Jordan Theriault

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stv7...

There's a software engineer in Hong Kong who makes incredibly detailed scientific diagrams for wikipedia, like this clickable metro-style map of metabolic pathways!!!

Oh wow, that's a super interesting position!

Because you're going to miss out on a lot of really interesting science (and this science we really need to know if we are to solve problems) if we abandon context-dependent biology

Given I no longer work in a lab, but work with many labs, my take on the replicability crisis is two-fold:

1) few findings replicate easily across systems - think p53 and cancer or caspases and apoptosis
2) most findings are context dependent because biology is complicated and illogical

Kathryn Nave, A Drive to Survive | BJPS Review of Books Matteo Colombo reviews A Drive to Survive, by Kathryn Nave

A Drive to Survive has now had a few reviews & I'm so grateful that they've been exceptionally generous and incisive. Thread here:

1st: Matteo Colombo in BJPS (particularly nice to read - given how pivotal his papers on the FEP were in helping me understand it)

www.thebsps.org/reviewofbook...

Best practices for using Jupyter notebooks Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 6, Part 6

Best practices for using Jupyter notebooks russpoldrack.substack.com/p/best-pract... - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series

Jobs | Psychological & Brain Sciences Tenured/Tenure-track position in Cognitive Psychology Open Date Dec 01, 2025 Salary Range or Pay Grade The expected academic base salary range for this position is $110,000- $144,500 (Assistant Profes...

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology.

pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

Thinking Takes Energy A new study shows how our brain metabolism sets the limits of thinking. Researchers explain why cognitive models remain incomplete without considering biological resources.

More press on our recent Behavioral and Brain Sciences article:

#philsci #cogsky #CognitiveNeuroscience

@phaueis.bsky.social

aktuell.uni-bielefeld.de/2025/11/24/t...

If my kids got hurt from faulty airbag, I'll feel awful. And if I doubled down early because someone called me an asshole for not seeing the recall notice, then I'd also feel bad.
But I the person calling me an asshole should feel bad too. Because they failed to convince me and it's obvious why!

That makes sense. I think I'm making a slightly different point, which is that this isn't about whether someone is right, wrong, or has a responsibility. It's about being effective.
And if they're not convinced, then they don't feel a responsibility in the first place! Even if you feel they should

I'm not saying don't be effective, or even don't embarrass people. But I feel like the goal should be to make the conclusion so clear, and so unobjectionable, that it would be embarrassing NOT to get the point.

I just don't see how being an asshole doesn't undermine that and give people an easy out

I don't think anyone wants to think of themselves as actively doing bad science or ignoring evidence though. Do you agree? I think it's very often about saving face and social embarrassment. Or the shame of having spent years walking down a blind alley. So why make that worse?

The point being: a tone issue is a presentation issue. And the responsibility for poor uptake from an ineffective presentation absolutely falls on the presenter, not the audience.

Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people — mcdreeamie-musings We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consid...

Oh no, the airbag issue isn't minor. It just will still kill you, just down the road.
But what is clear to you might be opaque to others. It could be because of tone, or even just unclear presentation (that doesn't consider the needs of the audience).
e.g., mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/...

If you had a "car needs recall" example instead, where someone berates and insults me for driving a car with defective airbags, I might just write them off as an asshole and go on my way.
Not disagreeing that people may be overly conflict averse, but to effect change you do need to be change minds!

I understand that he's getting at the chummy attitude in psych, but in practice you do also need to convince people, no? In the example, you can see for yourself the car is on fire. No real convincing necessary. In reality, you need to convince people to pay attention to something non-obvious.

Currently grappling with implications of constraint closure. IMO Nave counters dismissive arguments I've seen against medium dependence in cognition ("you think meat is magic?"). Hard to summarize, but this bit reminded me of what I've seen @wiringthebrain.bsky.social say in the context of free will

Embodied mind very much worth reading. IMO, Drive to Survive makes a nice case that homeostasis is a (often useful) modeling fiction. Fits well with The Brain Abstracted, which is also really worth reading.

A Drive to Survive Since 2005, Karl Friston's proposal that the principle of free energy minimization underpins the purposive behavior of living agents has evolved through thou...

On that note, have you read this yet? It's very good!
mitpress.mit.edu/978026255132...

@kathrynnave.bsky.social

AI World Clocks The current time as rendered by 9 different AI models. By Brian Moore.

You should see how they all do with making a clock... updates every minute, and somehow most never get any better at it.. and those that do, will not necessarily in the next minute.
clocks.brianmoore.com?ICID=ref_fark

Writing Resources Writing is a huge part of any career in science, and for many writers – no, for most writers – it’s a daunting challenge. But it’s not a challenge that you have to tackle alone. That’s a lesson I w…

Your periodic reminder: I keep a list of useful resources for scientific writers - book, blogs, software, etc - here:

'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022 Artist Tega Brain is fighting the internet’s enshittification by turning back the clock to before ChatGPT existed.

Slop Evader is a tool from artist and researcher Tega Brain that lets you search the web for results exclusively before November 30, 2022—the day that ChatGPT was released to the public.

Mentorship Program | SPAN

If you would like to volunteer as a mentor for the SPAN Mentorship Program, you can fill out a form on our website. We cannot guarantee that volunteers will be paired with mentees, but we will consider you when pairings are made.

Mentors suggested on an app do NOT need to fill out the form.

Enjoyed this read on the growing field of #interoception neuroscience.

Of course, I was also excited to see the article twice cited our lab's recent work, spearheaded by Jiahe Zhang and @jtheriault.bsky.social.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...

🚨 THRILLED to share Northeastern University is hiring a new Director for our human Siemens Prisma 3T MRI Center (Associate or Full Professor levels) who will join us as faculty in our Institute for Cognitive and Brain Health! Please share widely!
northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

Attn MRI enthusiasts! 📣

Just in time for Thanksgiving, I’m thankful to share this opportunity to join us as MRI Center Director! ✨ Couldn’t speak more highly of my time here so far—such a supportive & collaborative place to build a lab—and I’m more than happy to share more with anyone interested

Emotions do not form a natural class. A set of distinctions that has generally haunted the philosophy of mind stands in the way of giving good descriptions of the phenomena. We have inherited distinctions between being active and being passive; between psychological states primarily explained by physical processes and psychological states not reducible to nor adequately explained by physical processes; distinctions between states that are primarily nonrational and those which are either rational or irrational; between voluntary and nonvoluntary states. Once these distinctions were drawn, types of psychological activities were then parceled out en bloc to one or another side of the dichotomies. - Amélie Rorty, "Explaining Emotions" (1978)

I'm fascinating by how many concepts are really markers of our ignorance. Amélie Rorty says here that 'emotion' is one, a grab bag of leftovers from supposedly clearer concepts like will & reason.

We also have chance (Darwin's Origin), freedom (Kant's Groundwork), élan vital (Bergson). #philsky

Agreed. And it's not just that, but those sidelined emotion concepts are also often thought to be the force driving action. But they sit just off the map, somehow causal, but not fully examined. A problem for someone else or future work...

Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Full Professor of Cognitive Science - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Dept. of, Aarhus University

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof).
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!

international.au.dk/about/profil...