Iris van Rooij 💭
LightNews LightNews
banner
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 🏳️‍🌈
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
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 💭
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Ho-lee Shit. This is phenomenally good news. Department of Education rolls back— for now— its attempts to destroy Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility initiatives. Keep an eye on them, of course, and watch for the hidden knife, always, but for now: Fantastic news.
aclu.org ACLU @aclu.org · 7h
BREAKING: The Department of Education has ended its directive that attempted to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools nationwide.

This is a victory for academic freedom and education equity.
February 18, 2026 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
hypervisible.blacksky.app
If this is the expensive version, imagine what’s considered “good enough” for everyone else.
February 17, 2026 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/18/s... cc @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social
Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming
Marcela Suarez, Olivia Guest and I co-organise a Summer School Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming, June 22-26, 2026, at Radboud University, in The Netherlands. The Summer School is…
irisvanrooijcogsci.com
February 18, 2026 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
anthonymoser.com
seize the means of star production
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 18h
I'm sure Anthony knows but Kirby is performing dialectics for those who think Marxists have nothing to contribute to AI discourse 😌
anthonymoser.com Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 22h
Frame: the left is hurting itself by not engaging with the god machines

Negation: but this technology doesn't do the things you claim

kirby: the people writing these stories get funding to support narratives of power and inevitability, and that's what we should be scrutinizing
February 18, 2026 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
I'm sure Anthony knows but Kirby is performing dialectics for those who think Marxists have nothing to contribute to AI discourse 😌
anthonymoser.com Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 22h
Frame: the left is hurting itself by not engaging with the god machines

Negation: but this technology doesn't do the things you claim

kirby: the people writing these stories get funding to support narratives of power and inevitability, and that's what we should be scrutinizing
timnitgebru.bsky.social Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.bsky.social · 23h
Instead of "the left isn't paying enough attention to these machine gods" they're claiming to build, perhaps we should write an article about how effective altruists brand themselves "left", ask who is writing these articles, and trace their cults and sources of funding.
February 18, 2026 at 6:34 AM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
tjheffernan.bsky.social
She corresponded with Lovelace about math
February 18, 2026 at 9:50 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Mary Somerville: Scotland's First Scientist www.youtube.com/watch?v=utvO...
February 18, 2026 at 9:31 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
I hope that the first to sign up for your course are those who had predicted skyrocketing productivity gains and massive replacements of workers with robots. Better late than never.
@olivia.science
fortune.com/2026/02/17/a...
February 18, 2026 at 8:19 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
Yuuuup... I'm so tired of explaining that maybe that's not actually good work if it's minimally giving the impression of a conflict of interest and maximally just an advertisement

bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10h
I compiled a sort of follow up here olivia.science/before/ on the situation with ppl thinking we're in some special moment:

"We have certainly been here before. Many many times in the past, companies — just like artificial intelligence (AI) companies now — have lied to us to sell us products."

1/
February 18, 2026 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
abeba.bsky.social
i don't know how to put this politely but stating that your work is approved/supported by companies like open ai, google and anthropic doesn't give you the credibility you think it does.

for me, this is a clear sign that i am not interested in engaging or working with you
February 18, 2026 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
morungos.bsky.social
We’ve always used metaphors from tech to explore how people think.

The delicious one was the computer, because we ended up with folks using an abstracted version of what (mostly women) mathematicians did as a model of human behaviour. It’s all circular.

LLMs as the metaphor is maybe the worst yet.
February 18, 2026 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
morungos.bsky.social
This, by the way, is how text emerges with bullet points, dashes, bigger spaces between sentences, and using layout.

This is not rocket science, it is solid principles from the psychology of perception.
February 18, 2026 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
vortexegg.com
Perfect example of the science that a lot of reasoning about LLMs is “computational pseudoscience” in relation to. It’s pseudoscience because in part it ignores and rejects actual science.
morungos.bsky.social Stuart Watt @morungos.bsky.social · 6h
Specifically on this point of next-token prediction, as someone who’s studied this with eye-tracking, people are *not* next-token readers. They skim text. Eyes saccade. Even 1970s AI folks knew this, and old reading systems like DeJong’s FRUMP explored much more plausible mechanisms of reading.
abeba.bsky.social Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 8h
this argument asks the reader to reframe human intelligence/cognition in machinic terms flipping the default/baseline from which intelligence is measured/understood to machines. basically reducing human cognition to mere neural connection, making erroneous comparisons & inflating llm capabilities
6/
February 18, 2026 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
morungos.bsky.social
Specifically on this point of next-token prediction, as someone who’s studied this with eye-tracking, people are *not* next-token readers. They skim text. Eyes saccade. Even 1970s AI folks knew this, and old reading systems like DeJong’s FRUMP explored much more plausible mechanisms of reading.
abeba.bsky.social Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 8h
this argument asks the reader to reframe human intelligence/cognition in machinic terms flipping the default/baseline from which intelligence is measured/understood to machines. basically reducing human cognition to mere neural connection, making erroneous comparisons & inflating llm capabilities
6/
February 18, 2026 at 7:07 PM
irisvanrooij.bsky.social
Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/18/s... cc @olivia.science @marentierra.bsky.social
Summer School: Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming
Marcela Suarez, Olivia Guest and I co-organise a Summer School Critical AI Literacies for Resisting and Reclaiming, June 22-26, 2026, at Radboud University, in The Netherlands. The Summer School is…
irisvanrooijcogsci.com
February 18, 2026 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
For those who know what I think there is probably nothing new, but it might be useful to link to in discussions to help others. I just needed to collect these points as for me they keep coming up so much that I think it's easier to have them on my website. For example:

bsky.app/profile/oliv...

2/
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Dec 30
Something to consider:

1. rarehistoricalphotos.com/doctors-smok...

2. Academic Collaborations and Public Health: Lessons from Dutch Universities' Tobacco Industry Partnerships for Fossil Fuel Ties doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

1/n 🧵
February 18, 2026 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
olivia.science
I compiled a sort of follow up here olivia.science/before/ on the situation with ppl thinking we're in some special moment:

"We have certainly been here before. Many many times in the past, companies — just like artificial intelligence (AI) companies now — have lied to us to sell us products."

1/
February 18, 2026 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Iris van Rooij 💭
adolfont.github.io
My daughter was the first to draw my attention to the problems of AI.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 19h
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 1:25 PM
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 · 3d
📚 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 · 1d
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