Rachit Dubey

Top: A syntax tree for the sentence "the doctor by the lawyer saw the artist". Bottom: A continuous vector.

🤖🧠I'll be considering applications for PhD students & postdocs to start at Yale in Fall 2026!

If you are interested in the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, & AI, I encourage you to apply!

PhD link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...
Postdoc link: rtmccoy.com/prospective_...

Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change Nature Human Behaviour - Liu et al. investigate the ‘boiling frog’ effect and demonstrate that binary climate data visuals increase climate change perception via creating an...

Great analysis, reminds me a bit of Moore et al.'s rather bleak results: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

You might also be interested in my group's recent research on understanding and countering the "normalization" of climate change: rdcu.be/ePe20 and www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rachit Dubey

Jiacheng Miao

🎉 Congratulations to Rachit Dubey and Jiacheng Miao, winners of the 2025 NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award for their innovative work that asks fundamental questions at the intersection of life and social sciences.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4hIfANa; https://scim.ag/47ve0Lm

Cldn't have been possible without my awesome labmates like you!!

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tagging @dwallacewells.bsky.social because your writings have been very inspirational for this research!

Really grateful to the NOMISFoundation and the editors of Science for this recognition.

This pattern extends beyond climate change from how we normalize inequality, public health, and gun violence. Anywhere slow change should compel us but doesn't.

Together, this research suggests that whether people stop noticing worsening conditions or appreciating improvements, the root problem is the same—a mind that recalibrates too quickly, misaligning emotion, attention, and action.

The pursuit of happiness: A reinforcement learning perspective on habituation and comparisons Author summary Even in favorable circumstances, we often find it hard to remain happy with what we have. One might enjoy a newly bought car for a season, but over time it brings fewer positive feeling...

In another study, we examined hedonic adaptation and showed that the drive to always want “more” is computationally optimal, even at emotional cost. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change - Nature Human Behaviour Liu et al. investigate the ‘boiling frog’ effect and demonstrate that binary climate data visuals increase climate change perception via creating an ‘illusion’ of sudden shifts.

In one study, we examined the “boiling frog effect” and found that people perceive climate change as more impactful when shown binary data rather than continuous data, because binary data creates an illusion of sudden change. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I suggest that society’s failure to act on crises such as climate change reflects a deeper cognitive misalignment in how our minds perceive change over time. My research addresses this gap by combining perspectives from psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, and public policy.

In this article, I describe my lab's research on understanding how our minds get used to anything and why even crises start feeling normal.

The normalization of (almost) everything: Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal

Honored and excited to share that I am the winner of Nomis & Science Young Explorer Award!!

Also thrilled to share that my article describing my research is out now in @science.org today!

The normalization of (almost) everything www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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💫 I am recruiting exceptional PhD students & postdocs for my lab @tticconnect.bsky.social this year!

Application details: www.ttic.edu/studentappli...

Super happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social

We are looking for PhD students via the @ellis.eu and @munichcenterml.bsky.social PhD programs!

Jobs! First, we hope to be hiring in Computer Science for the @cornelltech.bsky.social campus:

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30804

Focus on security, SysML, and NLP.

Please share!

Probably the best paper title of my career. To read with the Indiana jones soundtrack. And yes we solved and differentiated quite well 80 millions (small) Fused Gromov Wasserstein problems per epoch using a neural network on GPU.

In honor of some new people coming from AI twitter, I finally updated my post to recommend For You over Discover.

I am recruiting PhD students to start in 2026! If you are interested in robustness, training dynamics, interpretability for scientific understanding, or the science of LLM analysis you should apply. BU is building a huge LLM analysis/interp group and you’ll be joining at the ground floor.

AI is evolving too quickly for an annual report to suffice. To help policymakers keep pace, we're introducing the first Key Update to the International AI Safety Report. 🧵⬇️

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Open Rank Faculty Position in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Columbia University in the City of New York: The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

Come be our colleague at Columbia IEOR! Open-rank (tenure-track or tenured) position with a priority deadline of November 21.

Candidates with application-oriented research are especially encouraged to apply.

apply.interfolio.com/175698

The Machines Finding Life That Humans Can’t See A suite of technologies are helping taxonomists speed up species identification.

"In a single week, AI processed many thousands of images each night, in which experts detected 2,000 moth species—half of them unknown to science."

Cool article on AI for large-scale biodiversity monitoring, feat. my awesome colleague @drolnick.bsky.social!

www.theatlantic.com/science/2025...

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis.

Today I want to share two new works on this topic:

Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425
Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492

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Which, whose, and how much knowledge do LLMs represent?

I'm excited to share our preprint answering these questions:

"Epistemic Diversity and Knowledge Collapse in Large Language Models"

📄Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04226
💻Code: github.com/dwright37/ll...

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📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce…

🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉

The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

Children spontaneously discover efficient solutions to a difficult sorting task - Nature Human Behaviour Children successfully solved a challenging sorting task by spontaneously discovering efficient sorting strategies, such as selection sort and shaker sort. Older children outperformed younger ones, demonstrating developmental progress in strategic thinking and problem-solving abilities.

Children can solve a difficult sorting task by spontaneously discovering efficient sorting algorithms. Older children outperform younger children, showing developmental growth in strategy use and problem-solving. @hw-yang.bsky.social‬‬
@celestekidd.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓

The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠

Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏

@belongielab.org welcomes applications for a PhD position in CV/ML (fine-grained analysis of multimodal data, 2D/3D generative models, misinformation detection, self-supervised learning) / Apply though the ELLIS portal / Deadline 31-Oct-2025

Very exciting opportunity here, come join us at the ICN!