Aurélien Allard

In poverty, do people take more or less risk? Some theories contend that they avoid risk out of caution. Others that they take risks (e.g. crime) out of desperation.

In our new paper in BBS, we show that they are the two sides of the same coin: the desperation threshold.

Peer commentary call soon!

Slavery and forced labor have become less common over the last 250 years. Line chart of the number of countries that had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor. In 1789, 165 of the 174 countries covered had not yet abolished large-scale forced labor. In 2024, it was 9 countries. Annotations on important cases, such as China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, say more about the history of slavery and forced labor.

✍️ New article: Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labor: a long-run data view

For much of history, forced labor was widespread and brutal. Tens of millions of people were made to work under the threat of violence or punishment. The situation today is very different.

European politics has an interesting geographical pattern (as measured by the affiliation of the prime minister or president).

The interior is conservative, while the west coast has centrist and left-wing leaders.

www.update.news/i/188900711/...

Qualtrics is getting too expensive and our institute is considering switching to another survey software.

What can you recommend?

Needs to be user friendly, have reasonable support, handle similar features to Qualtrics, and be cheaper.

Real peer review has never been tried - Works in Progress Magazine Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science. But in a world where research can now circulate rapidly on the Internet, we need to develop new ways to do science in public.

I just reread this old piece of mine and I don't want to brag but it's quite good.

Reading about the Icelandic Constitutional Council, which had some...issues with working class representation

Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.

1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'

Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵

If you were to create a philosophy of LLM course, what kinds of things would you cover?

My thoughts in thread, but eager to hear what others would do

Paper on statistical power necessary for interaction effects
doi.org/10.1177/2515...

A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models -- Part I: Continuity With Classic Debates Large language models like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable proficiency in a broad spectrum of language-based tasks, some of which are traditionally associated with hallmarks of human intelligence. This...

@cameronbuckner.bsky.social and @raphaelmilliere.com have a great philosophical introduction to LLMs. It is divided into two parts. The topics they discuss could be useful in the building of your syllabus:
First part: arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910
Second part: arxiv.org/abs/2405.03207

With all due respect to the authors (the study raises a “potential” concern), but its framing overstates that concern imo. A few things worth flagging before everyone panics 1/

The stages of online samples in my research career:
1. too difficult/expensive/unrepresentative
2. too expensive but representative
3. pretty affordable but less representative
4. cheap and full of bots with garbage responses
5. wide price range and maybe full of non-people pretending to be people

What is Open Science? 💡 Episode 59 is out now, where Lisanne de Moor spoke with @simine.com about the history, development, and future of Open Science in the field of personality psychology. Check it out!

a woman is standing in front of a blue wrapped present and says hey i got you a present ALT: a woman is standing in front of a blue wrapped present and says hey i got you a present

Je viens de découvrir un tableau exhaustive « Relevé des sanctions disciplinaires prononcées » par le CNRS par année. On peut voir un peu l'échelle des peines :

Par exemple : cadeau d'un ouvrage de dessins à caractère érotique => avertissement

Team "Elsevier Highlights Subversion" strikes again! Best one yet!
@deankarlan.bsky.social, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, @christopher-udry.bsky.social

”Most of the applications of clustering are not well thought out, not even considering whether observation clustering aligns with clinical goals.”

YES.
Clustering has become a huge fad in psychology as well, I see it everywhere.

Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic. text: The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

yeah it's one thing to go making things up like philosophy, but its another to go *looking* for the made up stuff

that's another level

poor bee GOLD_07, whose embarrassing mistake has been immortalised in a way beyond his comprehension

Color Survey Results Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…

I go back to this regularly, and it's always a fun and entertaining read: XKCD's color survey where he prompted ~230k users to write down color names for randomly shown colors. Data available online.

blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/c...

« "Nous avons comptabilisé 57 morts, dont 52 attribués à l'ultradroite et 5 à l'ultragauche de 1986 à 2021", relève Xavier Crettiez. "La violence politique est aujourd'hui très faible. Le dernier événement comparable à la mort de Quentin, c'est celle de Clément Méric en 2013" » tinyurl.com/576ef3w7

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

An LLM-backed "socratic tutor" to replace reading responses Blog about fatherhood, langauge, developmental psychology, and cognitive science.

New blogpost about a teaching experiment I'm doing this quarter: a "socratic tutor" bot to help students gain understanding of specific reading assignments.

babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-l...

Looking forward to work with @fierycushman.bsky.social and @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social on the moral psychology of authority!

Long format. Enquête sur une supercherie : le prof d’université s’est-il inventé un « Prix Nobel » ? Professeur de Lettres à l’Université Marie & Louis Pasteur de Besançon, le Montbéliardais Florent Montaclair est le lauréat 2016 de la Médaille d’or de philologie, une science qui a pour objet l’étude historique d’une langue par l’analyse critique des textes. Assimilée au Prix Nobel et à la Médaille Fields, cette récompense internationale n’a en réalité aucune existence institutionnelle. C’est un faux. La stratégie qui a été mise en place pour faire croire le contraire, et a abusé beaucoup de monde, y compris le milieu universitaire, est un singulier mélange de sophistication, d’approximation et de culot monstre.

Votre article du dimanche soir: l'invention d'un prix Nobel ou le narcissisme académique dans toute sa splendeur. Incroyable enquête de l'Est Républicain

www.estrepublicain.fr/faits-divers...

The motherhood penalty isn’t as large as we think And event-study designs aren’t the be-all end-all to empirical economics

On why the motherhood penalty may be overestimated. Simply put: The identifying variation comes from women having kids at different points in time, which might not be a valid counterfactual. open.substack.com/pub/plausibl...

The Case of the Mysterious Citations Mysterious citations are routinely appearing in peer-reviewed publications throughout the scientific community. In this paper, we developed an automated pipeline and examine the proceedings of four ma...

A review of the proceedings from four major computer-science conferences showed that none from 2021, and all from 2025, had fake citations.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.058...

#AI #LLMs #Hallucinations #Misconduct #ScholComm

Just an aside: 41 of the 100 meta analyses published in Psych Bull between 2023 and 2025 do not include *any* quality screening of identified studies. To the degree that those literatures include bad studies, they are being laundered together with the good ones.

How to live a meaningful life, according to science The meaning of life has puzzled philosophers for millennia, but new research suggests it could be as simple as lending a helping hand

What is the meaning of life? 🧪

Some will say "There is none!" But the question has niggled people at least since the The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4000 years ago.

It seems having a positive impact on others is key to feeling your life has meaning. www.newscientist.com/article/2513...