Patrick S. Forscher

How AI competence undermines Human-in-the-loop AI system safety link.springer.com/article/10.1... "humans most capable of and committed to meaningful verification are also the humans most penalized by organizational efficiency metrics. Over time, these humans either adapt (by reducing verification)

And it's not just Meta. Last December, Avriel Epps and I wrote about how OpenAI was "grantwashing" on AI harms by directing scientists toward certain questions with funding that appeared to provide scientific freedom. www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

New court documents show that Meta has been explicitly scheming to control the scientific narrative about their social media platforms

BREAKING: Electronic Arts is cutting 400 jobs and shutting down BioWare, the legendary development studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Excellent piece about the “zombie” science of “race realism” - the claim that biological races exist. It reviews two books which should “finally nail down the coffin” of this claim, covering its history and a careful discussion of the responsibilities of scientists when researching related topics

New: I pulled the Character ai bankruptcy documents. They show: - They were spending $14 million/month on compute alone at a time their revenue was around ~$1 million/month - Currently losing $9 million a month - They admitted they enshittified & that it didnt work www.404media.co/character-ai...

Our reflections on the recent "AI and Research Integrity" meeting in Montreal: We are somewhat worried that many AI trustworthiness assessment tools are not trustworthy. @lhdjung.bsky.social @jamiecummins.bsky.social trustworthy.scientific.claims/posts/trustw...

Useful package to delete drive and compute-hogging AI features you probably don't use futurism.com/artificial-i...

Thinking about and studying the way science functions and how it could do better is important work. It's amazing that the UK has a specific metascience unit to do this. But what a shame that instead of doing so they're investing in projects to study how AI can automate research evaluation.

a new investigative journalism audit of the Kenyan SHA system-AI that calculates affordability for access to healthcare-just dropped & its scandalous "The AI income predictor systematically overcharged those who could least afford it while undercharging the well-off" sha.africauncensored.online

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."

Interesting read, in which he acknowledges that one of the (few) examples used in the main Vanderbilt report as evidence for the hopeless politicisation of anthropology is, in fact, simply science working as it should www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol

New paper! Despite qualitative researchers claiming that generalizability is not a goal, their published work does indeed contain generalizable claims. We document this and provide recommendations for how all researchers can better calibrate their generalizability claims. doi.org/10.1177/2515...

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

My newest Presidential Column for @psychscience.bsky.social addresses the issue of psychologists' dominant use of convenience samples for their research. Can our science stop being WEIRD if we don't consider how we sample? www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

“The arrangement would give Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, a direct role in determining how NIH distributes its $48 billion in congressionally-appropriated money.” Bypassing the many checks and balances at NIH on grant funding decisions.

We already have an AI kill switch: cut power to servers. Really want to talk existential threat? Fine. We humans have many ways to blow things up. Like data centers. Panicky discourse assumes the first priority is protect tech company investments and expand their businesses. But why should it be?

Remember when y'all made this thread on Paulina Borsook go viral? Well, that resulted in her getting a deal to re-publish her book in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, Belgium, France, and Switzerland! Coming Sept. 15—with a foreword by some guy named Gil Duran. Pre-order! www.cyberselfish.com

This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.

Between Buildings in Cleveland, Ohio

i’m sorry but this entire worldview seems not just evil but deeply stupid? the far future is fake! it doesn’t exist! what matters are people here and now!

This is a test to see if I can still find my academic people and if they can find me. I met a number of people I still deeply treasure from #SIPS in Rotterdam (2019) or virtually (2020-2021). Since Twitter became unreckognizable, I've wanted to rebuild my network.

I am sad to share that Project Implicit, my first non-profit and foundation of my career, is closing. The IAT website will continue, managed by the next generation of leaders in implicit bias research. Here's the statement I posted to LinkedIn. It didn't vibe right as a bsky thread.

Faculty unions at major universities could learn a thing or two about leverage from musicians' unions

Whatever you think of his politics, this story illustrates the problem of leaving redistribution to “philanthropy”. We need effective taxes on wealth so that the receipts can be allocated according to the needs of the country as a whole.  @patmillsuk.bsky.social

The cover-up is always worse than the crime? Harvard's latest filing says that Gino manipulated a file to cover-up fabrication, hid the laptop used to do it during the discovery process, and did more [redacted] destruction of evidence after being compelled by the court to share the laptop.

Do small effects really accumulate to make big effects? Not really. And certainly not when there are other causes on the thing you are looking at. Which, you know, is always. From Berggren & @jkflake.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1... #psych

SIPS [@improvingpsych.org] elections are here! Don't forget to cast your ballot. If you don't already know the candidates, I would like to put a special shout out to @aliciafrancomnez.bsky.social who is running in the graduate student and postdoc category ✨

Update: The academic flight from Twitter is now complete and appears permanent. April 2023, after the pandemic research surge, we recorded 2,234,307 posts sharing research on Twitter. As of April this year, "X" had 896,741 posts about research. That's a 60% drop in traffic.

Psych Science has retracted Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002). The second author requested the retraction. Both authors agreed to it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... So grateful to @datacolada.bsky.social for these blog posts and the work behind them: datacolada.org/138 and datacolada.org/139 1/2

Who would like to guess why UK, US and European media outlets are not publishing 3,000 articles per minute about this www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

If you have a Gmail account, you need to read this. Google's AI now scans your emails and attachments, bank statements, tax files, medical letters, all of it. It turned on by default, and there's a class-action lawsuit over how. Here are 5 moves to shut it off, the switch is hidden in two places:

Powerful issue of @thecontinent.org zooms in on 20 years of the Bill Gates-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and how it has backfired. Across AGRA’s 13 focus countries, the number of undernourished people rose by 58%. www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/2... @timschwab.bsky.social

Maybe, sometimes, it's also possible to read the work of people who actually have been studying the countless reasons why stuff can fail to replicate or to understand that replication is not the only method we have to learn or to verify? Idk. Just saying. But sure go ahead and ask AI why won't you.

Among the many ironies of this report, I was particularly shocked that Joe Henrich - who coined the "WEIRD" acronym -was one of its 10 (all US-based) authors, making sweeping unsupported generalisations from very limited, "WEIRD" data

Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

Defending Cofnas, who had written outrageously racist stuff for years (e.g., that in a meritocracy there would be next to no Black professors because they have lower IQs), is an odd hill to die on. Yet the 100-plus academics who signed this letter are clearly willing to die on it :/

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

🤔 I really wish more of the discourse around Cofnas, Yarvin, Musk, Thiel etc and their successful lynching of a Black academic would refer to @quinnslobodian.com's "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" tracing Silicon Valley's route from Ayn Rand to 'race science.'

If you just happened to pick this week to start yelling about the importance of academic freedom, I sure hope you did more than watch silently for the past 18 months as the Trump administration assaulted everything from mRNA vaccine research to gender studies to the very idea of having universities.

I’m hiring a PhD student to work with me on metascience in psychology at @zpid.bsky.social! The position is very open - could cover a wide range of topics/themes 🤸🏻‍♀️✨ If you have questions, please reach out! Applications are open until October 1st. leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/en/job/fyjwt...