simón(e) 🌑

Jeffrey Epstein justified his evil actions with "science"

Evolutionary biologists whispering in his ear about how men and women are fundamentally different, and it's "natural" to desire younger women

Our field has a duty to explain why this is wrong both scientifically and ethically

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Candid photo of Zara Weinberg. She has short red hair, bangs and glasses. She is laughing.

The Leading Edge Fellows gathered this week to celebrate Zara Weinberg, a beloved member of our community. Our 7th cohort of Leading Edge Fellows (2026) will be named in her honor.

The Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Cohort application is now open! Due Feb 2.

www.leadingedgesymposium.org/apply/

we can make a better world.

Zara was an inspiration.
Rest now, @weinberz.witchlab.org

We carry on your legacy, a love for biology, SERMs, public transit, academic publishing anarchy… You gifted us with power to speak and be our truth, to be unapologetic in realizing our visions of a better future.

Zara Weinberg was a brilliant light both in and out of science. She changed the lives of everyone she interacted and loved for the better. Her legacy will live on through all of us and we will fight for a better world on behalf of her memory.

Zara Weinberg was a brilliant, loving, and beautiful woman. She inspired everyone who she interacted with, and always strived to make the world a better place for everyone. Tho the world is a little less bright today without her, her memory will always be a blessing.

She was truly one of the best.

Zara Weinberg passed away earlier this week. She joined my lab earlier this year when her postdoc lab formally closed.
She was a brilliant scientist, supportive mentor, dear friend, avid music fan, rabid believer in public transit, open science champion, and above all just an amazing human.

I cannot overstate how much my experience of my experimental results is my internal scientist going "WOAH" and my internal transsexual going "DUH."

the insanity of simultaneous
hope and hopelessness
too much and not enough

There are no words for what Miss Major has done for us. Rest easy.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, activist since Stonewall, has died The LGBTQ+ community — and particularly the transgender community — has lost an iconic activist.

Rest in power, Miss Major.

www.advocate.com/news/miss-ma...

Beautiful and inspiring work showing how hormones and social context come together! Big behavior and neuroimaging data! I’m in awe 🤩

Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
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"lmao"
~ Darwin. Probably.

call me shallow but this is why i never can bring myself to side with Reed, other than to play through that ending at least once 🤣

what have you built? i’m on my second play through of both and i can’t bring myself to do anything other than insisting on bringing swords and knives to every fight in a technofascist dystopia 🫨

is this your first PL playthrough?

Everybody's transgender, especially the nuclei from my transgender brain cells in my transgender mice. Everybody's transgender.

A good explainer on the EO. @kgandersen.bsky.social takes apart the key points.

His main point is exactly right. And we’ll add: politicizing science grants like this will — flatly — kill American science. Science, like business, is choked off by corruption.

With many postdoc grants like the NSF PRFB, Ford Fellowship, and Hanna H. Gray fellowships disappearing, I am currently looking for grants that could fund incoming postdoctoral scholars. Here is a thread of some of them 🧵

thank you for this!

Screenshot of album art for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 soundtrack. Track currently playing is “Nos Vies En Lumière” from the recent bonus edition of the video game soundtrack.

Good lord, the soundtrack to Clair Obscur is beyond phenomenal. One of the best, if not the best, video game scoring I’ve heard.

thank you! i’ll let you know 🖤

we’ll chat more this weekend but i’m planning to send in a couple apps next month despite being really early. the current situation isn’t exactly normal so 🤷🏻‍♀️

Lead researcher position : Sensory regulation of behavior and energy homeostasis. - Lille, France job with French National Institute for Health Research (INSERM) | 12840083 Research position leading to a permanent position at Inserm (equivalent to Associate professor).

Not sure what they mean by lead researcher but…

www.nature.com/naturecareer...

🖤 same!

both

Please, like he doesn't already live there.

Register Now

co-hosts

Zach Graves CO-CHAIR Zach Graves is executive director at the Foundation for American Innovation, as well as an ex officio member of the board. Previously he was head of policy at FAI, and managed the policy team. His research and writing focuses on the intersection of technology and governance issues, including work to strengthen science and technology expertise and capacity in Congress. Before joining FAI, he was director of the R Street Institute's technology and innovation policy program. Prior to that, he worked at the Cato Institute as manager of new media. He is currently a fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He is a member of the Polaris Council, a science and technology advisory board for the Government Accountability Office. He is a member of the Commonwealth of Virginia's Artificial Intelligence Task Force. In addition, he is a board member of the Institute for Progress. He holds an MA in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts, and a BA in philosophy from the University of California at Davis.

To understand why US science is currently being destroyed, take a close look at this:

The "Abundance 2025" conference is being held in Sept.

It is FILLED with rightwing money.
Most notably the "Foundation for American Innovation," which is funded by billionaires that wish to privatize science.
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