Drew Altschul

This is intriguing... tho what 'seekers' are doing may not be the same as identity formation as usually conceived by the psychologists. Worth finding out

Opinion | Why Even Basic A.I. Use Is So Bad for Students

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/o...

Is behavioral optimism really an emotion?

📢 New article out in PLOS BIology!

It was truly a pleasure and honour be a part of the core team members to lead this study and work alongside 129 collaborators from 82 institutions across 24 countries - the largest ever comparative study of neophobia in 🐦! 🥰

wow I've made some comparable errors on the train in my time and never once have they actually charged me anything

This is so cool. Thanks for watching!

A group of 10 smiling people pose for a photo in front of a large monitor. On the monitor, you can see the title slide from Drew Altschul's Big Team Science Conference talk about ManyPrimates. Everyone is having a GREAT TIME!

We received this dispatch from a @uop-ccep.bsky.social @uopcidd.bsky.social BTSCON viewing party. Look at all the Big Team Science FUN they're having! WE LOVE TO SEE IT!!

(👀 @dremalt.bsky.social @manyprimates.bsky.social)

Other minds are foreign countries

Or maybe just an attempt to write Hari Seldon's seminal paper on Psychohistory, in a grounded, non-fictional way

Most entertaining entry - "Cliodynamics 100 years on: Psychology's integral role in the study of predicting the future, in the future"

100 years? This might as well be a short story collection of speculative fiction. "This issue is about scientific foresight, not science fiction." Okay, I mean, good luck?

I think it'd be more valuable *and* enjoyable to read something like David Eagleman's "Sum"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum:_Fo...

Such a loss. Hard to understate how much Jane Goodall did for the field of primatology, and probably all of comparative psychology, animal cognition, animal behaviour... We are very much in her debt.

And its also just great that still to this day she would describe herself as an ethologist.

Thanks to Liza Muscovice & @goatswhostare.bsky.social for organizing, and to my co-presenter @bernhardvoelkl.bsky.social

YouTube video by Animal Welfare Slack [Drew Altschul & Bernhard Voelkl] Strategies to optimize cross-institute collaborations

Recently I spoke about @manyprimates.bsky.social for @liftcostaction.bsky.social about distributed research projects and teams in animal sciences!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKrA...
If you're interested in BTS projects, comparative cognition etc, have a watch

time for DAGs!

I have a theory about this as well, which is that the US, stupid as it can be, has a big population, still quite liberal for the world stage, and overweighted online pull. So there are lots of US pro therapy progressive types online, they do get surfaced a lot, and that gives the impression

That its gone up so rapidly is quite interesting I think, and I could again imagine some reasons, but who can say why.

I wouldn't say this is an outlier, its just at the top of the range - Iceland probably proscribes them more (Aus isn't far off either - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...). I could come up with a few other reasons why the US would be likely to have more anti-dep use, some of which you've named.

How is that implicitly suggested?
Or maybe what I'm wondering is how do you define 'true need'?

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Bringing in new reviewers after the first back-and-forth has got to be one of the biggest misuses of everybody's time

📣 New paper out (and my first one on ravens)! ❤️ "Startling ravens Corvux corax at foraging: Differences in anti-predator behaviour can be explained by age rather than personality" by Janina Weißenborn, @pesumas.bsky.social, Thomas Bugnyar and myself, out now in Journal of Avian Biology! ✨️😊

Hah, I've not seen this before.

Probably comes from some sort of self-compassion or gratitude practice that people who came through a more enlightened educational pipeline learned.

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Russell twice lost his position on account of his social views. He was twice imprisoned for them. His last sustained political action, the Tribunal on American War Crimes in Vietnam, was met by a conspiracy of silence round the world. The fact that he was an intellectual genius made it easier for those who purveyed a more comfortable view of life to present him as a simpleton. He endured this too. He continued in the belief that, the desire for power aside, the most socially dangerous conditions of mind were boredom and the love of excitement.

Richard Wollheim on Bertrand Russell.

Colobus monkey (Colobus guereza) approaching a two-choice set up to test for its ability to infer the hiding location of a bait by exclusion.

We are currently testing highly underrated and understudied colobus monkeys for @manyprimates.bsky.social at Zoo Krefeld.
It's a start - but ManyPrimates needs more colobines (and gibbons) for fair representation!

confirm this as my experience as well

https://www.garnelio.de/spitzschlammschnecken-lymnaea-stagnalis

1/3 First evidence of anxiety in snails

They exhibit fear responses hours after the source of their anxiety is removed. These responses can be reduced with an anxiolytic, such as alprazolam. They have also demonstrated high-level learning.

(paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our letter is out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

We argue against a recent claim that animals cannot make mental simulations because they supposedly do not reliably memorize sequences. The evidence for model-based animal cognition is too overwhelming. 🧪
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lKMt_V1r-...

oh wow, thank you for writing this. The original article irked me so much on basically this exact issue.