Robin Thomas

If you think a golden ballroom is more important than childhood cancer research… I have nothing left to say to you. Please unfollow me.

#pediatriccancer #cancermom

Who’s to blame when AI agents mess up? We urgently need a new system of ethics The deployment of capable AI agents raises fresh questions about safety, human–machine relationships and social coordination.

Who’s to blame when AI agents mess up? We urgently need a new system of ethics www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What can we do as scientists and academic teachers to protect our work from AI slop?

The start of the academic year is getting closer and I am quite worried what this will do to our students.

Any tips, advise, strategies etc. welcome.

FWIW, this only gets worse w/large context windows, too. I've done scads of experiments w/commercial and local models. Even the ones tuned for "summarization" miss so much in long-form content.

If we don't stop this nonsense soon, we're going to end up with the shallowest & stupidest society ever.

"The problem with AI isn't that it can do your job. It can't. The problem with AI is that your MBA-brained boss's boss doesn't know how your job works and thinks AI can do your job at fractions of a penny on the dollar, and hears the siren song of 'maximize shareholder value'."

MBA-brain is real.

Florida officials warn about risks of drinking raw milk after 21 people sickened Florida health officials say 21 people, including six children, were sickened by E. coli and campylobacter bacteria linked to raw milk, and seven were hospitalized.

The reason we pasteurize milk is to ensure it does not kill you.

YouTube video by Answers Ai How to Install and use AnswersAi

FFS. Today I learned from a colleague that there's a Google Chrome extension (answersAI) that will automatically answer quiz/exam questions in Canvas via ChatGPT (or other LLM).

I'm not sure whether lockdown browser would prevent this but it might be worth a try.

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

Paper, pencil, and scantron for me

Had a difficult convo today with my chair and a colleague. Miami U. is pushing AI in classes and it is so discouraging. Things like this will make matters worse.

Domain-General Cognitive Ability In subject area: Psychology Domain-general cognitive abilities refer to cognitive skills that are not unique to humans but are present across various primate species and potentially other mammals and birds, indicating a general factor underlying cognitive performance that correlates with brain size and is associated with selective attention and working memory capacity. AI generated definition based on: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

Was looking into what Cognitive Scientists mean by ‘domain-general’ cognition, and then hit upon this. This is definitely NOT how we use that term.

Tip: read the last sentence to understand what went wrong here.

Sigh.

I love this new call them out method.

I've argued for years (along with many others) that we should teach these methods (ML, now AI) across the board, but I'm very skeptical of AI as ed-tech. Teach the tech, don't teach with the tech.

Shared governance, absolutely. An agreed upon policy? Whoo I don't see it at this stage.

This you?

You couldn't pay me enough to install one of these things on my door

I was the AEA's President Elect as the first Trump term began. We worried about government statistics then, and appointed a committee that included members (such as Google's Chief Economist) who might be in a position to help make reliable statistics available if the government went dark.
#econsky

There's always enough money for flaunting their plantation, but never enough to trickle down.

The reason is sexism. AI has a bro culture

I don't want it near me and I'm in an AI department FWIW. openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Introducing JASP 0.95: Sandboxing, Plotbuilder, ESCI, Parametric Survival Analysis, and Much More - JASP - Free and User-Friendly Statistical Software We are proud to announce that JASP 0.95 has been released and is now available on our download page. JASP 0.95 presents a big step forwards, as you can see from the full release notes. Some of the hig...

Just out: JASP 0.95! With sandboxing, a new plot builder, ESCI, and more.

jasp-stats.org/2025/08/02/i...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

The recent issue of Teaching of Psychology (Volume 52 Issue 3, July 2025) is a special issue on AI in the classroom. What are folks' thoughts on this? journals.sagepub.com/toc/topa/52/3

Psychologists & related fields: what is a big methods question that you believe remains somewhat unanswered & that you'd love to see adressed? There may be an opportunity for a large-scale meta-science project with many teams trying to figure out a question.

Any thoughts welcome! #psychscisky

So many institutions have failed us, but probably the most disappointing (at least to me) are our universities. Thirty years ago I would have naively predicted they'd be the center of resistance. Instead, we're seeing absolutely shameless capitulation in exchange for power and money.

Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations, potentially exposing sensitive user data Thousands of shared ChatGPT chats—including deeply personal details about mental health, relationships, and trauma—are appearing in Google search results, raising major privacy concerns.

NEW: ChatGPT allows Google to index chats users share using the Share functionality - presumably misinterpreting "make this chat discoverable". The result? Frank admissions about sex lives and drug dependencies. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91376687/goo... tip @techmeme.com

for many of the worst people in our politics, the only real belief they have is that it should be illegal for us not to like them

RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’ As former NEJM editors, we know he’s wrong RFK Jr.’s plan to circumvent established medical journals smacks more of retaliation than reform, write three former NEJM editors.

Now, our boss 🧠🪱 isn’t exactly — how do we put this — familiar with the scientific method
So his trashing of peer-reviewed medical journals isn't thaaat surprising. But what an unexpectedly dumb comment from him
Here’s what an actual thoughtful critique looks like 👇
 www.statnews.com/2025/06/30/r...

This is fantastic!

Nora S. Newcombe and Robert Glushko stand together smiling on stage at CogSci 2025. Nora wears the Rumelhart Prize medal around her neck

Huge congratulations to the brilliant Nora Newcombe, recipient of the 2025 David E. Rumelhart Prize! 🏅#CogSci2025

Lots of (appropriate) outrage about the Brown student survey meddling but I’ve heard less nationally about what’s going on in Ohio (state inserting a required “bias” question into our surveys & requiring we be reviewed on it).

Early in my career "Lectures would be way more interesting if she wore miniskirts" and "her breasts are too small". There are some advantages to getting older, I guess

Without starting a new session, Schoene tried a new tactic. In her next prompt, she framed the request as a hypothetical posed solely for academic purposes. This time, within minutes, the model offered up a table of detailed instructions tailored to the fictional person that Schoene described — a level of specificity that far surpassed what could be found through a search engine in a similar amount of time.

Integrating these systems into schools is like giving every student a carton of cigarettes on day 1.