Two weeks ago, I attended the Learning Salon, hosted by Joshua Vogelstein, Ida Momennejad and John Krakauer, for the first time. Marcin Milkowski was speaking on the question “Why think that the brain is not a computer?”. Given this topic, obviously I could not resist and signed into the crowdcast. I even had opportunity to participate in the discussion “on stage” and shared some thoughts on the question posed. This blogpost is to spell out my thoughts a bit more.

22 September 2020, Nature Communications published an article titled ‘Tracking historical changes in trustworthiness using machine learning analyses of facial cues in paintings’. When the last author advertised the publication on social media (Twitter), many researchers expressed concerns about the work (including historians, statisticians, computer scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists).

For my NIAS project Tools for theory, I’m reading up on theory & psychology, both recent and older papers. I will be tweeting about them in “Now Reading” threads.

Together with Chris Donkin, I co-organized a symposium at MathPsych/ICCM2020, titled Perspectives on ‘What makes a good theory?’ Below you find the symposium description and links to the talks.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a paper discussion of “Theory before the test”. Eirini Zormpa and Johannes Algermissen organized the discussion for ReproducibiliTea Nijmegen, an OSCN initiative.

I’m honoured to have been awarded a Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship (DLF). This means I will be working on my project Tools for theory: Improving the theoretical foundations of psychological science at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), Amsterdam.

Delighted to announce that Cambridge University Press has made Chapter 1 of our book Cognition and Intractability freely available. You can download it for free here or click below.