims to have reached over 5,000,000 students to date. 1/2

Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

I can tell how I'm feeling about life by whether & where the eyeroll emoji is in my "recently used" list. It's making a LOT of appearances these days.

Liz Renner reposted

Andrea Howard
@drandreahoward.bsky.social

New paper from me, out soon in Behavior Research Methods: I'm a lil bit obsessed with good online recruitment and the result is this side-quest paper that made use of data we had collected that recruited people online in three ways (met them on Zoom, validated their email, and Prolific). 🧵>>

PsyArXivBot@psyarxivbot.bsky.social

Engagement begins at recruitment: Comparing videoconference verification to passive online screening for participant retention and study engagement: https://osf.io/5qe6c

Liz Renner reposted

Christina Bergmann
@chbergma.bsky.social

PSA for the American (North, Middle, and South, I presume) collaborators: Europe just did the whole clock changing thing. Prepare for some meeting time confusion if you meet at fixed times

Liz Renner reposted

Charlotte Lydia Riley
@lottelydia.bsky.social

University of Nottingham, right now, is cutting 560 jobs. Do we need to rebrand universities as very large, very clean, land-based oil rigs to get government support?

Leo Hickman@leohickman.carbonbrief.org

From the govt's press release: "The developer estimates that Jackdaw will create 27 new direct jobs and safeguard 273 existing jobs that would otherwise be lost." Odd that so much is made about this being good for jobs. Your nearest out-of-town supermarket likely generates more jobs.

Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

My university has 3 EV chargers (which each have 2 spots), for a total of 6 charging parking spaces. But they don't enforce the rule that you should only park in EV bays when charging. So today I've been charger-blocked by 2 assholes (one in a Ford, one in a Mercedes). I emailed our parking team

Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

about the issue, and their advice was this: "We would advise never relying on being able to use the electric chargers at work." Wow, helpful! Thank you for the excellent advice!

Liz Renner reposted

Dr Matilda Fitzmaurice
@matildaf.bsky.social

"Shifting increasing numbers of staff to teaching-only contracts or reducing research time for staff who are not supported by specific grants risks weakening the relationship between knowledge creation and knowledge transmission" 💯 #UCU #UKHE www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

thebritishacademy.ac.uk​​Is research what makes a university a university?​Universities are under increasing pressure to change. Faced with financial shortfalls and demands to support economic growth and skills, proposals for greater institutional specialisation have become ...
Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

Marmoset there'll be days like this, there'll be days like this, my marmoset

New England Primate Conservancy@neprimateconsrv.bsky.social

Native to South America's western Amazon Basin, including portions of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Threatened by deforestation and capture for the pet trade. Learn more: neprimateconservancy.org/western-pygmy-marmoset/

Liz Renner reposted

Per Engzell
@pengzell.bsky.social

My PhD taught me research. I wish it had taught me how to answer ten emails without needing the rest of the day off.

Liz Renner reposted

Patrick Ness
@patricknessbooks.bsky.social

The NHS Guidance on trans people in hospital will protect zero women but will badly harm trans people. What a hateful disgrace and will be remembered by future generations as a stain on us all.

Liz Renner reposted

Mar Hicks
@histoftech.bsky.social

As more people got access to degrees gradually they weren’t seen as worth as much… fast forward to today where we’re being told machines can & should do our thinking & our work. The oligarchs saying this are descendants (in some cases literally) of the people who tried to keep most of us uneducated.

This post is unavailable.

Liz Renner reposted

Nate Bowling
@natebowling.com

Replying to @natebowling.com

Somewhere out there a teacher is using AI to grade their students' AI writing. While it's not my place judge them for their practice, all I can say is "couldn't be me." At that point what are even doing? I'd rather hang-up the proverbial cardigan than live that life.

Liz Renner reposted

Dr Nick
@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social

New paper! Accepted at Perspectives on Psychological Science. A textbook finding in infant psychology is that newborns - within ~1 hour of birth - visually track a simplified 'three blob' facelike stimulus further than its inverted control (see picture). This suggested inborn knowledge of faces!

Dr Nick@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social

ok the editorial and publication process is taking too long, so here is link to the accepted manuscript for our systematic review of the newborn face preference literature. it unearths a rather strange tale. check it out, any thoughts much appreciated www.researchgate.net/publication/...

researchgate.net(PDF) Is there an innate face detection module in the human newborn? A systematic review, meta- analysis and theoretical examination of the newborn face preference and its implicationsPDF | Reports of 'newborn face preference' are widely cited as evidence for an innate face detector, yet the literature has not been systematically... | Find, read and cite all the research you need o...

Liz Renner reposted

Helen Mylne
@helephantmylne.bsky.social

Primate Profile #103: Hoffmann's Titi Monkey We know almost nothing about these little guys beyond their range and physical description. Titis are small, monogamous monkeys from South America. Hoffmann's is ~1kg, ~30cm body + ~48cm tail. Image: Jane Kempler & Andrew Goldby Freelance (iNat.org)

Liz Renner reposted

Carl T. Bergstrom
@carlbergstrom.com

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

news.berkeley.eduUsing AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley NewsA UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.
Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

Somewhat tangential to the topic at hand, but we basically all now have to check communications from official bodies and individuals alike for accuracy, because they're using these systems and not declaring it. And like, we really could do without the extra work involved 🤷

Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social

After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

Liz Renner reposted

Jan Schaumann
@jschauma.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy

“just one more prompt, bro!” by @davidgerard nails how chatbots implement the typical patterns of addictive design, with their stochastic responses working beautifully as selective reinforcement. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

pivot-to-ai.compivot-to-ai.comYou’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shout at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpmann is a software developer. He’s been trying out AI autocomplete for coding. He was very impressed at how good the tools are for the first 80% of the code. But that last 20% is the hard bit — where you have to stare into space and think for a bit, work out structure, and understand your problem properly: [_Revontulet.dev_] > For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes. So he used the chatbot as a vastly more wasteful rubber duck. He adds: > … This experience is shared among peers, where AI traps you into the thinking “I am only one prompt away”, whilst clearly it just does not know the answer. That is: generative AI works the same way as gambling addiction. Spin the gacha! Just one more spin, bro, I can feel it! Large language models work the same way as a carnival psychic. Chatbots look smart by the Barnum Effect — which is where you read what’s actually a generic statement about people and you take it as being personally about you. The only intelligence there is yours. [_Out Of The Software Crisis_ _, 2023;__blog post_ _, 2023_] This is how people fall for chatbot girlfriends. They know it’s a bot, but they fall in love with the personality they’ve projected onto the generic statement generator. There’s a book on this — _Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products_ by Nir Eyal, from 2014. This is the how-to on getting people _addicted_ to your mobile app. [_Amazon UK_ _,__Amazon US_] Here’s Eyal’s “Hook Model”: * First, the trigger is what gets you in. _e.g._ , you see a chatbot prompt and it suggests you type in a question. * Second is the action — _e.g._ , you do ask the bot a question. * Third is the reward — and it’s got to be a _variable_ reward. Sometimes the chatbot comes up with a mediocre answer — but sometimes you love the answer! Eyal says: “Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire.” Intermittent rewards are the key tool to create an addiction. * Fourth is the investment — the user puts time, effort, or money into the process to get a better result next time. Skin in the game gives the user a sunk cost they’ve put in. * Then the user loops back to the beginning. The user will be more likely to follow an external trigger — or they’ll come to your site themselves looking for the dopamine rush from that variable reward. _Hooked_ builds on research papers about the mechanisms of gambling addiction — a life-destroying problem — to explain how you can use the same psychological manipulation techniques in your app. This book is on the bookshelf at every startup. Eyal said he wrote _Hooked_ to promote healthy habits, not addiction — but from the outside, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference. Because the model is, literally, how to design a poker machine. Keep the lab rats pulling the lever. You’ll see the _Hooked_ model in every mobile game. You’ll see it in dating apps, where the business model is to string you along and _not_ connect with someone nice, but keep you spending money on the dating app. Before Duolingo went nuts with AI slop, it used the same techniques to get you to do your language practice every day! I sort of recommend you read _Hooked_ , though the book’s a bit disingenuous about what it says it’s doing, and it will make you angry. Because it explains so much about everything we deal with. With ChatGPT, Sam Altman hit upon a way to use the Hook Model with a text generator. The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time. This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult. Send ’em a copy of this post. For addictive potential, Sergio Visinoni posted a few months ago: “Is GenAI digital cocaine?” He works through the analogy. [_blog post_] Coincidentally, Natalie Ponte on LinkedIn posted today: [_LinkedIn_] > try replacing “ai” with “cocaine” in all the posts you read about it. it’s pretty funny Let’s try it! * “My cocaine skeptic friends are all nuts, they’ll be left behind.” * “Cocaine isn’t going to replace you. Someone using cocaine is going to replace you.” Checks out. Cocaine doesn’t make you a business genius — it just makes you _think_ you’re a business genius. Same for AI. * _Video version_ ### Share this post: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### _Related_

Liz Renner reposted

New England Primate Conservancy
@neprimateconsrv.bsky.social

Black-crowned Central American squirrel monkeys (Saimiri oerstedii), also called red-backed squirrel monkeys, are endemic to Costa Rica and Panama. Occupying seasonally inundated and river-edge forests and secondary forests. Threatened by habitat loss due to agriculture and urbanization. Endangered.

Liz Renner reposted

Dave Vetter
@davidrvetter.bsky.social

Just imagine if the UK had some sort of national broadcaster that had a duty to act in the public interest.

The Guardian@theguardian.com

Britons kept in dark about scale of climate crisis, say viewers of ‘first-of-its-kind’ emergency briefing

theguardian.comBritons kept in dark about scale of climate crisis, say viewers of ‘first-of-its-kind’ emergency briefingNine out of 10 people felt motivated to act after watching film outlining threats to food security, economy and public health The British government must be honest about the scale of the threat posed by climate and nature breakdown, researchers have said, after nine out of 10 people surveyed after watching a briefing on the issue felt more motivated to act. Last November, in the “first-of-its-kind national emergency briefing”, nine experts gave stark assessments in Westminster Hall in London of the scale of the changes needed in the UK to adapt to the rapidly changing climate and ecological landscape. Continue reading...

Liz Renner reposted

Abhishek Dedhe
@adedhe.bsky.social

🧠 Is hierarchical reasoning uniquely human, or do we share this capacity across species and development? Our new paper in Cognition, "Flexibility of hierarchical reasoning across age and species," explores how humans and non-humans flexibly deploy recursive strategies! 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Liz Renner reposted

Dr Dean Burnett
@drdeanburnett.bsky.social

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

Liz Renner reposted

Lukas Gunschera
@lukasgunschera.com

Addiction has become the default framework for interpreting problematic social media use. It shapes how it is measured, discussed, regulated, and what support young people are offered. But does it match the experiences of young people who report feeling addicted to social media? 🧵(1/7)

Liz Renner reposted

Tobias Wilson-Bates
@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social

The best advice for grad students is to have them picture an enormous fire. Their work is on fire. The buildings are on fire. The fire has consumed all and its flames reach into space and consume even the cold and silent moon. Also don’t enter your original work into a chatbot.

Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

And to think, just a few months ago we were saying "not now, hantavirus cruise ship" life moves fast

Forbes@forbes.com

Russian officials said a researcher working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia died after contracting “pneumonia of unknown etiology.”

forbes.comRussian Plague Lab Researcher Dies As Nearly 200 Monitored—Here’s What We KnowRussian officials said a researcher working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia died after contracting “pneumonia of unknown etiology.”
Liz Renner
@lrrenner.bsky.social

250 locally acquired cases of dengue in Florida. (!!) This is a disease you don't mess around with. Dehydration is a big risk (among other symptoms), especially for the young and old. Dengue mosquitoes tend to be day biters, & you may not notice them hanging out under tables & similar places

Virginia Gewin@virginiagewin.bsky.social

“Traditionally, the CDC would be highly visible in a situation like this, but it hasn’t been this time… The U.S. public health agency has to be invited in by state officials, however, and Florida officials have not asked for CDC disease investigators to come in”.

apnews.comFlorida's dengue outbreak is now the largest in the continental US in decadesFlorida is experiencing its largest dengue outbreak in decades, with over 250 locally acquired cases reported this year.