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irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Iris van Rooij 💭
@irisvanrooij.bsky.social
18K followers 1.2K following 2.5K posts
Professor of Computational Cognitive Science | @AI_Radboud | @[email protected] on 🦣 | http://cognitionandintractability.com | she/they 🏳️‍🌈
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irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · Jan 6
✨ Updated preprint ✨

Iris van Rooij & Olivia Guest (2026). Combining Psychology with Artificial Intelligence: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? PsyArXiv osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aue4m_v2 @olivia.science

Our aim is to make these ideas accessible for a.o. psych students. Hope we succeeded 🙂
Figure 1 Illustration of why AI systems cannot realistically scale to human cognition within the foreseeable future: (b) Human cognitive capacities (such as reasoning, communication, problem solving, learning, concept formation, planning etc.) can handle unbounded situations across many domains, ranging from simple to complex. (a) Engineers create AI systems using machine learning from human data. (d) In an attempt to approximate human cognition a lot of data is consumed. (c) Making AI systems that approximate human cognition is intractable (van Rooij, Guest, et al., 2024), i.e., the required resources (e.g. time, data) grows prohibitively fast as input domains get more complex, leading to diminishing returns. (a) Any existing AI system is created in limited time (hours, months or years, not millennia or eons). Therefore, existing AI systems cannot realistically have the domain-general cognitive capacities that humans have. [Made with elements from freepik.com.]
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
llmllc.bsky.social
Do you know about Mary Somerville? The word “scientist” is a thing because they didn’t know how to describe her —she had so many interests, & she was highly respected in more than one science! She had to teach herself a lot of what she knew in secret because women didn’t need to know math, etc.
February 18, 2026 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
We must stand "against the onslaught of AI logics in our academic environments" — when they attack women it is the same playbook as AI, making these men pro-AI unless they get serious. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

@marentierra.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social
4 Decoloniality Decoloniality is the decentring of views which stem from white and masculine supremacy, techno- solutionism, and fascism. In the CAILs context, decolonial strategies can range from pushing back against the onslaught of AI logics in our academic environments to (re)centring, uplifting, and protecting of non-mainstream perspectives from those outside the privileged classes with a goal of reducing harm, increasing justice, and cultivating empathy in our colleagues and students. AI is inimical to running on anything but colonial lines. Within computational and other fields affected by AI, any academic who works towards “challenging the status quo faces systemic rejection, resis- tance, and exclusion.” (Birhane and Guest 2021, p. 61) Tracing these trends of how these fields treat their thinkers, and how their mainstream views affect society, illuminates historical precedents for gendered, racialised, and other harms (Benjamin 2019; Erscoi et al. 2023; Gebru et al. 2024; Hicks 2017; Saini 2019). We face high barriers to decolonising (van Vree 2023). Foregrounding scholars who are not hegemonically aligned goes a long way. As does outlining how concepts or methods may have harmful genealogies (Guest 2024). For example, statistics and ‘intelligence’ have eugenical histories; Charles S. Peirce wove white supremacist views into his logic (Neville 2018; Raposa 2021); while many figures due to cryptogyny, for example, are actively expunged from the record (Connell et al. 2022; Erscoi et al. 2023; Evans 2020; Gage 1883; Guest and Forbes 2024; Hicks 2017; Kleiman 2022; Pozo et al. 2019; Pozo-Sánchez et al. 2021; Rossiter 1993; Shetterly 2017; van den Brink et al. 2012). So women and people of colour are not only absent in our classes and references lists, but also their contributions do not serve as foundations or inspirations. Relatedly, we have a duty of care to de- tect and intervene decolonially when interpersonal tensions or bullying between students flows on…
February 18, 2026 at 11:19 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
None of these are one offs by the way... Women have always been really good at thinking.

7/n

bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Oct 10
"We document the participation of women in European academia [from the year 1000 to 1800]. A total of 108 women taught at universities or were members of academies of arts and sciences. Comparing them with 58,995 male scholars, we find that they were on average better."

doi.org/10.1093/ereh...
February 18, 2026 at 6:45 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
And yes... They will do this until they get rid of the women (in the historical record minimally), so let's not let them do it 😌

It's not a coincidence for example you've never heard of Margaret Cavendish from the 17th century, for example. bsky.app/profile/iris...

6/n
irisvanrooij.bsky.social Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 2d
📚 Now reading 📚

Cavendish, Margaret (1666). Observations upon Experimental Philosophy.

(Edited by Eileen O'Neill, in 2012: www.cambridge.org/core/books/m...).

Will be compiling some quotes and thoughts over time. Pin📍or bookmark this thread if you want to follow along.

1/🧵
Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
Cambridge Core - Philosophy Texts - Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
www.cambridge.org
February 18, 2026 at 6:41 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
The process is "great man theorising" and they are doing it with how they started ragging on @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social as if their book isn't radical and groundbreaking, basically helping set the stage for anybody to fight hype nonsense.

5/n

bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Dec 30
"Great man theorising requires the (re)orientation of the theory to direct all credit to one person (or a biased subset of a select few) reminiscent of monarchy—far from the pluralistic or meritocratic facade science often hides behind"

doi.org/10.1007/s421...
February 18, 2026 at 6:18 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
For those who don't know the term cryptogyny...

Let's just chill on doing it for the billionth time.

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

4/n
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Nov 15
reminder of cryptogyny, the hiding of women's contributions to science, technology, engineering, and medicine:
"although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness."

www.jstor.org/stable/jj.55...
Although the twentieth century finds male practitioners firmly in control of formal Western medicine, women doctors and healers still have important inventions and innovations to their credit. For example, although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness. Women had discovered the mold’s usefulness centuries or perhaps millennia earlier (Halsbury 1971, p. 19; Raper 1952, p. 1), and one nineteenth-century Wisconsin woman, Elizabeth Stone, an early antibi otic therapist, specialized in treating lumberjacks’ wounds with poultices of moldy bread in warm milk or water: she never lost an injury patient (Stellman 1977, p. 87). In the twentieth-century development of the drug, it was a woman bacteriologist, Dr. Elizabeth McCoy of the University of Wisconsin, who created the ultraviolet-mutant strain of Penicillium used for all further production, since it yielded nine hundred times as much penicillin as Fleming’s strain (Bickel 1972, p. 185; O’Neill 1979, p. 219).4 And as Howard Florey, leader of the British penicillin team, was quick to point out, it was Dr. Ethel Florey’s precise clinical trials that transformed penicillin from a crude some time miracle worker into a reliable drug. It was also a woman, Nobel laureate and X-ray crystallographer Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who finally deter mined the precise structure of the elusive penicillin molecule (Bickel 1972, p. 216; Opfell 1978, pp. 211, 219). Women were also involved in developing the sulfa drugs that preceded penicillin. For instance, it was a married pair of chemists, Prof. and Mme. Tréfouėl, and their colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who split red azo dye to create sulfanilamide (Bickel 1972, p. 50). At least two women have invented new antibiotics for which they receive sole credit. Dr. Odette Shotwell of Denver, Colorado, came up with two new antibiotics—duramycin and azacolutin—during her fi…
February 18, 2026 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
If you're reading this and thinking, "but Olivia, I love to *insert euphemism for my hobby of* stealing from women" then yeah,you're gonna have to block me, chief.

If you're reading and agreeing, get serious. There's a reason it's mostly women academics fighting AI.

3/n

bsky.app/profile/timn...
timnitgebru.bsky.social Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 20h
I helped build the FAccT academic conference, and white men like Seth have to come along and make sure that the people we tried to get away from, the TESCREAL eugenicist ghouls, have every academic space in addition to the billions they're drowning in.
I'm not sure if it's worth adding this, but in case anyone's wondering, @AmandaAskell is a brilliant philosopher doing by far the most important philosophical research anyone in the world is doing right now (in terms of both impact and philosophical interest). I've had the privilege of seeing her at many stages along this journey, from a chance meeting in the hallways of Coombs (the building where ANU Philosophy used to be) back in about maybe 2015, to a visit with her at OpenAI's offices on the day, more or less, that she and others decided to leave OpenAI to form Anthropic, to a number of workshops and other things since, where she showed an incredible generosity of spirit to the folks both in philosophy and in the FAccT community who most needed to learn from her work.
February 18, 2026 at 6:14 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
are a typical dynamic. This time let's not. Maybe sexism and racism on the Left aren't radical, eh?

If you cannot behave, and build and on the shoulders of giants maybe you're the problem?

2/n
bsky.app/profile/alex...
alexhanna.bsky.social Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 15h
New book review suggests that we 1) don't have a critique of capitalism (after a chapter which spends most of the time discussing Luddite labor struggles, digital Taylorism, and automation) and 2) argues that we believe there is some fundamental ordering of the world in which "ground truth" exists.
February 18, 2026 at 6:14 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
emp1.bsky.social
✊🏼

and I am not kidding
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 6h
The gendered and racialised dynamics of people (of course it's mostly men) telling women like @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social in the last couple of days, that their work and efforts against AI are not radical enough or other cryptogyny (gendered theft) 1/n
February 18, 2026 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
The gendered and racialised dynamics of people (of course it's mostly men) telling women like @emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @timnitgebru.bsky.social in the last couple of days, that their work and efforts against AI are not radical enough or other cryptogyny (gendered theft) 1/n
February 18, 2026 at 6:14 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
more here too: bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Jun 11
To help us do this, we develop a lens to help us trace the harm towards women within/by AI by examining literature, film, and other media (see the figure above), and then apply the lens (also above) to current types of technologies like voice assistants to demonstrate its use.
February 17, 2026 at 7:20 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
OK! I collected much of what I @spookyachu.bsky.social @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (and other collaborators not on here) have said on the Turing test (from critical, gendered, etc. angles) as it keeps being relevant: olivia.science/turing — hope it's useful for others too. Happy Sunday! 🤖💭
February 15, 2026 at 1:19 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
clarissadelune.bsky.social
I blocked the original poster and can’t view the printed skeet but I wonder what possible damage is there that is caused by thinking “slop machines that are run on theft and gurgle surreal amounts of water and energy and don’t even glean actual profits and hallucinate often are overrated”
February 17, 2026 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
hcayless.bsky.social
I’m coming to the conclusion that for most of us, the response to AI should be principled refusal. I know I’m not the first to say so, but I’m slow and have to think hard about these things.
February 17, 2026 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
nicholdav.bsky.social
Looks like a good critical write-up of Big Open Science, from @batoolmm.bsky.social who I would imagine has plenty of first-hand experience.

Adding to the To Read list
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 15h
"This article looks briefly at exclusive systems of knowledge production. I describe how the Open Science movement that was founded to reform science often recycles the same extractive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism described by dependency theory."
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol27-2-poli...
Rethinking Open Science • SftP Magazine
The Open Science movement promises inclusivity and better science but ignores the economic and political realities that shape research.
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
February 17, 2026 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
📚Here is a review of Mary Henle’s book by Wertheimer: www.jstor.org/stable/1422799

“ (…) many thousands should read it. It is refreshing, disturbing, entertaining, challenging, and inspiring. It is a model of historical, intellectual, and critical analysis at its very best” (1988, p. 142)

3/🧵
Page 1 of Review of “1879 and All That: Essays in the Theory and History of Psychology” by M Wertheimer, in American Journal of Psychology, The 101(1):135 University of Illinois Press 1988
February 14, 2026 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
I found one of the chapters of Mary Henle’s book online, previously published as article, this one:

Henle, M. (1978). One man against the Nazis: Wolfgang Köhler. American Psychologist, 33(10), 939.

Let me see if I can find some of the other chapters too.

pure.mpg.de/rest/items/i...

6/🧵
Top part of page 1 of: Henle, M. (1978). One man against the Nazis: Wolfgang Köhler. American Psychologist, 33(10), 939.
February 14, 2026 at 6:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Not so "reputable" anymore when an editor does this 🫨
carorowland.bsky.social Caroline Rowland @carorowland.bsky.social · 3d
Pretty certain we just received our first AI generated action editor letter. From a reputable developmental journal as well. Reject decision, obviously.
A small grey cat looking angry
February 17, 2026 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
That quote from Mary Henle (1989) reminded me of @olivia.science et al.’s points about “terminological disarray” and how this creates conceptual unclarity and related problems in thinking about AI. olivia.science/ai

5/🧵
Critical AI
On this page are some resources for Critical AI Literacy (CAIL) from my perspective.
olivia.science
February 14, 2026 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
📚I discovered reference to the book, btw, in an obituary for Mary Henle by Clare Porac: www.jstor.org/stable/27784...

This quote caught my eye:

“(…) conceptual muddles result from careless terminology or, equally, careless terminology reflects conceptual muddles" (Henle, 1986, p. vii).

4/🧵
MARY HENLE (1913-2007) on JSTOR
Clare Porac, MARY HENLE (1913-2007), The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 122, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 111-113
www.jstor.org
February 14, 2026 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
Ah thank you to @nicholdav.bsky.social for finding the author @batoolmm.bsky.social on here!

bsky.app/profile/open...
openresshef.bsky.social Open Research, University of Sheffield @openresshef.bsky.social · 1d
New from @batoolmm.bsky.social, 'Metascience for whom?': "The system is not broken... It is designed to produce certain kinds of knowledge, funded in certain ways, published in certain journals, using certain vocabularies... That is the trap that metascience should avoid."
markrubin.bsky.social Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social · 2d
“We should be careful not to marginalise questions of power, because in wearing that aura of clean objectivity, metascience risks becoming strangely depoliticised.”

By @batoolmm.bsky.social
February 17, 2026 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
"This article looks briefly at exclusive systems of knowledge production. I describe how the Open Science movement that was founded to reform science often recycles the same extractive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism described by dependency theory."
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol27-2-poli...
Rethinking Open Science • SftP Magazine
The Open Science movement promises inclusivity and better science but ignores the economic and political realities that shape research.
magazine.scienceforthepeople.org
February 17, 2026 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
cloudquistador.bsky.social
@olivia.science They're going to compel me to do yet another paragraph by paragraph analysis. "Brilliant"! the man said.
rutgerbregman.com Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman.com · 1d
Absolutely brilliant piece about the Left's TOTAL blindness on AI. Their dismissal of AI risks mirrors how climate deniers treat CO2.

Will probably get a lot of nastiness for this on Bluesky, but I guess that's part of the same problem.

www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...
The left is missing out on AI
As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right
www.transformernews.ai
February 17, 2026 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
also... bsky.app/profile/oliv...
February 17, 2026 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
If you find our educational materials of use, we’d love to know.

And don’t forget to cite us 🙏

Blokpoel, Mark & van Rooij, Iris (2021-2025). Theoretical modeling for cognitive science and psychology. computationalcognitivescience.github.io/lovelace/.
THEORETICAL MODELING
for cognitive science and psychology
computationalcognitivescience.github.io
December 27, 2025 at 9:02 PM