steven t. piantadosi

A little opinion piece on the contributions of mathematicians in the era of AI colala.berkeley.edu/papers/piant...

Enormous news. A melanoma vaccine, one of the most deadly cancers out there. Science is good and helpful and there should be more of it. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

UT Linguistics'll have 4 (!) computational linguists! Consider applying! I'm looking for students and also potentially postdocs. For postdocs, particularly interested in philosophically rich issues around AI cognition: Can AI introspect? How can we study if they have preferences?

This is a heist. cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Imagine two people standing in the same spot, looking at the same Goya. They inspect exactly the same parts of the painting, but in a different order. Later, they talk about what they saw. Ignoring all other differences: are the memories they formed identical?

Question for the #CogSci community: What's one kind of community building in our field that deserves far more recognition than it gets? If a specific person comes to mind, consider nominating them for the #ElmanPrize 👇

Simple mistakes in LLM reasoning might suggest that models are *pattern matching*, not reasoning. But what if people are doing the same thing? In my preprint with @glupyan, we find that LLMs are highly aligned with people *because* they are pattern matching! A thread🧵(1/15):

As a PhD student designing my first survey, I added what I thought was a throwaway question at the end. To my surprise, thousands of academics answered it! The paper is out today: doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

(5/X) Thirty years from now, people will read that Trump started and lost a war in Iran for no reason, helped a Russian dictator kill Ukrainians, posted snuff films on social media, ran a multi-billion dollar crypto scam, and had his own personal army roaming the streets killing with impunity...

A haunted house where you keep running into people explaining the rules of board games to you

Today in space: The Hera spacecraft is about to perform a hard burn so it can meet up with asteroid Dimorphos. 4 years ago, NASA deliberately crashed a probe into Dimorphos. Starting next month, Hera will map the wreckage. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Space_Safety...

Please enjoy this new offering from the lab: we discover that #excavates - ancient flagellate lineages with a voracious appetite for bacteria - change their behaviour depending on the availability of said prey! Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #protistsonsky

they did the thing

news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

🧠 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...

Why isn't this on every TV screen and not the fairy tale of killer robots

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

"Another misunderstanding is that sexual violence can be ended through education. There is not a single evidence-based program for perpetrators that has reduced sexual violence."

www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/s...

This is a deep and powerful report from the @standupforscience.net Foundation. It is thorough and deep but worth the time to read. www.standupforscience.foundation/forging-the-...

"From the day Photograph 49 was taken, Franklin interpreted the pattern as indicative of a helix. ... she calculated how many layers of purine and pyrimidine bases there must be `per turn of helix (if there is a helix).'" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.

Nominations are open for the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize! The prize honors mid-career cognitive scientists whose work shows scientific excellence and a real commitment to community building. Deadline: Nov 18 🗓️ Details and how to nominate: cognitivesciencesociety.org/elman-prize/ #CogSci #Award

Congrats to @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on receiving a 2026 MacArthur Fellowship - very well deserved!

I wrote for @thecut.com about the Cornell case and what it says that, at my institution and many others like it, protesters are often punished more harshly than sexual assailants www.thecut.com/article/what...

A gigantic test, 650 infants across 30 laboratories, finds "no evidence" for Marcus et al.'s ABB rule learning: "to the contrary, a Bayesian analysis of the data indicated strong evidence for a null effect."

New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵

You know when public attention can reverse a prosecutorial decision like this you almost get the sense that the decision to shrug it off in the first place was not based on an assessment of the quality of the evidence so much as an assessment of the seriousness of the crime.

9/26/2026- SCOTUS www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/se...

Absolutely unbelievable how solar power has taken off worldwide during the Hormuz oil crisis. You don't have to hand it to him, but Trump may have done more to finally kick off a global civilization of effete librul solar users than anyone else in the West

"Imagine a different flavor of Hilbert/Millennium problems which focus on trimming up human thought about the deepest questions in science…"

Little opinion piece: Mathematics in the Age of AI Oracles

What's behind this tidal wave of epidemics? In the largest study ever conducted on emerging infectious diseases, we show that the popular explanation - "our relationship with nature is out of balance" - doesn't hold up. Out now in Nature, after half a decade of work: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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?

Can confirm (see 🧵 ). But let me share some optimism. A NIH colleague said today that against all odds, NIH has been…winning. “We made this EO a necessity. We fought hard. We threw sand in all the gears. All the lowdown ways of blocking grants failed to produce the results Vought et al wanted.”

so we just nearly started a war with china (a nuclear state) because of genAI use

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.

protectdemocracy.org/work/researc...

Scientist here: It is widely known inside science that this—top-down imposition of a research agenda—leads to mostly rote, boring, non-innovative work. Building an institute to do discovery science is hard: you hire young people, put them together, hope synergies arise and ideas fall out.

www.dailycal.org/news/campus/...

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.