Micah Goldwater

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading Microsoft 365 users Asia In Brief: PLUS: China demotes tech self-sufficiency goal; Alibaba Cloud quietly quits VMware; India demands deepfake labels; and more!

Good on Australia for doing this! It’s such a deceptive practice to tell customers their price is increasing because of AI, when the old price is still available without genAI but only if you try to cancel.

I know we're desensitized, but it's important to note, again, that today's events would have led to the immediate impeachment & removal of any president from at least Truman to at least Obama. We're hundreds of miles on the interstate past Richard Nixon's high school prank-level crimes compared to 👇

The net result is the worst of both worlds. Universities invoke the rhetoric of business discipline, but they lack the governance structures that give that discipline bite. They operate without the checks that private ownership provides, yet subject staff and students to the cost-cutting and efficiency drives that profit-maximising firms pursue. The result is waste at the top and insecurity at the bottom.

this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses.

www.afr.com/work-and-car...

Thanks. In the older “school as factory” model, students were the products, which isn’t necessarily a better metaphor, but certainly different implications.

There is a ton of research that students ratings on aggregate do not reflect learning outcomes, but whatever biases the population has. But in the "run universities like a business" model, student ratings are customer satisfaction surveys, so reflecting learning outcomes is irrelevant.

Social Media Manager by Timothy Graham A roguelike management sim about social media manipulation and corporate

Excited to announce my first ever published game, for the @halcyonfrequency.bsky.social gamejam.

”Social Media Manager", a shady deskjob simulator with #roguelike elements. I hope you enjoy it and would love to hear any feedback

#indiegames #indiedev

timothyjgraham.itch.io/social-media...

Why Jimmy Kimmel would have never been cancelled in Australia We need to be careful about how we separate true hate speech from satirical speech. In America, it seems, differentiation is out of favour.

This is a bizarre thing to publish on the day the federal court awarded a journalist $220,000 for being unfairly dismissed from an on-air role for their political views.

In Australia it isn't just private companies that cave to pressure, it's the public broadcaster

www.smh.com.au/national/why...

If you, like me, are the parent of a neuro-atypical child dreading this autism press conference, please remember: These are the people hurting our kids. Not us. They are the ones stigmatizing and pathologizing them. They are the ones peddling untested science. And we should be very, very angry.

It Turns Out That Google's AI Is Being Trained by an Army of Poorly Treated Human Grunts Google is depending on thousands of contractors to train the AI behind its flagship chatbot Gemini.

"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor."

Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors - Nature Climate change made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed.

Interesting new study! They attributed heatwaves🔥 to emissions of individual companies. Companies that emit a lot of CO2 contribute to climate change, making heatwaves more intense. Can this help in pushing them to reduce emissions and hold them accountable for the damage?

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I teach developmental psychology and this is the most succinct way to summarise the class.

Home - Consortium on Moral Decision-Making Welcome to the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making A collaborative hub dedicated to unraveling the intricate threads of ethical choices. As a multidisciplinary alliance of scholars, thinkers, and prac...

As the fall semester begins, I'd like to send a call to anyone who would like to get involved in our Consortium on Moral Decision-Making. We're a dedicated network of morality and ethics researchers focused on breaking outside siloes to work together on big questions.
moralconsortium.psu.edu 1/n

Screenshot from Fox News that says CDC official includes 'pregnant people' terminology and pronouns in resignation letter Daskalakis accused President Trump's administration of attempting 'to erase transgender populations' By Alex Nitzberg • Fox News Published August 28, 2025 1:47pm EDT

I often talk about the fact that MAGA does not access the same news as the left wing. I present to you Exhibit A.

Dr. Daskalakis’ resignation letter excoriated RFK Jr. and shared that RFK Jr. was lying to the public, manipulating data, and ordering unethical actions.

This what Fox News served.

New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS @pnas.org

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇

Thanks Sam!

Sam Altman: I see humans achieving omnipotence using dark matter by… 2030 maybe? That’s if OpenAI is given a quadrillion dollars

Theo Von: Yeah

Altman: Or, we may become a race of slaves, genetically modified to be harvested by robot spiders. That’s if OpenAI doesn’t get the money

Von: Right

Is there a good piece on how the most famous economics & business school made bad terrible crypto investments?

Why do smart people get hooked on wellness trends? Personality traits may play a role Certain personality traits may help explain why some educated, well-intentioned people sometimes reject conventional medicine in favour of fringe practices.

"Public health campaigns should consider personality traits for more effective preventive interventions. They can target people high in openness, for example, by presenting health science as dynamic and evolving, not just a set of rules and prescriptions…"

I know it’s gauche to share good news on here, but our university’s IRB (ethics office) just declared that low risk applications will no longer be reviewed by 4 people & then go to a committee. They’ll be reviewed by 1 person.
I almost can’t believe a change this positive is possible in this world.

Conspiracy Theories and Storytelling A blog about imperfect cognitions, such as delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, and implicit biases.

In June, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies hosted a workshop on conspiracy theory and story telling at the University of Birmingham, featuring five exciting academics working on the topic. Today's post presents a brief summary of each of their talks.

#philsky #philpsy

In light of the Columbia and Brown deals, I’m bumping these slides again about the Nazi takeover of German science, which includes discussion about how they took over academia, in a manner very similar to the Brown and Columbia deals

hell yeah!

Evidence for rule versus exemplar learning strategies as stable individual differences independent from working memory - Memory & Cognition Evidence for two qualitatively different learning strategies has emerged from the function- and category-learning literatures: a rule-based and an exemplar-based strategy. With a rule-based strategy, ...

New paper: we argue that an individual's propensity to compare items and discover abstract relational rules, rather than focus on surface similarity, is stable across learning tasks, and is independent of working memory capacity. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

unclear if it's anyone's goal, either with or without a phd, to spend more time with people with phds.

bayesians gotta relax with the taking credit for the concept of infering things about the world

Micah presenting this meme

Lol @micahgoldwater.bsky.social meme redux at #cogsci2025 in a cool talk about political psych via memes

Community health workers’ counseling is based on a deficit model of behavior change Author summary In 2005, India started the ASHA program to help rural communities get better healthcare and health education access. While the program has improved health services, many do not follow m...

In our new paper, we motivate giving community health workers the tools to support evidence-based medical decision-making that go beyond a deficit model. journals.plos.org/globalpublic...?

Tufts international graduate student taken into ICE custody The student was reportedly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and remains in federal custody, according to an email sent by the university Tuesday evening.

Tufts PhD student in child development, whose research was on the representation of refugees in children's media, was abducted by ICE; video in link. I hadn't seen this on this app, so wanted to spread at least a little. This is very far beyond suppressing free speech. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...