Patrick S. Forscher
@psforscher.bsky.social
Director of the CREME developmental meta-research team at Busara, a non-profit that does behavioral science in service of poverty alleviation. https://patrickforscher.com/
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Job opportunity — Junior Professorship in Psychological Metascience @zpid.bsky.social leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/job/10kku5n7 h/t @bethclarke.bsky.social
November 26, 2025 at 3:10 AM
Job opportunity — Junior Professorship in Psychological Metascience @zpid.bsky.social leibniz-psychology.onlyfy.jobs/job/10kku5n7 h/t @bethclarke.bsky.social
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Congratulations to the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative -- a remarkable effort by a remarkable team. This is a wonderful acknowledgement of an incredible contribution to assessing and improving research quality.
🏆 Institutional: The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is a nationwide effort to evaluate research results in laboratory biology & the largest coordinated replication effort in the field worldwide, showcasing the potential of country-level research improvements. @redebrrepro.bsky.social (3/5)
November 24, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Congratulations to the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative -- a remarkable effort by a remarkable team. This is a wonderful acknowledgement of an incredible contribution to assessing and improving research quality.
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
In any event, this is the point of the preprint below. The asymmetry here makes it all too easy to distract, delay and bias science without even needing to corrupt a single scientist.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
The Risks of Industry Influence in Tech Research
Emerging information technologies like social media, search engines, and AI can have a broad impact on public health, political institutions, social dynamics, and the natural world. It is critical to ...
arxiv.org
November 19, 2025 at 2:02 PM
In any event, this is the point of the preprint below. The asymmetry here makes it all too easy to distract, delay and bias science without even needing to corrupt a single scientist.
arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
I'm surprised I only came across it now, but this review on improving communication in data visualization is excellent.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works - Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Jessica Hullman, 2021
Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, an...
journals.sagepub.com
November 19, 2025 at 11:48 AM
I'm surprised I only came across it now, but this review on improving communication in data visualization is excellent.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
“We analyzed 47000 conversations that people had with ChatGPT. We’re pretty sure we don’t have consent for a lot of them. So we are reproducing screenshots here.”
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
November 15, 2025 at 7:40 PM
“We analyzed 47000 conversations that people had with ChatGPT. We’re pretty sure we don’t have consent for a lot of them. So we are reproducing screenshots here.”
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea:
"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"
Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"
Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 13, 2025 at 2:59 PM
A quick (1000 words) read to enjoy with your morning coffee or afternoon tea:
"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"
Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
"Psychology wants to stay WEIRD, not go WILD"
Why hasn't psychology diversified it samples, methods, theories, etc.? Because it doesn't want to. osf.io/preprints/ps...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
It still comes down to the matter of wanting to do it. We will do hard work when it aligns with our values and priorities, and then throw up our hands and say "too hard!" when it doesn't. This, from my "Slow Progress towards Diversification in Psychological Research" paper osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 13, 2025 at 5:33 PM
It still comes down to the matter of wanting to do it. We will do hard work when it aligns with our values and priorities, and then throw up our hands and say "too hard!" when it doesn't. This, from my "Slow Progress towards Diversification in Psychological Research" paper osf.io/preprints/ps...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
For folks (and journalists) who want to search the Oversight Committee email texts, I made a database for searching the 20k text files:
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
Epstein Document Search
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
November 13, 2025 at 1:12 AM
For folks (and journalists) who want to search the Oversight Committee email texts, I made a database for searching the 20k text files:
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
We're so excited to announce that our first official CONNECT preprint is now available:
"A network of networks: The next frontier for Big Team Science"
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Please read, share, and give us feedback!
✉️ connect-contact[at]manybabies[dot]org
"A network of networks: The next frontier for Big Team Science"
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Please read, share, and give us feedback!
✉️ connect-contact[at]manybabies[dot]org
OSF
doi.org
November 11, 2025 at 7:09 PM
We're so excited to announce that our first official CONNECT preprint is now available:
"A network of networks: The next frontier for Big Team Science"
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Please read, share, and give us feedback!
✉️ connect-contact[at]manybabies[dot]org
"A network of networks: The next frontier for Big Team Science"
🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Please read, share, and give us feedback!
✉️ connect-contact[at]manybabies[dot]org
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Richard Lynn was criticised for using a sample of children with intellectual impairment to calculate the "national IQ" of Equatorial Guinea in 2002. In 2019, he calculated the IQs of Native Americans from children referred for psychoeducational evaluations, including those with learning difficulties
November 3, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Richard Lynn was criticised for using a sample of children with intellectual impairment to calculate the "national IQ" of Equatorial Guinea in 2002. In 2019, he calculated the IQs of Native Americans from children referred for psychoeducational evaluations, including those with learning difficulties
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.
This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.
Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.
Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org
November 1, 2025 at 5:28 PM
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.
This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.
Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.
Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said.
Cyclist falls down 130-foot ravine in France, survives 3 days by drinking wine he had in shopping bag
A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with a rescue doctor calling his survival "a miracle."
cbsn.ws
October 31, 2025 at 12:40 PM
A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said.
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
New paper finds that selective reporting remains the most replicable finding in science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... I especially like their new exploratory metric 'p-values per participant'. Some papers had 11 p-values per participant! 🤯
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
October 31, 2025 at 7:39 AM
New paper finds that selective reporting remains the most replicable finding in science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... I especially like their new exploratory metric 'p-values per participant'. Some papers had 11 p-values per participant! 🤯
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
"Introducing Doublespeed, an [Andreessen Horowitz backed] startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients.
Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm."
Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm."
AI "Phone Farm" Startup Gets Funding from Marc Andreessen to Flood Social Media With Spam
Andreessen Horowitz has injected $1 million into Doublespeed, a startup meant to flood social media with gobs of for-profit spam.
futurism.com
October 28, 2025 at 1:37 PM
"Introducing Doublespeed, an [Andreessen Horowitz backed] startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients.
Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm."
Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm."
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
We built the openESM database:
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python
Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python
Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
October 22, 2025 at 7:34 PM
We built the openESM database:
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python
Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
▶️60 openly available experience sampling datasets (16K+ participants, 740K+ obs.) in one place
▶️Harmonized (meta-)data, fully open-source software
▶️Filter & search all data, simply download via R/Python
Find out more:
🌐 openesmdata.org
📝 doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
We don't know if these two DAGs are up to divine mediation problems like identifying the Father's Supernatural Direct Effect or Nicene Indirect Effect, but the Church is in the business of cross-world assumptions, so we're sure it will work out.
10/10 for whichever one is theologically correct 🤞
10/10 for whichever one is theologically correct 🤞
I have found an EXCELLENT meme for the church history lecture on Wednesday (which includes the Great Schism)
October 21, 2025 at 12:49 PM
We don't know if these two DAGs are up to divine mediation problems like identifying the Father's Supernatural Direct Effect or Nicene Indirect Effect, but the Church is in the business of cross-world assumptions, so we're sure it will work out.
10/10 for whichever one is theologically correct 🤞
10/10 for whichever one is theologically correct 🤞
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta.
Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵
www.reuters.com/business/ins...
Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵
www.reuters.com/business/ins...
Exclusive: Instagram shows more ‘eating disorder adjacent’ content to vulnerable teens, internal Meta research shows
Meta researchers found that teens who report that Instagram regularly made them feel bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters.
www.reuters.com
October 20, 2025 at 1:23 PM
This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta.
Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵
www.reuters.com/business/ins...
Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵
www.reuters.com/business/ins...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Hello Bluesky!
We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.
Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?
1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"
We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.
Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?
1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"
October 17, 2025 at 11:45 AM
Hello Bluesky!
We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.
Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?
1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"
We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.
Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?
1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
www.technologyreview.com
October 16, 2025 at 3:14 AM
“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
New research finds that Twitter’s efforts to remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation were largely ineffective and sometimes backfired. Skeptical communities grew more active and viral, and content quality declined over time. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Explaining Twitter’s inability to effectively moderate content during the COVID-19 pandemic - Scientific Reports
Social media platforms routinely face pressure to restrict harmful content while protecting free speech; however, prior theory suggests that platform design might undermine the efficacy of content mod...
link.springer.com
October 16, 2025 at 12:32 PM
New research finds that Twitter’s efforts to remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation were largely ineffective and sometimes backfired. Skeptical communities grew more active and viral, and content quality declined over time. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Excellent 🧵 about LLM synthetic data (silicon samples etc) and why they don't solve any particular problem in human research.
FWIW, in addition to results and considerations like these, I've argued elsewhere that the entire question is ill-formed: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...
FWIW, in addition to results and considerations like these, I've argued elsewhere that the entire question is ill-formed: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...
October 1, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Excellent 🧵 about LLM synthetic data (silicon samples etc) and why they don't solve any particular problem in human research.
FWIW, in addition to results and considerations like these, I've argued elsewhere that the entire question is ill-formed: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...
FWIW, in addition to results and considerations like these, I've argued elsewhere that the entire question is ill-formed: quantuxblog.com/synthetic-su...
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
Psychologists running empirical studies to rediscover engineering design choices is such a strange genre of papers. By all means, run studies on LLM judgments -- but what else than lexical co-occurence and statistical priors would they be based on??
Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
October 17, 2025 at 10:59 AM
Psychologists running empirical studies to rediscover engineering design choices is such a strange genre of papers. By all means, run studies on LLM judgments -- but what else than lexical co-occurence and statistical priors would they be based on??
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions!
Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.
Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.
October 10, 2025 at 6:12 AM
ReplicationResearch.org is now open for submissions!
Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.
Submit replications and reproductions from many different fields, as well as conceptual contributions. With diamond OA, open and citable peer review reports, and reproducibility checks, we push the boundaries of open and fair publishing.
Reposted by Patrick S. Forscher
