Daryl Cameron

This is amazing! Thank you so much to @jinxungoh.bsky.social and @lydiaemery.bsky.social for putting together an amazing guide to the Chicago food scene for those coming to #SPSP2026!

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

Just one week til our “Social AI: A Philosophy Workshop”

🌟We will be joined by Pii Telakivi, Rob Clowes, Kris Goffin, Shahd Omar, Kesavan Thenagopal, Mike Barnes, Mercedes Corredor, Ben White, Leda Bario, Allister Lee, Àger Pérez Casanovas, Shane Glackin, Tom Roberts, & Joel Krueger 🌟

Join us on Tuesday for the Spring Kickoff Event!

RSVP here: buff.ly/s9ImZWW

Sometimes you have one of those days when you feel, more than usual, how lucky it is to have a great team. As I walk into the weekend, grateful for the team of @amormino.bsky.social @jokretz.bsky.social @farvk.bsky.social @jdweng.bsky.social. It was a day when the holism of the EMP Lab stood out.

Got to welcome @jdweng.bsky.social my AI empathy seminar as a special guest today! In the snow flurry along Pattee Mall

@psuliberalarts.bsky.social
@rockethics.bsky.social
@ssripennstate.bsky.social
@prcpennstate.bsky.social

I don't know why I said tomorrow. It's next Tuesday!

If you're in the Penn State area tomorrow stop by! We have several workshops and conferences upcoming this spring, and a seed grant RFP. Meet fellow researchers who study morality!

@psuliberalarts.bsky.social
@ssripennstate.bsky.social
@prcpennstate.bsky.social
@rockethics.bsky.social

@psuliberalarts.bsky.social @ssripennstate.bsky.social @prcpennstate.bsky.social
@rockethics.bsky.social
@spspnews.bsky.social
@psychscience.bsky.social
@affectscience.bsky.social
@isreorg.bsky.social @isjrorg.bsky.social @socphilpsych.bsky.social #empathy #psychscisky #socialpsych #academicsky

In the paper, we find that people tend to rate AI empathy as more empathetic than human empathy, even as they tend to choose human empathy when given the opportunity to do so. It’s an intriguing paradox in human choice that speaks to broader debates about the nature and value of AI empathy
2/n

Super proud advisor moment: kudos to @jdweng.bsky.social for his first first-author publication! With @minzlicht.bsky.social, we inverted the empathy selection task to look at preferences to receive empathy. We can speculate on what people want from AI, but a motivational account suggests we ask
1/n

My new book is starting to arrive for those who pre-ordered it! Let’s change the way we think about democracy.

If you order a copy, please share a note and photo when it arrives!

Don’t give in to nihilism, friends: you matter, and we matter, and we are much stronger together.

A reminder that how we talk about empathy, how to use it and expand it for those in need, can often matter at the level of policy and may shape what kinds of empathic choices seem possible. We discuss a recursive loop between policymaking and citizen reaction, as mutual motivated empathy regulation

The ‘R-Word’ Returns, Dismaying Those Who Fought to Oust It

"“It’s language used by bullies to bully.”

As a society, it's really important to call out and reject ableist hate when we see it. Language wars matter for the horizons of families.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

Bailey Ober recognizing the situation in Minneapolis, the first MLB player to do so

#MinnesotaTwins #TwinsBaseball #MLB

Talk with your family, friends, colleagues about why empathy and kindness are important. Because active choices to not care are being rewarded, and empathy as an ideal is at stake. Advice to mind one's business is a recipe for a callous default that most of us wouldn't want our own kids to embody.

And I'm not really a big pro basketball fan, but someone who cares about decision-making. Many of our moral emotions are socially constructed, in conversation with our peers, and so what society tells us can matter quite a bit for making sense of the scale and importance of individual moments.

For what it's worth, I think that the Minnesota Timberwolves cancelling a game on account of the killing was important. I remember early in the Covid-19 pandemic when the NBA started cancelling events. It stood out as a distinct marker, a sense of social norming, bellwether of something happening.

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

Epic snowfall here ❄️🌨️

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him.

White. Hot. Rage.

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

YouTube video by Agalloch - Topic The Hawthorne Passage (2016 - Remaster)

A song for winter. Beauty, finitude, death. Awe at the short breath of life and the power of collective moments. Rebirth
youtu.be/6n0va4524fI?...

Thousands of protesters shut down parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul on Friday as hundreds of businesses closed their doors. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

genuinely stunning image

And with our discussion today about the messiness of defining those constructs, I think they are beginning to see how the seminar will ultimately raise more questions than answers.

Highlight of the week in my AI empathy senior seminar was reading the opening chapter of Suri and McLelland's new book "The Emergent Mind". They loved the metaphors of mind therein as a basis for thinking about what it would mean to study human empathy & morality, much less benchmark it against AI.

Penn State campus at night in the snowfall ❄️🌨️

Richard B. Lippin Lecture in Ethics: Ted Chiang | Liberal Arts Events Award-winning author Ted Chiang, whose stories probe the moral dimensions of technology, will deliver the 2026 Richard B. Lippin Lecture in Ethics. Chiang is the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Li...

Excited for my AI-empathy senior seminar to attend this as part of our course, later this spring. They really enjoyed the juxtaposition of "Lifecycle of Software Objects" to Sherry Turkle's work

events.la.psu.edu/event/richar...

And of course, that's not to remove the role of PI's in training their own students in how to review papers (e.g., through transparent co-review), or of editors in stepping in to tell reviewers if their reviews are too harsh, etc.

Human–AI collaboration enables more empathic conversations in text-based peer-to-peer mental health support - Nature Machine Intelligence AI language modelling and generation approaches have developed fast in the last decade, opening promising new directions in human–AI collaboration. An AI-in-the loop conversational system called HAILE...

I wonder if it might be especially helpful for those who are just learning how to review. I.e., those who could use perspective on the quality of their own reviewing, in-the-loop feedback. Reminded of this paper, how those who gained most from AI empathy training were those needing the most help