Caspar van Lissa 🟥

Welcome to Hotel Elsevier: you can check-out any time you like … not » Eiko Fried A journey by Robin Kok and Eiko Fried trying to understand what private data Elsevier collects; what private data Elsevier sells; and what to do about it.

I was reminded today of the heroic work done by @eikofried.bsky.social and
@robinnkok.bsky.social to see what information Elsevier collects on academics and was re-horrified. 🧵 (1/5)

eiko-fried.com/welcome-to-h...

#academicsky

Day 2 Keynotes kicked off with Laura Nelson's inspiring presentation, “Why Qualitative Research Needs Computational Social Science”. What is the state of this maturing field called qualitative computational methods? What are the ongoing debates and futures? #ic2s2

Loving @ic2s2.bsky.social , but I wonder if we're asking the right questions. Is "How can I outsource this task to a proprietary, black box, resource-intensive, often un-validated LLM?" when fit-for-purpose classifiers abound a computational a computational research question? Or even scientific?

At my preconference workshop @ic2s2.bsky.social participants will conduct a *fully reproducible* and *FAIR theory based* simulation study.
The full interactive tutorial is in the theorytools R-package docs: cjvanlissa.github.io/theorytools/...
And slides: cjvanlissa.github.io/worcshop/ic2...

To be FAIR: Theory specification needs an update! Theories that others can reuse and update help navigate the "theory crisis". The theorytools R-package now has tutorials showing how to make theories FAIR and use them to select covariates, simulate data, etc

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Keynote speaker Caspar J. van Lissa To be FAIR: Theory specification needs an update

🚨 Program Highlight!

We're thrilled to welcome @cjvanlissa.bsky.social as our keynote speaker on June 5th! He’ll present his work on FAIR theory—a framework to make theories Findable, Accessible, Interoperable & Reusable—and share his path as a meta-scientist. #openscience #FAIRtheory #metascience

The late Caryl Rusbult told me: in academia, celebrate all the small successes.

I'm hiring a PHD candidate in Machine Learning-Informed Formal Theory Construction. Please encourage talented students to apply, or reach out if you want to collaborate. Looking for machine learning, theory development, and programming skills, and interdisciplinary interests! See tiu.nu/22752

The AI bubble: Why scientific models remain essential | Tilburg University From ChatGPT to self-driving cars, AI promises a revolutionary future. But is this technology truly as groundbreaking as often claimed? A conversation with Caspar van Lissa, Associate Professor of Soc...

For @tilburg-university.bsky.social 's #sciencequest podcast, I discussed the question: Do we still need scientific models? Can we not just use AI to answer all of our questions? The interview is in Dutch, accompanying text in English: www.tilburguniversity.edu/magazine/ove...

Under Pressure, Psychology Accreditation Board Suspends Diversity Standards As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.

Extremely disappointing & cowardly. The American Psychological Association is rescinding diversity requirements. Not due to any actual mandate from the federal government, but only because it may *someday* face pressure from the government www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/h...

They're leggings, best kept secret for climbing hard!

Went bouldering with Noah van Dongen and @cjvanlissa.bsky.social. Noah got a Veni grant this year, Caspar a Vidi, and I received a Vici, so we had to make this picture 😊 We will also work together in our projects on improving theorising in psychology!

Kabinet wil geen actieplan om Amerikaanse wetenschappers aan te trekken - ScienceGuide Maak speciaal actieplan om Amerikaanse wetenschappers en experts naar Nederland te halen, zeggen D66 en Volt. Premier Dick Schoof voelt echter weinig voor een specifieke focus op Amerikaanse kennismig...

Alle Europese landen zijn serieus werk aan het maken van het aantrekken van Amerikaanse wetenschappers. Behalve de Nederlandse coalitie van "boekhouders en ruziemakers", zegt
Rob Jetten van D66. Het kabinet is dit ook niet van plan, zegt Dick Schoof.

Bridging the gap between #R package documentation and #openscience Open Educational Materials, I'm embedding formative quizzes in the package vignettes (based on @debruine.bsky.social 's webexercises)! Check the development version of github.com/cjvanlissa/t... to see how it's done.

To be FAIR: Theory needs an update! FAIR theory can be shared, reused in analysis software, and updated based on new findings. Using existing #openscience infrastructure, it streamlines collaboration, reduces research waste, and accelerates cumulative knowledge development osf.io/preprints/ps...

revise: Dynamic Revision Letters for 'Rmarkdown' Manuscripts Extracts tagged text from markdown manuscripts for inclusion in dynamically generated revision letters. Provides an R markdown template based on papaja::revision_letter_pdf() with comment cross-refere...

Revising papers became easy when I discovered James Conigrave's "revise" package, which inserts tagged snippets from a manuscript into a revision letter! No more back-and-forth, no more consistency checking. Now on CRAN, may it save you as much time as it did me! cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

YouTube video by TilburgUniversity Mini-symposium: The Researcher of Tomorrow - Studium Generale - Tilburg University

Who is "the researcher of tomorrow"? Will we be replaced by AI? I really enjoyed discussing these issues in front of a live audience with Studium Generale Tilburg

The video starts on the panel discussion, but make sure to check Nathan Wildman's inspiring lecture too

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oRx...

In order to understand cognition, we often recruit analogies as building blocks of theories to aid us in this quest. One such attempt, originating in folklore and alchemy, is the homunculus: a miniature human who resides in the skull and performs cognition. Perhaps surprisingly, this appears indistinguishable from the implicit proposal of many neurocognitive theories, including that of the 'cognitive map,' which proposes a representational substrate for episodic memories and navigational capacities. In such 'small cakes' cases, neurocognitive representations are assumed to be meaningful and about the world, though it is wholly unclear who is reading them, how they are interpreted, and how they come to mean what they do. We analyze the 'small cakes' problem in neurocognitive theories (including, but not limited to, the cognitive map) and find that such an approach a) causes infinite regress in the explanatory chain, requiring a human-in-the-loop to resolve, and b) results in a computationally inert account of representation, providing neither a function nor a mechanism. We caution against a 'small cakes' theoretical practice across computational cognitive modelling, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, wherein the scientist inserts their (or other humans') cognition into models because otherwise the models neither perform as advertised, nor mean what they are purported to, without said 'cake insertion.' We argue that the solution is to tease apart explanandum and explanans for a given scientific investigation, with an eye towards avoiding van Rooij's (formal) or Ryle's (informal) infinite regresses.

Figure 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 2 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Tired but happy to say this is out w @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: Are Neurocognitive Representations 'Small Cakes'? philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

We analyse cog neuro theories showing how vicious regress, e.g. the homunculus fallacy, is (sadly) alive and well — and importantly how to avoid it. 1/

‘Wetenschap kan wat AI niet kan’ - ScienceGuide Nu AI-modellen onbetrouwbaar blijken, moeten wetenschappers de hunne naar de praktijk brengen, zegt Caspar van Lissa.

Is the AI bubble bursting? Maybe for ChatGPT, but there is now widespread support for automating everyday tasks. Academics build small specialized models, trained on high quality data, informed by domain knowledge. It's time to incorporate these into everyday workflows instead of "asking ChatGPT".

Open Science and Open Source only with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Including all of humanity is and always will be at the heart of open science.

Open Science and Open Source only with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility.

Inclusion is essential to science, and science is only worthwhile if it lifts everyone up together.

ropensci.org/blog/2025/02... #OpenSource #OpenScience

YouTube video by TilburgUniversity Het loopbaanpad van: Caspar van Lissa

Did this interview (Dutch) for @tilburg-university.bsky.social series "The Career Path", about interdisciplinarity, open science, and collaboration. Hopefully, this will encourage young scholars to pursue their curiosity and contribute to research that matters. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z5h...

YouTube video by Jeff Geerling OpenAI's nightmare: Deepseek R1 on a Raspberry Pi

DeepSeek powerfully demonstrates the value of open source and the importance of optimization. I hope it will also help democratize LLMs. Watch it run on a Raspberry Pi, accelerated by an AMD graphics card!
youtu.be/o1sN1lB76EA?...

Not every study needs super-complicated statistics, sometimes all you need is a contingency table. Now, thanks to Yasin Altinisik, Rebecca Kuiper et al, you can test informative hypotheses for contingency tables with the gorica R-package! link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

Do not cut back on open science The proposed budget cuts in higher education will directly impact funding for open science. But if the goal is to work more efficiently, now is precisely the ti

Open science is efficient: reusable code, data, results, and educational materials saves unnecessary work. Wen facing cutbacks, it's a bad idea to cut back on practices that increase efficiency!

universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Bezuinig niet op open science De plannen voor de bezuinigingen in het hoger onderwijs raken direct het budget voor open science. Maar als het doel is om efficiënter te werken, is dit juist

🙏🏽 ✨

@cjvanlissa.bsky.social and @michelenuijten.bsky.social !
#openscience
universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Use evidence-based methods for decision-making on complex policy issues - De Jonge Akademie News

It was a pleasure to contribute to this Participatory Value Evaluation on Research Funding by the Dutch Young Academy; one main conclusion - that dependence on grant funding threatens academic freedom - is more relevant than ever in the context of cutbacks. dejongeakademie.nl/en/news/2937...

NWO-voorzitter Levi is een slechte vertegenwoordiger van de Nederlandse wetenschap

Goede column van @dirkscheffers.bsky.social

ukrant.nl/nwo-voorzitt...

Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions via FLOW-3D An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used  its software without a valid license.  Both retracted papers were published …

Two papers retracted because the authors used unlicensed commercial software - how many more arguments do we need to just switch to free open source research software? retractionwatch.com/2024/11/08/c...

Zotero is great and I think that anyone who needs to organise and cite more than a handful of references should be using it. Here's an intro to Zotero that I made for my undergrad students (but the info is relevant for anyone new to Zotero).

Full vid [13 mins]: youtu.be/SlUHjOqVCyU
Preview ⬇️

Zesduizend mensen verwacht in Utrecht bij demonstratie tegen bezuinigingen hoger onderwijs

"Universiteiten zijn eigenlijk too big to fail: ze kunnen helemaal niet failliet gaan, dus een klein beetje academische ongehoorzaamheid is wel op z’n plaats."

www.folia.nl/nl/actueel/1...