Cameron Brick

@cameronbrick.bsky.social

5K followers 1.7K following 350 posts

Psychology, behavior & environment, especially climate change. Uni of Amsterdam; Assoc. Editor 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘯𝘷. 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 🔬 c.brick@uva.nl www.cameronbrick.com -- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=MeoqEYgAAAAJ&hl=en

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Environmental science 21%

Psychology 20%

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Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 1h

I don't teach history! Thanks for the helpful links, I will read them. My Dutch is also mediocre/ok.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, great example, thank you. I teach this history of protest in Amsterdam. It is perhaps a better case than Paris to reveal the feedback loop between individual actions, policy and infrastructure change, and back to individual actions.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 1d

That's revealing. I didn't realize the rates were so modest to begin with. No wonder I always read about the change in relative rather than absolute rates!

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 2d

Useful history. I think 10 years could be seen as fast for this level of transformation. I'm not surprised that policy and luck help; more, where did the political will come from?

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 2d

That's illuminating, thank you.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 2d

Paris invested heavily in bike infrastructure and saw a massive increase in ridership. Does anyone know about research on where the willingness and investment came from, e.g., attitudes, priorities, city-level meetings, national conversations? How do such changes in policy and infrastructure emerge?

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 8d

Yeah. It's not just bad coverage in education. The more fundamental problems I think are the lack of error correction either during peer review or after publication; there being no consequences for a paper getting it wrong.

Reposted by Scott L. Greer, Calvin K. Lai, Cameron Brick , and 12 more Scott L. Greer, Calvin K. Lai, Cameron Brick, Ian Hussey, Max Nathan, Lauren Hersch Nicholas, Nazita Lajevardi, Margot C. Finn, Sofia Stathi, Patrick Präg, Marko Lindroos, Adele Perry, Simon Wiederhold, Claudia Landwehr, Richard Moorhead

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 11d

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Reposted by Jonathan A. Patz, Cameron Brick

Ed Maibach @maibached.bsky.social · 23d

If ever there was a moment to shame climate wrongdoers, that moment is now. To that end, I offer a recently published article (by @sharonyadin.bsky.social & me) on how ordinary folks like you & me--plus civil society & governments--can harness the power of shame.

@ioppublishing.bsky.social

Shaming climate wrongdoers

Shaming climate wrongdoers, Yadin, Sharon, Maibach, Edward

doi.org

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 25d

EN
Do your laundry for science from your own home! Sign up here for our Citizen Science project and collect the microplastics from your clothes.

NL
Doe thuis jou was voor de wetenschap! Meld je hier aan voor ons Citizen Science project en verzamel de microplastics van jouw kleding.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 25d

theconversation.com/we-got-lazy-...

Lots of debate in NL right now about our wealth tax and the changing rules. There's uncertainty and I think that also causes distaste. If it was just 'the way we do it' it would be easier to be proud of what values and benefits it supports, maybe?

‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country

For some Swedes, the question isn’t simply whether a wealth tax works, but what kind of society has been lost with its abolition.

theconversation.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 29d

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Good result. Took too long. Interesting article.

Greece: Aid workers cleared of human trafficking charges

The former volunteers, who were facing lengthy jail terms, worked for an NGO that rescued asylum-seekers.

www.bbc.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Jan 5

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/m...

We could just wring our hands and decry autonomous lethal drones, but before judgment it's worth pausing just to recognize how much has changed in the past few years and where it leaves us, Ukraine, and the future of war.

In Ukraine, a New Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born

www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Rebecca Sear, Cameron Brick

Jeannette Eggers @jeannetteeggers.bsky.social · Jan 3

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Science in Resistance: The scientist rebellion for climate justice by Fernando Racimo. Maybe not very surprising, after all, it was reading a paper by Fernando that made me join Scientist Rebellion three years ago.

🧵

Picture showing the cover of the book this post is about.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Yawning at the apocalypse | BPS

Cameron Brick and Sander van der Linden on how psychologists can help solve the largest social dilemma in history.

www.bps.org.uk

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

Stimulating. I have adapted from Buddhism as well, more for academic psychology than for politics. Agreed that compassion is not conditional on the target in moral terms. Instrumentally, I don't see rapid societal change through without winners and losers, heroes and villains, as we wrote about.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

Well, I like your writing and argument.

I hear a lot on the left that we need as wide a tent as possible, but in practice championing seems to expose political vulnerability.

Maybe part of this is short vs long term success. Certainly disenfranchisement is unstable and unjust.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

Certainly capital is an enemy, but I'm not even convinced that democracy is the solution. The country doing the most for the energy transition is not very democratic

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

There is no laissez-faire capitalism, so the only questions are where we want to lean on the wheel and how much

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

www.dutchnews.nl/2025/12/traf...

Couldn't have written that more clearly myself. Increase roads, increase demand for roads. How about investing more in solutions with fewer costs on society: public health, finances, environmental quality?

Traffic congestion increased this year, despite new roads - DutchNews.nl

The total length and duration of traffic jams in the Netherlands increased this year, despite the opening of several new roads in Zuid Holland, figures from the ANWB show. The ANWB said traffic conges...

www.dutchnews.nl

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 29

Interesting summary, thanks. We can reject any theory of cognition where the person is an island.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 28

On willpower being overrated

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/o...

Opinion | Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.

www.nytimes.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 25

Took me a long time too. Compelling

Reposted by Efrén O. Pérez, Cameron Brick, Johannes Breuer , and 1 more Efrén O. Pérez, Cameron Brick, Johannes Breuer, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · Dec 25

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth.

www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

Birth Lottery

If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?

www.givingwhatwecan.org

Reposted by Diane Coyle, Anna O. Law, Andrew Scott , and 6 more Diane Coyle, Anna O. Law, Andrew Scott, Tim Bale, Rosemary A. Joyce, Cameron Brick, Duncan Bell, Andrew Jacobs, Renaud Morieux

Dave Andress @davidandress.bsky.social · Dec 25

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Cardiff couple invited man in for Christmas, he stayed for 45 years

An arrangement Rob and Dianne Parsons thought would last a few days ended up changing their lives.

www.bbc.co.uk

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 23

My inbox is a de-facto to-do list. When using Outlook, an email feature I really miss, was it in gmail in the past?, was to snooze a message into the future UNLESS I receive a response in the meantime. That way, items don't disappear off the list, and I don't get extra messages.

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Cameron Brick, Ian Hussey , and 3 more Alexander Wuttke, Cameron Brick, Ian Hussey, Eric Hehman, Jana Lasser, Johannes Breuer

Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · Dec 18

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate.

Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains.

Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 15

A thousand percent. Dying young helped. Gordon Lightfoot didn't age too poorly. One political song was banned in 30 US states. Not too shabby

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · Dec 15

was it? Wow, crazy. I doubted later that I had chosen the right track. 'Baby Love' is also groovy.

Next entry: Dutch and not even the Osdorp Posse? www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gWc...