Carolyn Dicey Jennings
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cdj.bsky.social
Carolyn Dicey Jennings
@cdj.bsky.social
2.6K followers 790 following 560 posts
I study how we direct our own minds through attention and its impact on things like perception, action, & consciousness, now extending to collective attention and digital technologies. PI at philosophydata.org, Editor-in-Chief at philosophymindscience.org
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Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
kjhealy.co
Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.
February 5, 2026 at 1:07 PM
cdj.bsky.social
Another chilling story. Alberto Castañeda Mondragón is said to have entered the country legally with no criminal history, a job and family. After being racially profiled by ICE he suffers injuries that give him brain damage, memory loss, an inability to work, and large medical bills. Disgusting.
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 10d
DHS doesn’t even bother trying to lie well. The man whose skull was shattered told the hospital he’d been struck by ICE officers, an ICE officer told hospital staff the guy “got his sh*t rocked,” then when it became clear how badly he was injured, they claimed he deliberately ran into a wall.
January 31, 2026 at 5:20 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
kjhealy.co
I imagine you could get quite huffy about it. “How dare you suggest I take the time to find out anything about any filthy-rich person who invites me to his house and might give me money; what do you think I am, some sort of researcher? Good day to you sir!”
January 31, 2026 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
markriedl.bsky.social
“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.”

Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for
www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
www.anthropic.com
January 31, 2026 at 3:50 AM
cdj.bsky.social
Not a fashionista, but I appreciate cool ideas in the arts, and this is a really cool show www.voguehk.com/en/article/r...
A screenshot from the Vogue article about Gaurav Gupta’s 2026 show, with two dresses worn by separate models in different colors delicately interlaced, such that they seem lightly bound to walk together, a fragile connection that could be easily disrupted
January 28, 2026 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
marisakabas.bsky.social
ICE ended up returning the man, Saly, after realizing he’s a fucking US citizen with no criminal record, per his sister-in-law. These fucking animals.
January 19, 2026 at 5:41 AM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
wanjawiese.bsky.social
Wanna know how to infer the presence or absence of consciousness in artificial systems? Check out my new preprint: philarchive.org/rec/WIEITP #PhilMind #PhilConsc #Consciousness
Wanja Wiese, Inferring the presence (or absence) of consciousness in artificial systems - PhilArchive
How should we assess which artificial systems could be conscious? Given uncertainty about the nature and distribution of consciousness, it is promising to look for indicators of consciousness that pro...
philarchive.org
January 16, 2026 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
muellershewrote.com
BREAKING: Medical examiner says death of ICE detainee was a HOMICIDE - a witness says he was choked to death by GUARDS. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
Medical examiner believes death of man in ICE custody was homicide, recording says
A fellow detainee says he witnessed Geraldo Lunas Campos being choked to death by guards at the ICE detention center in Texas on Jan. 3.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 15, 2026 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
lutzfernandez.bsky.social
An invaluable new report. A "premortem" is exactly what we need.
The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits, report says
A new report warns that AI poses a serious threat to children's cognitive development and emotional well-being.
www.npr.org
January 14, 2026 at 12:09 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
add-hawk.bsky.social
Never, in a million kabillion years, when I decided to say "screw it" to mainstream philosophy and started writing about the philosophy of games, could I have imagined that this road would take me down to having the goddamn NY Times profile me and my new book.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...
Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore
www.nytimes.com
January 13, 2026 at 3:58 PM
cdj.bsky.social
life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

(The end of a poem by Renee Nicole Good.)
January 8, 2026 at 5:36 AM
cdj.bsky.social
This stress is affecting everyone.
January 7, 2026 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
tamarhaspel.bsky.social
This is absolutely wild, and super important.

There are zillions of studies claiming that fMRI signals indicate increased brain activity, and it looks like that's often just wrong.

If confirmed, this means we've misinterpreted a lot of research.
pgmj.bsky.social Magnus Johansson @pgmj.bsky.social · Dec 28
"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.”
www.tum.de/en/news-and-...
40 percent of MRI signals misinterpreted
Interpretation of numerous MRI data may be incorrect: blood flow is not a reliable indicator of brain activity.
www.tum.de
December 28, 2025 at 10:00 AM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
December 19, 2025 at 5:20 PM
cdj.bsky.social
Why we are defunding liberal arts? Read this: everyone is "incentivized to reinforce acceleration of early performance years...starting in a discipline early, focusing exclusively on that discipline...[leading to] early, but not long-term, exceptional performance" 🔥

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We re...
www.science.org
December 19, 2025 at 9:56 PM
cdj.bsky.social
📣 Preprint alert! "Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy" is forthcoming in Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Methods. This paper was written a couple of years back but the volume is now coming together. Check it out here: philpapers.org/rec/CONHAM-3 🧵
Sherri Lynn Conklin, Alex Dayer, Michael Nekrasov & Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Human and Machine: Analyzing Language Trends in Descriptions of Academic Philosophy - PhilPapers
Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative ...
philpapers.org
December 19, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
parkermolloy.com
David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov.

He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.
David Brooks: The Epstein Story? Count Me Out. David Brooks in the epstein photos
December 18, 2025 at 5:35 PM
cdj.bsky.social
Bluesky wrapped is a fun exercise. I posted much less in the past few months, but in good news I have been spending more time with the “neighborhood mayor.” Mornings a bit busy now with intense ear scratching sessions. Hard to post given demands of my new position

www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...
A photo of a cat on my lap looking curiously out into the distance. Unfortunately I am not currently scratching his ears in this photo which means I am close to getting a small bite of disapproval.
December 18, 2025 at 3:31 PM
cdj.bsky.social
We should reject the idea that the best way to prepare students for careers is to create programs tailored for specific job outcomes. It doesn’t work to “teach for the test,” so why would this work? Real life, real careers are messy, require problem solving. A disturbing trend for a dying economy.
miriamposner.com Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · Dec 9
Yes we all agree that this is the reason colleges are in trouble
She knows that many people disagree, that they see the value of liberal arts as less about job preparation and more about teaching students how to think. It's a nice sentiment on some level, she says, but it's also hopelessly naive. More to the point, she argues, it's exactly the reason many colleges are in trouble: Faculty grew too powerful and too romantic about their role in society. Students are her customers, she says, and at colleges like Albright they no longer major in Latin American studies or even economics. If they want an Al major, her responsibility is to give them one.
December 9, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
neurograce.bsky.social
Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p...
#MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
Lindsay Lab - Postdoc Position
Artificial neural networks applied to psychology, neuroscience, and climate change
lindsay-lab.github.io
December 8, 2025 at 11:53 PM
cdj.bsky.social
The Philosophy Department at #UCMerced hosted its first public talk in the new downtown space with Dr. Kaity Creasy’s “How to Be Lonely.” Dr. Creasy dissected different forms of loneliness and argued for its value in our lives, despite its challenges. Fascinating talk, great space.
A photo of Dr. Kaity Creasy giving a talk A photo of Dr. Kaity Creasy giving a talk A photo of Dr. Kaity Creasy giving a talk
December 5, 2025 at 6:04 PM
cdj.bsky.social
Tonight!
cdj.bsky.social Carolyn Dicey Jennings @cdj.bsky.social · Nov 28
If you are in the Central Valley you may want to check out these talks next week on loneliness by Dr. Kaity Creasy. One will be in downtown Merced and open to the public (Thursday 12/4 @ 6 pm), the other on campus at #UCMerced (Friday 12/5 @ 3:30 pm). Please share with those who may be interested!
Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) How to be Lonely UC Merced on Main: 1635 M Street Thursday, December 4, 6-7pm Everyone experiences loneliness at some time or other. Even so, some of the situations in which we find ourselves lonely can surprise us. While we might expect to feel lonely in a room full of strangers, for example, we typically don't expect to feel lonely in the presence of loved ones. To make better sense of the wide variety of circumstances in which loneliness may arise, I begin by exploring several distinct causes of loneliness with the help of concrete (including real-life) examples. Then, after reflecting on the features of human existence to which loneliness calls our attention, I will suggest that loneliness, although painful, may have positive potential. As an experience that can reveal what and who matters to us, loneliness may offer opportunities for self-knowledge and meaningful personal transformation, depending on how we relate to it. Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) Loneliness and Emotional Resonance COB 129 Friday, December 5, 3:30-5pm Loneliness is a painful feeling that arises when our desires for recognition or connection are not fulfilled (or are perceived to be unfulfilled). But there are many forms of meaningful recognition and countless forms of connection that we may need or desire, not all of which can be offered even by those who love and appreciate us. Building on my work on the importance of particular recognition and affirmation for assuaging loneliness, in this talk I explore what I call deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and personal connection, forms that necessarily involve emotional engagement or experiences of emotional resonance. I then contend that these deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection, when present, play a distinctive role in the amelioration of loneliness: they allow the individual to feel more at home in her world, in part by allowing her to make (shared) sense of it. Finally, I show that attending to certain of the conditions that make these forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection possible-e.g., shared forms of life and complementary sensibilities between individuals helps us make sense of cases of loneliness tied to the presence or absence of particular empirical others.
December 4, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
jordanaxt.bsky.social
Implicit racial attitudes accounted for ~2.5% of variance in behavior beyond explicit racial attitudes, an effect size that was *just* over our agreed upon threshold for what would constitute a practically significant effect. Explicit racial attitudes still explained much more variance (~45%).
December 2, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
cdj.bsky.social
If you are in the Central Valley you may want to check out these talks next week on loneliness by Dr. Kaity Creasy. One will be in downtown Merced and open to the public (Thursday 12/4 @ 6 pm), the other on campus at #UCMerced (Friday 12/5 @ 3:30 pm). Please share with those who may be interested!
Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) How to be Lonely UC Merced on Main: 1635 M Street Thursday, December 4, 6-7pm Everyone experiences loneliness at some time or other. Even so, some of the situations in which we find ourselves lonely can surprise us. While we might expect to feel lonely in a room full of strangers, for example, we typically don't expect to feel lonely in the presence of loved ones. To make better sense of the wide variety of circumstances in which loneliness may arise, I begin by exploring several distinct causes of loneliness with the help of concrete (including real-life) examples. Then, after reflecting on the features of human existence to which loneliness calls our attention, I will suggest that loneliness, although painful, may have positive potential. As an experience that can reveal what and who matters to us, loneliness may offer opportunities for self-knowledge and meaningful personal transformation, depending on how we relate to it. Kaitlyn Creasy (CSU San Bernardino) Loneliness and Emotional Resonance COB 129 Friday, December 5, 3:30-5pm Loneliness is a painful feeling that arises when our desires for recognition or connection are not fulfilled (or are perceived to be unfulfilled). But there are many forms of meaningful recognition and countless forms of connection that we may need or desire, not all of which can be offered even by those who love and appreciate us. Building on my work on the importance of particular recognition and affirmation for assuaging loneliness, in this talk I explore what I call deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and personal connection, forms that necessarily involve emotional engagement or experiences of emotional resonance. I then contend that these deep forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection, when present, play a distinctive role in the amelioration of loneliness: they allow the individual to feel more at home in her world, in part by allowing her to make (shared) sense of it. Finally, I show that attending to certain of the conditions that make these forms of recognition, affirmation, and connection possible-e.g., shared forms of life and complementary sensibilities between individuals helps us make sense of cases of loneliness tied to the presence or absence of particular empirical others.
November 28, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Reposted by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
dailynous.com
Academic Philosophy and Data Analysis is collecting information about philosophy departments. If you're a current philosophy PhD student or received your PhD within the past 10 years, and you haven't heard from them, see this.
Current & Recent Philosophy Grad Students: APDA Is Reaching Out - Daily Nous
If you're a current philosophy PhD student or received your PhD within the past decade, Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) wants to make sure you're counted in its 2025 survey, which is runn...
dailynous.com
December 1, 2025 at 1:59 PM