Beau Sievers

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth.

Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word!

More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

may we all know the joy of rotating the same cube around in your head until The Problem is Solved even if The Problem is Solved in disgraced obscurity

butterfly meme ME ANYTHING IS THIS A GAUSSIAN PROCESS

New gaussian process slides going well

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 09 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02371-7Vaziri et al. examined how humans detect changes in auditory pitch, revealing that listeners rely on correlations in sound intensity over frequency and time, processing that is reminiscent of visual motion detection.

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch

It’s the “we all” part that’s tricky here

“Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works.” - Stuart Hall, born Feb. 3, 1932

"Shape packing" is a good search term

hcie.csail.mit.edu/research/fab...

github.com/DanielLiamAn...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Croissant kill:death ratio

behold, we found great variation in how people think! Many activities that we thought would be “gaming” weren't & vice versa, eg half of the participants interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’. Ergo: surveying ‘gaming’ without defining it creates data mess

PC games (are gaming). Arcade games, which require inserting money to start (are gaming). Football outdoors with friends (is gaming). Frisbee golf outdoors with friends (is gaming). Drones and similar remotely controllable physical machines (are gaming). Console games (are gaming). Esports (are gaming). Smartphone AR games outdoors like Pokemon GO (are gaming). Online slot machines with the possibility to win real money (are gaming). Offline slot machines in a casino with the possibility to win real money (are gaming). Traditional lotto with the possiblity to win a million dollars (is gaming). Casual mobile games (are gaming). Competitive mobile games (are gaming). Handheld console games (are gaming). Betting (on sports, esports, etc.) to win real money (is gaming). Betting (on sports, esports, etc.) to win skins or other digital items (is gaming). Online casino games that do not allow winning real money (is gaming). Online poker with digital cards, which allows winning real money (is gaming). Offline poker with real cards, which allows winning real money (is gaming). Fantasy football i.e. predicting winners in real football with the possibility to win valuable prizes (is gaming). Duolingo and similar language apps (are gaming). Tinder and similar dating apps (are gaming). Gamified loyalty programs where people collect points/rewards with airlines, online stores, etc. (are gaming). Watching online live-streams where other people play videogames (is gaming). Watching online videos where other people play videogames (is gaming). Buying randomised physical game packs like Magic: the Gathering cards or Pokemon cards with real money (is gaming). Buying lootboxes with virtual in-game currency, which allows winning

Considering how fun this research was, it would’ve been stupid to stop here. What people *really* think when they read ‘gaming’ or related terms? I had dreamt of this exploration for ages-- we created a list of 50 statements (EN+SK), asking how much participants agree diverse activities are gaming

Confusion in gaming disorder measurement Abstract. Measurement is important for the scientific programmes of addictive behaviours. In the present study, we investigated the measurement of gaming d

First post of the year, new paper out today: we present possibly the biggest case of systematic Measurement Schmeasurement in tech use. It seems that most studies on gaming (videogame) addiction/disorder haven't measured gaming after all. This research took years, so long 🧵 doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

more

idea i had

South Korean Ex-Premier Gets 23 Years in Prison for Role in Martial Law Han Duck-soo was convicted of playing a key role in former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s imposition of martial law, which a court said was an insurrection.

Han Duck-soo, a former prime minister and acting president of South Korea, was sentenced to 23 years in prison on Wednesday after a three-judge panel in Seoul convicted him of collaborating in former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief imposition of martial law in late 2024.

Have discovered that I am now a single issue voter focusing on elite impunity. Hope it's temporary.

YouTube video by Hollandspiele GRAVITY IS FREE: the games of René Soriano

I wanted to know who designed an old board game I loved. I found out he made over fifty games he was never credited for, in a career spanning more than three decades.

youtu.be/dTepZ7qM24Q

The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution Abstract. The societal effects of children’s learning in cultural evolution have been underexplored. Here, we investigate using agent-based models how a pr

Really great new paper using agent-based modelling to show how an exploratory childhood can lead to innovation in the population at large.
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Played Shape Chess (形棋) this weekend, a great new board game from China by Richu (日出).

The goal is to make mirror-symmetric shapes while stopping your opponent from doing the same. Just a grid and pieces in two colors.

A great English intro to the game: blackandwhite.develz.org/games/ShapeC...

Mason & Dixon too

You Can Call Me Al, by Alicia Witt from the album Alicia Witt EP

While we're talking about pop reharmonization may I recommend Alicia Witt's berserk arrangement of "You Can Call Me Al" aliciawitt.bandcamp.com/track/you-ca...

Screenshot of a data visualization titled “The Cost of American Exceptionalism,” subtitled “What would change if the U.S. matched the OECD average?” The page explains that each card shows how outcomes would change if the U.S. matched the average of 31 peer democracies. Below, a section labeled “Economy & Inequality” displays eight cards comparing U.S. figures to OECD averages. Highlights include: +$19K per household per year in redistributed income and +$96K in redistributed wealth if the top 1% matched OECD shares; a 71% lower CEO-to-worker pay ratio (from 354× to 101×); 50 million more workers with union coverage; 26 million more people with health insurance; $2.1 trillion saved annually in healthcare spending; $691 less per person per year in prescription drug costs; and intergenerational economic mobility being twice as high. Each card shows the U.S. value alongside the OECD average.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this:

America's problems are solved problems. Just not here.

What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

I'm looking to pick up some extra contract-work this month. Research in AI policy and AI alignment, also open to technical writing and science communications contracts if very high-end

The title page

🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨
The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social)
Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics
Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Beloved SF Club Bottom of the Hill to Close at the End of 2026 One of the city’s last independent music venues, Bottom of the Hill has survived waves of gentrification, COVID closures, and more throughout its 35 years. Now, owners say it’s last call — on their ow...

Breaking some news for @coyotemedia.org here.

Incredibly sad about this — some of the best nights of my life have involved this club — but I’m also so honored and grateful to Ramona, Kathleen and Lynn for trusting me with this story.

www.coyotemedia.org/san-francisc...

A 6x6 grid containing numbers. Original puzzle by nyoroppi - https://twitter.com/nyoroppyi/status/1230510304011833344

Can you solve a puzzle without knowing the rules?
For the first week of January, I'm publicly sharing the experimental beta of Scriddle - a daily puzzle where the rules are kept secret. I'd love to know how many guesses it took you to solve it.

🔴 SCRIDDLE #24
▶️ scriddle.net?d=MDEtMDEtMj...

And, although it is usually credited to Dirichlet, the principle was introduced earlier in a Jesuit mathematics textbook written in Latin by Jean Leurechon. Makes me wonder if there are even earlier formulations in non-Indo-European languages.

backoffice.biblio.ugent.be/download/411...

In this light, one could read Dijkstra as making a moral case for actively cultivating cardinal intuitions—for preventing language and metaphor from obscuring the truths of mathematical abstraction.