Kevin Mitchell

Pete Hegseth's murderous buffoonery, coming amid a lifetime in which he's betrayed everyone close to him and failed up from one disaster to the next, is a perfect example of how the appeal of Trumpism is that it creates a permission structure for people to openly be their worst selves

Revisiting Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943) - Biological Theory Biological Theory - This article examines Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s 1943 article “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, which is widely remembered both as the foundational...

➡️ New Classics in Biological Theory article out! ⬅️

Revisiting Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943)

by Auguste Nahas (@augustenahas.bsky.social)

Open access, also to Rosenblueth et al. (1943) (supplementary material) on: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Oppose Nomination of Casey Means for Surgeon General The Senate HELP Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the nomination of Casey Means to serve as U.S. Surgeon General on Wednesday, February 25th. While we were hoping this nomination was dead, i...

Tired of unqualified hacks running the U.S. public health system? I sure am.

Sometimes it feels like there is nothing we can do to fight this.

But right now, we can write letters to our Senators to oppose Casey Means as Surgeon General to prevent yet another quack from gaining power.

Or his podcast

Sign that says "YOU DON'T HAVE TO VACCINATE ALL YOUR KIDS, JUST THE ONES YOU WANT TO KEEP"

Smarts.

Challenge for the Techbros: Read Mary Shelley.

Again, every single person involved in this wildly illegal & unconstitutional project needs to go to jail for many years, & some, like Elon Musk, for the rest of their days.

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

Rasmussen Retorts | Substack More pandemics and fewer vaccines are not indicators of a healthy democracy. Click to read Rasmussen Retorts, by Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko - Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge rasmussenretorts.substack.com?utm_source=n... - an accurate, unflinching assessment by @angierasmussen.bsky.social

But you can also not accept the extreme heterogeneity “of autism” like it’s a natural kind. It’s a conventional diagnosis, the bounds of which may have been stretched beyond utility

#StandUpForScience Philly division

Mumps is back, but vaccines can prevent it Maryland is one of several states that are reporting cases of the infectious disease mumps, suggesting the return of diseases—like measles—that vaccines protect against

Mumps infections reveal that vaccine-preventable illnesses are resurging in the U.S. www.scientificamerican.com/article/mump...

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

1% grant scores, not getting funded.

Tech bro oligarch: The AI is... real... sentient.... it's feeling real feelings... we must do everything we can to protect it and give it rights
Also tech bro oligarch: Human females are basically cattle made to push out as many babies as possible, all of which I will neglect

A man in a blue "Deranged Activist" standing next to a tree outside.

Heading off to set up for the
@standupforscience.bsky.social
rally in Pittsburgh.

1:00 Allegheny Landing

Come on out Yinzers.

Hey I did a fun thing with @warren.senate.gov about breaking up giant healthcare conglomerates

Stand up for Science Stand up for Science

Stand up for Science Rally is TODAY in Boston Common 12-3 pm
fight2win.standupforscience.net/Boston-March/?

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text www.science.org/content/arti...

I don’t think she’s dismissive of the diverse challenges faced by many people. She’s just arguing (in my reading) that having the same label for this incredibly wide spectrum isn’t helpful

For me, a guy with a PhD, it is always hard to know if a scientific paper will be understandable to the general public

I think the Cell paper linked to below is, with some effort maybe, understandable to anyone with a college degree or equivalent

but hard to know

Kevin Mitchell, one of the authors, chatted about this on the Decoding the Gurus podcast.

...that risk didn't feel imminent.

In 2026 if you have a 3-year old kid and a 3-month old in the house at the same time that perception of actual danger feels very, very different.

Pulling a point I made in some replies onto main: I think one big shift in how the public is reacting to people who don't vaccinate their kids is that as recently as, say, 2023, you could look at your anti-vax neighbors as annoying flakes and a theoretical risk - but far lower case numbers meant...

a grievous self-inflicted wound that will take years to heal if at all

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures.
#climatecrisis #auspol www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Honored to be speaking alongside the brave @ianlmorgan.bsky.social!

I’ll be presenting my work at #COSYNE2026. Stop by our poster to come learn about how the geometry of neural population activity shapes communication between brain areas during learned behavior 🐦‍⬛🧠🎶

Guests urged to be vaccinated at anti-vaxxer RFK Jr’s party

Vaccines for me but not for thee!

RFK Jr calls Covid vaccines “the deadliest vaccine in history,” which is a horrific lie, but when he had a party during the Covid pandemic, guests were urged to get vaccinated!

Oops!