Rebecca Merkley

Worth it. It's gorgeous

YouTube video by Mind & Life Institute Mind & Life Podcast: Molly Crockett – Changing the World is a Group Project

I'm only halfway through listening but this podcast featuring @mjcrockett.bsky.social touches on just about everything I believe it's important to ponder re human cognition, cultural evolution, the digital degradation of social learning, it's all here. Wonderful.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6onU...

In every way possible we should be moving to make ourselves less reliant on the US.

Again, our governments have nowhere near the urgency on this that they need. Stop thinking things will 'return to normal' after Trump - he is dismantling that country, and it will take a generational rebuild.

I'm sure we will solve our student engagement/effort and budget problems at USC with [checks notes] an expensive new AI program the provost just emailed us about.

Notre Dame has three *open-rank* faculty positions in the Institute for Educational Initiatives. These positions are part of a strategic initiative to build on our excellence in educational research and action--both within education and across associated disciplines. Details in thread.

Riding the Autism Bicycle to Retraction Town Does anyone *really* know their Factor Fexcectorn?

Springer-Nature statement

“Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.”

How am I now expected to believe that two people looked at the paper twice and DGAF?

No one at the rap battle will wait for me to type my prompts

Screenshot from linked article: Learning is done best in community. The most important function of educational institutions is providing spaces for building that community. Every time we suggest a student would be well served by “asking a chatbot,” we are cutting off an opportunity for that student to engage with their classmates, instructors, or librarians. Those interactions, however small, are what constitute communities of learners.

Yes! This also comes up in my recent contribution to CHE:

www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

Schools Are Accommodating Student Anxiety — and Making It Worse Removing stressors robs students of growth opportunities, writes TC's Ben Lovett and his co-author Alex Jordan

"Academic accommodations for anxiety convey two harmful messages. First, they imply that the feared situation is truly dangerous. Public speaking, testing, or lunch with classmates are too risky...Second, they suggest that the student can’t withstand the distress. Those messages increase anxiety."

This is a great addition to the limited literature on childcare/early childhood education and women's outcomes.

See our piece in Science for a brief overview of how limited that literature is www.cgdev.org/sites/defaul...

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice.

Caveats:
-*-*-*-*


> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees

> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

Numerical Cognition

Happy to share this new entry on numerical cognition for the OECS. Thanks to @hbaum.bsky.social and @mcxfrank.bsky.social for making this happen! Apologies if your work isn’t cited! Had to limit cites!!! oecs.mit.edu/pub/rek9756r...

5 ways to think about OpenAI in education 🧵

what a great honour to receive the 25th Irish Tatler Women of the Year Award in the category of Innovation. the optimist in me thinks this marks a turn for recognition of the importance of critical work and accountability in AI

www.businesspost.ie/life-luxury/...

The social origins of consciousness | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences We present the social origins of consciousness hypothesis, according to which the ability to coordinate with group members was the original adaptive function of consciousness. We offer three arguments...

Loved this paper by @kristinandrews.bsky.social and Noam Miller. A very convincing argument for the function of consciousness.

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

In April 2009, the Washington Post asked 10 writers to make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out as part of "spring cleaning."

I chose Larry Summers.

Better late than never.

Unlocked version of my 16-year-old article below.
naomiklein.org/why-we-shoul...

"data centers already accounted for 22% of Ireland's total electricity consumption in 2024. In the Dublin/Meath area, where a third of Ireland's population lives, 48% of the electricity was used by data centers in 2023." @abeba.bsky.social & @krisshrishak.bsky.social

✍🏼 www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

8 headlines Should Women Work? Should Women Have the Vote? Should Women Be Allowed to Drive? Should Women Choose Their Mates? Should women run marathons? Should women learn to box? Should women vote? Should Women Listen? Somtimes I think they should but sometimes I think they shouldn't.

So many questions

Somewhere out there someone who’s the best at what they do is terrified that they have imposter syndrome while a bunch of barely literate pedophiles are very calmly running the world

Some thoughts about the power we have as academics and the impact of our choices around the framing of our work.

Pop-up AI defacing your article critical of AI captures a lot of what it feels like to work in this space.
@lmesseri.bsky.social

This got me thinking about how academic success has changed in just the 20++ years since I was an undergrad. When I was looking for a thesis supervisor, I worked up the courage to ask my 3rd year cognition prof, who agreed on the spot.

1/3

It’s insulting to tell 🇨🇦 scientists we need international scientists to run to our rescue & ensure innovation.

🇨🇦 scientists have exceeded expectations with paltry funding. If the gov funded Tricouncil > & sustainably; imagine how innovative we’d already be!! /End

Come work with us @msupsychology.bsky.social!

I promise, we don’t match *all* the time @tedmond.bsky.social

Sexbots, students, and schools AI is warping our understanding of what public education is for

Earlier this year, @himself.bsky.social wrote an essay describing how technology warps our understanding of what "the public" believes, and thereby degrades *collective* human intelligence. I think this applies to AI in public education as well, in worrying ways.

open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

Cover page of Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 1 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

Table 2 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft:

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧵 1/

It is hard to overstate the stress produced by the incoherence of academic institutions pumping generative AI when they want to play business and then leaving instructors to deal with the results when they want to play school

I really do not get the general urge among online academics to dunk on X area for discovering what Y area has known for decades. There are many reasons why this is unscholarly. To name a few:

1. Most scientists don't perform interdisciplinary research because it's explicitly disincentivized.