Cameron Brick

@cameronbrick.bsky.social

5K followers 1.7K following 330 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

Videos

Environmental science 21%

Psychology 20%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 1d

Took me a long time too. Compelling

Reposted by Cameron Brick, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 1d

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 · 1d

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 · 3d

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 · 8d

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 · 11d

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 · 11d

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...

Winne - 'Crime Passionel ' ft. Dick Klees #5 Winne Zonder Strijd

YouTube video by TopNotch

www.youtube.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

youtu.be/FXsCBvSjdYg?... staying french, this guy has a masters in sociology I think

MC Solaar - Onzième commandement (Audio Officiel)

YouTube video by MCSolaarVEVO

youtu.be

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

Oh wow, that's a groove. Jovanotti meets Will Smith, on a west coast gangsta loop? Electro!

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

Next: iraq is the new black, 2009 youtu.be/TtoHCUMpNMY?...

Narcy - PHATWA

YouTube video by NARCY / YASSIN / THE NARCISSIST

youtu.be

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

Oh absolutely. "That's my favorite band!" said my wife tonight. What? I have never heard her play them 🤔

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

Really, they should just avoid them most of the time. Make the text slightly longer and more accessible.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 12d

Nice, I'm glad! Let's trade some more. What do you think about Samy Deluxe, too cornball?

Reposted by Cameron Brick

Robert Rohde @rarohde.bsky.social · 12d

The cost of grid-scale solar plus batteries has become so cheap that spreading solar power out over 24 hours is now cost-competive with building new natural gas plants in many cases.

ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

Graph showing solar spread over 24-hours and the associated cost.

Reposted by Cameron Brick

Max van Geuns @maxvangeuns.bsky.social · 12d

De echte Nederlandse winter kwijnt weg en wordt uitgerekt tot een drie maanden durende tunnel van zouteloos lauwgrijs.

Het is 14 graden in december: een eeuw geleden totaal ondenkbaar.

“Sneeuw in december is een romantische gedachte die we samen met de fossiele brandstoffen hebben opgestookt.”

Column | Op zoek naar licht in een tunnel van zouteloos lauwgrijs

De winter houdt Nederland in een drievoudige houdgreep. Hoe kun je daaraan een positieve draai geven, als weerman?

www.nrc.nl

Reposted by Cameron Brick

Erik Nordman @eriknordman.bsky.social · 13d

My book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, and all @islandpress.bsky.social e-books, is on sale for $6.99 through 12/19.
Ostrom's groundbreaking ideas showed that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable. Communities can sustain their shared resources through collective action. 1/2

The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom

islandpress.org

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 13d

Too large a category! But if you like Los Chikoz, have you heard of this Chilean group? For me this is classic hip-hop www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr6G... 'Lo que es estar dividida, no saber cual es su tierra'... Tijoux had a pretty good solo career, saw her perform once in California

Makiza - La Rosa de los Vientos

YouTube video by Seo2

www.youtube.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 14d

Optimal Delivery of Social Norms Feedback to Reduce
Household Water Consumption

1st author: @kashramli.bsky.social

Open access: gep.psychopen.eu/index.php/ge... 3/3

gep.psychopen.eu

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 14d

Heterogeneity shows where the behavior was plastic vs constrained.

In sum: situational affordances were sufficient; motivation/personality/values not needed; small effects, but real and scalable.

Suggested for: applied behavioral scientists, policy designers, skeptics of self-report. 2/3

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 14d

New paper: real water-use behavior change using multi-year, metered data (19k homes). Not attitudes, identity, efficacy, or persuasion. We manipulated delivery mode + frequency of home use reports → ~2% reduction (~7 L/day here). 1/3

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

Yes exactly, very much agree. We've been narrowly using "identification with the social group 'environmentalist'", mostly for concreteness rather than preferring some other formulation, but even that relies on what they think that word means and it doesn't translate well into Germanic languages.

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

This later passage also reminds of Bem's classic 'how to write a good article' text in which he describes a lot of ways to increase error rates

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

This defense of verbal theories sounds much weaker in 2025 than it did in 2004

Susan Fiske pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15223512/

I should read these old works more often—it would help me argue from more basic principles why current practices are so ineffective

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

I agree, it doesn't even pass the sniff test, and we seem to have to do this with evidence for every area (prosocial behavior, etc.). We collected a few more here:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34283676/

Illusory Essences: A Bias Holding Back Theorizing in Psychological Science - PubMed

The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence, attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essen …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

"The United States has not always used its military effectively or for just causes." God, that sentence is like a truss holding up a giant dam. Very difficult for me to wish for a stronger US military, but maybe, just maybe, the alternative is even more dangerous.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Opinion | Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Must Reinvent Itself (Gift Article)

Investing in the old ways of war leaves America at risk.

www.nytimes.com

Cameron Brick @cameronbrick.bsky.social · 17d

I guess they believe it in part because they want to believe the peer review is a process that actually works and that editors are moral and engaged. My experience of editors lately is very passive. Frustratingly so