Joseph Harney

Wonder why this scene looks so familiar...
#WildlifeWednesday 🐦🐕

Human beings evolved as a social species, with empathy, and our capacity for it, at the heart of our ability to bond, collectively survive.

Billionaires are outliers. You need an empathy defect, total lack of conscience, inability to share, to enable you to amass that kind of money and resources.

To Be Happier, Try One Tiny Act of Joy Each Day A community science project finds that modest reminders to find joy in the day can have benefits that are on par with those of more ambitious well-being interventions

A community science project finds that modest reminders to find joy in the day can have benefits that are on par with those of more ambitious well-being interventions

New UN report warns that welfare cuts can fuel far-right support. It features my work on public service deprivation with @paularettl.bsky.social @catherinedevries.bsky.social @marcocappelluti.bsky.social and on climate-related disasters and far-right incumbents with @pstanig.bsky.social

Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy
amzn.eu/d/gMTaboL

The Psychology of Supremacy amzn.eu/d/ho9aQr3

Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy
amzn.eu/d/gryYFcq

A Phenomenology of Racism in Counselling and Psychotherapy amzn.eu/d/9yZ5eUL

God damn it this is such a loss… D’Angelo is indeed the ultimate essence of soul, the purest of the pure… love to infinity 🙌🙌🙌

Beautiful people ❤️

Groupthink – a monument to truthiness? | BPS Ramon J. Aldag re-examines a familiar concept.

'Groupthink' - a zombie idea in social and organizational psychology, from @bpsofficial.bsky.social @psychmag.bsky.social

(Yes there are drives to uncritical conformity in some groups, but that's because of particular group norms not some quality of being a group)

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Looked at my data collections for state-backed activity. If the report were a picture:

“The long-term therapeutic relationship is a casualty of today’s healthcare.”

“The quality of the [therapeutic] relationship…profoundly influences the quality of the information the therapist uses to make the diagnosis.”

“Good chemistry [of therapeutic alliance] is literally good chemistry.”

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

Some people live as though they are already dead.

There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.

- #ThichNhatHanh

YouTube video by Raw Wealth The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1994) - Narrated by Leonard Cohen

#LeonardCohen narrated the #BardoThodol aka #TibetanBookoftheDead.

That’s it. That’s the post.

youtu.be/mg8ikDKL_zs?...

Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust The chatbot is also praising Hitler and attacking users with Jewish-sounding names.

@justus4all4one.bsky.social
Elon Musk's grok is literally praising Hitler, attacking people with Jewish names and calling for a Holocaust and you out here tone policing Black people for calling these people Nazis. This is why white liberals fail. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Donald Trump gives people permission to be their worst selves. His politics are not just representative, they are generative. His words seep into people’s souls and slowly corrode whatever potential for human decency ever resided there.

They don’t believe in any gods and can’t read the Bible. How can they possibly do the morally correct thing?

The dangers of taking ADHD drugs when you don’t really need them A rise in diagnoses has led to a spike in prescriptions, many of them unnecessary. Here, experts reveal the risks of ‘brain doping’

"you shouldn’t take ADHD drugs at all if you don’t have ADHD..."

Prof. Katya Rubia sat down with ‪The Telegraph to discuss how #ADHD drugs work and their effects on the body.

Click the link to learn more 👇

#IoPPNInTheNews @nihrmaudsleybrc.bsky.social

bit.ly/4e7dvbN

The corruption has now eaten its way into the spiritual layer

Shine a light on beautiful.

#photography #flowers #flowerfeed #bloomscrolling #nature #dc #sunlight

He’s got them hooked, juiced, on anger. Aided and abetted by RW media.

They’ve got ‘all’ the political power, everything they need and want, to do what they want.

And yet… they remain angry, stuck in it like thick treacle and can’t see their way out of it.

Really important new study looking at self-diagnosis of mental disorders

This is one of those papers that documents something pretty obvious – that YP look up their symptoms online ahead of seeking/receiving treatment, and then self-diagnose – but...

(cont)

And you, Elizabeth? Where are you finding it!

Finding small joys in everyday real life and limiting time online!!

A metal statue in front if the Vatican depicts a boat of refugees.

Boat of refugees. Sculpture in Vatican Square. Thank you for being such a bright light, Pope Francis.

Redefining the mainstream: A review and meta-analysis of the evolving dynamics of majority-group acculturation Socio-historical factors – including coloniality – have perpetuated the long-standing neglect of cultural change among majority groups but also recently catalysed a paradigm shift. After outlining ...

Why has acculturation research focused only on minority groups when it's defined as mutual cultural change? My meta-analysis of 37 studies (N = 11,000+) reveals how majority groups also transform—and how colonial mindsets in academia created this blind spot.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I think sometimes we on the left do sabotage our cause by blaming folks for not already being at the finish line when they're just getting ready to join the race. Like, how does anyone change if the only acceptable starting point is to already be knowledgeable and experienced?

In 1931, Italian university professors were required to swear an oath of loyalty to Mussolini’s fascist regime. Out of 1,250 professors nationwide, Vito Volterra was one of only twelve who refused to take that oath. As a consequence, he lost his position at the University of Rome. In 1938, he was stripped of his Italian citizenship because he was Jewish. He lived in Paris for most of his final decade.

I'll be teaching some students about the Lotka-Volterra food web model tomorrow, and this historical aside feels particularly relevant.

Pretty stark that, in 1931, only 1% of Italian professors refused to sign a loyalty oath to the fascists.