Sami Beaumont

Infographic with AI slop published in Nature Scientific Reports

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

When I bring up the fact that most replications are uninformative and unjustifiable by design, hence we should instead do better research, I always get the same argument back and I'd like to think through this reasoning carefully.

It goes like this:

Dopamine dynamics during stimulus-reward learning in mice can be explained by performance rather than learning - Nature Communications VTA dopamine activity control movement-related performance, not reward prediction errors. Here, authors show that behavioral changes during Pavlovian learning explain DA activity regardless of reward ...

Seeing lots of reactions to this compelling paper - showing VTA dopamine is linked to cue and outcome induced behavioral reactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I have some thoughts…

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

How Genocide Happened

Front page of Scottish newspaper The National today.

I deeply agree with the sentiment of this paper. Although, as a norm, I dislike mixing up "activism" and research, there are occasions in which it is justified. Universities and society are blindly and impositively adopting corporative tools that severely jeopardise our capabilities of reasoning
>>

Sans intervention immédiate, les derniers reporters de Gaza vont mourir 21 juillet 2025 L'AFP travaille avec une pigiste texte, trois photographes et six pigistes vidéo dans la Bande de Gaza depuis le départ de ses journalistes staff courant 2024. Avec quelques autres, ils sont aujourd'hui les seuls à rapporter ce qu'il se passe dans la Bande de Gaza. La presse internationale est interdite d'entrer dans ce territoire depuis près de deux ans. Nous refusons de les voir mourir. L'un deux, Bashar, collabore pour l'AFP depuis 2010, d'abord comme fixeur, ensuite comme photographe pigiste, et depuis 2024 comme principal photographe. Samedi 19 juillet, il est parvenu à poster un message sur Facebook: « Je n'ai plus la force de travailler pour les médias. Mon corps est maigre et je ne peux plus travailler ». Bashar, 30 ans, travaille et vit dans des conditions égales à celles de tous les Gazaouis, allant d'un camp de réfugiés à un autre camp au gré des bombardements israéliens. Depuis plus d'un an il vit dans le dénuement le plus total et travaille en prenant d'énormes risques pour sa vie. L'hygiène est pour lui un problème majeur, avec des périodes de maladies intestinales sévères. Bashar vit depuis février dans les ruines de sa maison de Gaza City avec sa mère, ses quatre frères et sœurs et la famille d'un de ses frères. Leur maison est vide de tout aménagement et confort, à part quelques coussins. Dimanche matin, il a rapporté que son frère aîné était « tombé, à cause de la faim ». Même si ces journalistes reçoivent un salaire mensuel de l'AFP, il n'y a rien à acheter ou alors à des prix totalement exorbitants. Le système bancaire a disparu, et ceux qui pratiquent le change entre les comptes bancaires en ligne et l'argent liquide prennent une commission de près de 40%. L'AFP n'a plus la possibilité d'avoir un véhicule et encore moins de l'essence pour permettre à ses journalistes de se déplacer pour leurs reportages. Circuler en voiture équivaut de toutes les façons à pre…

🚨BREAKING: The last journalists working for AFP in Gaza have said they can no longer work for the news agency.

They are out of energy and they are starving to death.

I have never seen a statement from a news organisation like it.

🧵

The only reason to refer to technology as “AI” is to confuse people. Change my mind.

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

A powerful essay by @omerbartov.bsky.social that concludes, with care and precision, that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Others have reached this conclusion too. Bartov's piece explores some deep and important questions. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

The rough idea is that the explanatory power of computationalism is not in the analogy between brains and machines but in the formal tools brought by computational sciences

Hi ! Allow me to intrude on the conversation, here is a probably relevant paper bsky.app/profile/iris...

📢 I'm very excited to release AgarCL, a new evaluation platform for research in continual reinforcement learning‼️

Repo: github.com/machado-rese...
Website: agarcl.github.io
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.18347

Details below 👇

Behavioral, computational and self-reported measures of reward and punishment sensitivity as predictors of mental health characteristics - Nature Mental Health Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

New in Nature MentalHealth! with Vrizzi, Najar, Lemogne, and @mael-lebreton.bsky.social

We tested whether behavioural and RL-based model parameters are test-retest reliable and predict mental health traits.

The result? Not really.

A cautionary tale for comp. psychiatry
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

I am seeing news that AI companies face “unexpected” obstacles in scaling up their AI systems.

Not unexpected at all, of course. Completely predictable from the Ingenia theorem.

Ça se passe en direct sous nos yeux. Nous ne pourrons pas dire que nous ne savions pas. (Pétition à signer)

blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-...

Brain Explorer - Test your brain power The brain explorer app for Apple and Android tests your brain functions and helps researchers to understand the brain. Explore your brain power and how brain functions are important for mental health.

#OCD is a understudied disorder, meaning that we know way too little about the underlying (brain) processes.
We have thus built the Brain Explorer app www.brainexplorer.net where everyone can easily contribute to understanding OCD.
#MentalHealthAwareness @tueneurocampus.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk

@computationalbrain.bsky.social @jbarbosa.org

A West Bank village destroyed | Editorial ***

www.haaretz.com/opinion/edit...

Israel preparing to turn Rafah – one-fifth of Gaza – into part of buffer zone ***

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

No plans to allow any aid into Gaza, says Israeli minister Israel Katz says blocking aid is ‘one of the main pressure levers’ on Hamas while military announces it has turned 30% of Gaza into buffer zone

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Hi! this looks really interesting, but the link doesn't redirect to the paper

Ça se passe en direct sous nos yeux. Nous ne pourrons pas dire que nous ne savions pas.

Behavioral threat and appeasement signals take precedence over static colors in lizard contests Behavioral signals outweigh static color patches in determining the winner of territorial disputes. To understand what limits aggression in wall lizards, w

Excited to share our latest paper on lizard contests and agonistic signals! Read on for a daydream on how being a lizard could be like, disguised as a discussion on the relative impact of static colour patches and behavioral displays in animal contests 🧵
academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Reference Point-Dependent Reinforcement Learning in Humans and Rats Previous studies indicate that rewards and punishments in reinforcement learning are encoded in a relative manner. Reference point-dependence, a valuation bias shared by eminent adaptation level and p...

🚨 New study alert! 🚨
Ever wondered if rats and humans learn in the same way? 🐭🧑‍🔬
We tested this — and the answer is yes, at least when it comes to how we value rewards in context.
(with @shaunaparkes.bsky.social Lachlan Ferguson, Magdalena Soukupova)

🧵Thread 👇

1/

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ça se passe en direct sous nos yeux. Nous ne pourrons pas dire que nous ne savions pas.

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧵1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy

In order to understand cognition, we often recruit analogies as building blocks of theories to aid us in this quest. One such attempt, originating in folklore and alchemy, is the homunculus: a miniature human who resides in the skull and performs cognition. Perhaps surprisingly, this appears indistinguishable from the implicit proposal of many neurocognitive theories, including that of the 'cognitive map,' which proposes a representational substrate for episodic memories and navigational capacities. In such 'small cakes' cases, neurocognitive representations are assumed to be meaningful and about the world, though it is wholly unclear who is reading them, how they are interpreted, and how they come to mean what they do. We analyze the 'small cakes' problem in neurocognitive theories (including, but not limited to, the cognitive map) and find that such an approach a) causes infinite regress in the explanatory chain, requiring a human-in-the-loop to resolve, and b) results in a computationally inert account of representation, providing neither a function nor a mechanism. We caution against a 'small cakes' theoretical practice across computational cognitive modelling, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, wherein the scientist inserts their (or other humans') cognition into models because otherwise the models neither perform as advertised, nor mean what they are purported to, without said 'cake insertion.' We argue that the solution is to tease apart explanandum and explanans for a given scientific investigation, with an eye towards avoiding van Rooij's (formal) or Ryle's (informal) infinite regresses.

Figure 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 2 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Tired but happy to say this is out w @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: Are Neurocognitive Representations 'Small Cakes'? philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

We analyse cog neuro theories showing how vicious regress, e.g. the homunculus fallacy, is (sadly) alive and well — and importantly how to avoid it. 1/

21/21 If you're interested in the details, check out the full preprint doi.org/10.1101/2025.... I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback!