Simon van Baal

- Me: "write a small function that does one thing"
- LLM: would you like me to add a calculation for the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything?
- Me: [deletes, includes print("42")].

Self-control in daily life is more than willpower — but how well do commonly used trait scales capture this recent, broader view on self-control?

New preprint with @kaihorstmann.bsky.social & @mhennecke.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Short summary below.

Great to see this work! Also I love this angle on how impulsivity and self-control come apart (and are not opposite ends of a spectrum).

So true. Good to avoid unnecessary suffering!

I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.

@madselk.bsky.social, @benansell.bsky.social, Laure Bokobza, @aslicansunar.bsky.social, @mhaslberger.bsky.social, and @jacobnyrup.bsky.social. 2025. ‘Why Is It so Hard to Counteract Wealth Inequality? Evidence from the United Kingdom’. World Politics. 77(3): 515–61. muse.jhu.edu/article/964464

100% agreed. So frustrating. Sometimes I’m unsure whether it’s just rhetoric or politicians truly don’t understand the ramifications.

We need this badly. Unfortunately, there's also too little attention to cold-related deaths. Way more people die of the cold in Europe, and that nearly never makes the news. Though that balance will probably flip in a few decades.

Shows death rates in US and eu cities by temperature, air con being the decisive factor

Sitting here bleary after another poor night's sleep, disinclined to engage in a day of cognitive effort, this chart from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com really strikes home on.ft.com/4eFZG4l

Great PSA! To echo: please don't use the chat window (your research decisions are being made for you). Send me a message and I will happily provide you with code to prompt OpenAI's model endpoints and store the conversational context throughout.

Fairphone Has a New Plan to Get You to Care WIRED loves Fairphone and everything it stands for—but people just aren’t buying its devices, and the few who have don’t need to upgrade.

WIRED loves Fairphone and everything it stands for—but people just aren’t buying its devices, and the few who have don’t need to upgrade. www.wired.com/story/fairph...

Great article linked below. I was unaware journals could negotiate and inflate the metric by excluding article types. I suppose that is part of the reason why there are always a bunch of different article types. Yet another example of Goodhart's Law!

journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

CDS Summer School Program Registration Schedule Directions 8th – 12th September, 2025 The Center for Decision Sciences will be hosting a summer school during the second week of September, 2025 and taking place…

Registration is open for the Summer School on Computational Decision Sciences, 8–12 Sept

Join us in London for a week of cutting-edge research on decision-making, AI, cognitive science and more!

(free, register by 11Aug)

center-decision-sciences.com/cds-summer-s...
#PsychSciSky 🧠 #neuroskyence🧪

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

@lukaszwalasek.bsky.social

Love to see it. Thoughtful piece too :)

I love a good traffic violation (especially if you don't operate heavy machinery for your travel), so I will grab the popcorn for this conversation. Imo if many pedestrians are crossing where/when they "shouldn't", it's a design error - they're deprioritised for automobile traffic flow.

Added it to the list! Re your point: not to mention the history of the term jaywalking!

I can hear a faint echo of: “Rotgänger, totgänger!!!”

First, that’s so valid. Second, sorry but I have to say that’s the most German complaint you could make 😂 I’m so here for it!!

That’s definitely part of it. Another point is that we get a lot of negative press about gun violence, lack of public transportation, expensive healthcare etc. From the outside, it’s difficult to see how localised some of these things are.

Oh absolutely, arguably even more so in the US! Especially in the North East and the West Coast. But the US market has a finite supply for faculty positions… Also probation is usually less intense than tenure, so that could contribute!

Great point!

Though US & CA pay much better, the pay in the UK is commensurate with many EU countries, so it’s a straightforward option if you wish to stay within reach of family and friends.

Also the higher education market in the UK has always benefited from a prestige privilege, inflating funding for faculty positions via intl student fees. This creates network effects, making it more attractive to work here due to big departments w more colleagues in one’s own field

Thanks!!

#CDRLeeds 's Simon Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social and colleagues have received an AFSG Minor Exploratory Grant (afsg.org) to improve use of the Problem Gambling Severity Index. They'll attempt identifying different problematic gambling profiles using the score and natural language processing tools.

New work by Sudeep Bhatia @sdpbht.bsky.social, Simon van Baal @svanbaal.bsky.social, Feiyi Wang, and @lukaszwalasek.bsky.social Lukasz Walasek -- now out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences!

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

Would you like to extract and exploit textual data from the internet? No matter whether you want to analyse product reviews, or political opinions, #CDRLeeds 4-day workshop Webtext2Insight will teach you how to do it. 9-12 June 2025 in Leeds. More info and registration: shorturl.at/JCiKT

bsky.app/profile/svan...