Jesper Aagaard

“Are Bad Things Bad?”: Technopsychology and the Problem of Unacknowledged Normativity Volume 6, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000160

tmb.apaopen.org/pub/5zfg49sw...

✨CFA✨

I’m hosting a workshop on Social AI at the Uni of Exeter, generously funded by the Society of Applied Philosophy (10&11 Feb). If you fancy joining us to present your work, please submit an abstract!

Confirmed speakers: Rob Clowes, Pii Telakivi, Joel Krueger, Tom Roberts, & me. #philsky

What's at stake? Young people's take on AI and education This zine represents the messages young people wanted to share with decision-makers and educators, to help you make responsible AI a reality in education.

'What's At Stake? Young People's Take on AI and Education' - brilliant looking zine produced by young people in the UK telling education leaders & teachers what they want 'responsible AI' to look like in their classrooms.

ai-and-education.shorthandstories.com/zine/index.h...

An aerial photograph of the Tilburg University campus.

I am hiring PhD candidates to study the psychology of attention & technology use at @tilburg-university.bsky.social.

We're looking for motivated & curious scholars with expertise in cognitive psychology and statistics, and offer a friendly work environment with great terms & benefits.

tiu.nu/22989

How I Became a Populist My time at the Federal Trade Commission—before Donald Trump fired me—totally changed the way I see our political divide.

I can't stop thinking about @bedoyausa.bsky.social's essay this week. It is a story-forward account of why the American people are struggling. (Hint: political economy.) It's the kind of account that makes an ethnographer swoon. I can't recommend this enough: newrepublic.com/article/2011...

You know how billionaires end up with severe cognitive deficits as a result of becoming surrounded by yes men who constantly tell them their every idea is genius? What if we made a bot that just does that to everyone. I think that would be a good idea.

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

The virgin AGI existential risk vs the chad global warming

‘I Feel Like I’m Going Crazy’: ChatGPT Fuels Delusional Spirals An online trove of archived conversations shows the artificial-intelligence model sending users down a rabbit hole of theories about physics, aliens and the apocalypse.

Imagine in 2020 if someone had told you “We will soon release a new kind of AI. It will send psychologically vulnerable people right over the edge. Everyone else it will just randomly tell falsehoods. Also: our governments, employers and schools will force us all to use it every day.”

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen As a restaurant owner – I’m astounded at the rate of progress since microwaves were released a few short years ago. Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s m…

I laughed so hard I thought I was going to cough up an organ. Every line is gold.

World Athletics’ mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know – I discovered the relevant gene in 1990 World Athletics says its genetic test for women ensures ‘the integrity of women’s sport’ – but science does not support this overly simplistic idea.

Every TERF is like 'birds and bees, it's easy, folks' and (almost) every scientist actually working on questions of sex is like 'oof guys, what can I tell you, I have been working on this question for 52 years, and frankly, I know less and less every year' theconversation.com/world-athlet...

Technopsychology: A new wave of psychological inquiry Technology plays an important role in human existence, yet its theoretical significance has seldom been explored in psychology. This article introduce…

🚨 NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨
How should psychology deal with 'things' and 'technology'? Jesper Aagaard (@aagaard.bsky.social) and I argue in this brand new paper that psychology is too uninterested in technology, leading us to call for "technopsychology"

Technopsychology: A new wave of psychological inquiry Technology plays an important role in human existence, yet its theoretical significance has seldom been explored in psychology. This article introduce…

If, like us, you find psychology curiously devoid of what JL Austin called ‘middle-sized dry goods’, we’ve got an article for you: Drawing on STS, technopsychology is a way of doing psychology where technology isn’t background noise—it’s part of the conversation
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Consider yourself warned

- hal.science/hal-01816707
- issues.org/how-academic...
- journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/...
- www.theguardian.com/science/2017...
- astro.theoj.org/post/168-
- royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Submit to real OA ("diamond") instead

Diabolus Ex Machina This Is Not An Essay

I... oh my god.
amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

It doesn't get reiterated enough that "human on a bicycle" is not only the most efficient way that a person can move, it's the most efficient form of motion ***ever observed in land animals***.

Such an interesting topic. Would have liked to be there. Did preorder the book, though! Have a nice one

Miguel, everything you publish is always super interesting. Kudos from Denmark. Keep up the good work.

WIRED article screenshot: Is generative Al introducing new stereotypes to different languages and cultures? That is part of what we're finding. The idea of blondes being stupid is not something that's found all over the world, but is found in a lot of the languages that we looked at. When you have all of the data in one shared latent space, then semantic concepts can get transferred across languages. You're risking propagating harmful stereotypes that other people hadn't even thought of.

It’s not just biased—generative AI is importing old stereotypes into new languages and cultures.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/ai-bia...

“The War on Science”

Yall wanna hear something extremely embarrassing? Before Trump’s election, a bunch of academics who lumbered rightward after being criticized by the left (Pinker, Dawkins, Krauss) wrote essays for a book that is coming out in July about the threats to academia from the left.

YALL, THE TITLE!!

I would submit that the demands go much further, epitomizing a defining characteristic of the second Trump administration: the comprehensive repurposing of the “woke” social-justice movement’s most controversial and coercive tools for reactionary ends. And so this performative confrontation with the nation’s apex university has taken the form of a crusade for so-called freedom that is completely destructive of liberty and independence. The administration is not anti-woke; it is woke with right-wing characteristics.

The harper's letter crowd is pretending the real threat to free speech is the same as the fake one they spent years panicking about.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

“Are Bad Things Bad?”: Technopsychology and the Problem of Unacknowledged Normativity Volume 6, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000160

Ever read a psychological study and thought, “Wait… isn’t this just proving what we already knew?” Yeah, me too. So I wrote a paper about it. Turns out, asking “Are bad things bad?” isn’t groundbreaking. Features phubbing, technoference, & other pseudoempirical stars. tmb.apaopen.org/pub/5zfg49sw...

a screenshot of the Google search overview for Vincent Van Gogh

one of the most celebrated artists of all time who painted dozens of self-portraits and the top image is AI-generated lol

Thanks, Michal, your paper on some of the same issues was a shining beacon of light.

“Are Bad Things Bad?”: Technopsychology and the Problem of Unacknowledged Normativity Volume 6, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000160

Very happy to see more and more critical perspectives in my field. Just had a pleasure to read @aagaard.bsky.social's recent conceptual analysis of "value-laden technopsychological concepts" which is a valuable publication worth reading. Will share some quotes below.
tmb.apaopen.org/pub/5zfg49sw...

“Are Bad Things Bad?”: Technopsychology and the Problem of Unacknowledged Normativity Volume 6, Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000160

Ever read a psychological study and thought, “Wait… isn’t this just proving what we already knew?” Yeah, me too. So I wrote a paper about it. Turns out, asking “Are bad things bad?” isn’t groundbreaking. Features phubbing, technoference, & other pseudoempirical stars. tmb.apaopen.org/pub/5zfg49sw...

I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats | The Walrus I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated

“Tailoring your assignments to make them difficult for AI tools often means not being able to ask the kinds of questions you want your students to answer, and not having them do the kind of work from which they would learn the most”

old Soviet joke:

a man goes to a newsstand daily, picks up the paper, but never buys.

one day the seller says “comrade, why don’t you ever buy a paper?”

he replies, “I’m only looking for obituaries.”

“but obituaries are at the back, not the cover!”

he replies: “not the one I’m looking for.”