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patrickesavage.bsky.social
Pat Savage
@patrickesavage.bsky.social
2.5K followers 700 following 700 posts
Director: @compmusiclab.bsky.social. Rutherford Discovery Fellow @U Auckland. Assoc. Prof. @Keio U. PI @manyvoices.bsky.social. Music, evolution, diversity. He/him. Tangata tiriti.
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patrickesavage.bsky.social
Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 12d
Just submitted corrected proofs for my first book!
Publication (open access) is scheduled for late Feb 2026 (but the preprint is already available if you don't want to wait: osf.io/preprints/ps...)
COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music By Patrick E. Savage (to published by Oxford University Press in Feb 2026)
patrickesavage.bsky.social
It’s a Christmas miracle: new highest chess rating!
Lichess blitz rating showing recent increase to new highest rating of 1988
December 26, 2025 at 8:52 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/mich...
Figure 1: Relationship between early and adult performance in the full population (black) and elite performers (red). Conditioning on elite status induces a negative association despite a positive population relationship.
December 22, 2025 at 1:06 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
paulkirkley.bsky.social
My 14-yo-son has recreated the climax of Back to the Future in gingerbread and I thought you should know.
December 20, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
troembke.bsky.social
@matildellen.bsky.social bravely decided to do a registered report with @pci-regreports.bsky.social as the first manuscript of her PhD -- 2+ years later, it's out! It's on how bilingualism affects statistical word learning, and the results were quite unexpected. Read more:
The influence of bilingualism on statistical word learning: a registered report
Abstract. While statistical word learning has been the focus of many studies on monolinguals, it has received little attention in bilinguals. The results o
royalsocietypublishing.org
December 17, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
ginnybraun.bsky.social
“What’s unfolding now is more than dishonesty—it’s the unraveling of any shared understanding of what education is for.”

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
www.currentaffairs.org
December 17, 2025 at 11:06 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
davidcolquhoun.bsky.social
December 15, 2025 at 10:45 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Really good (and damning) analysis of how LLMs are exposing deeper problems in citation metric-based scientific incentives
bayesianboy.bsky.social Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 12d
If you have to read anything about the prospect of “automating scientific discovery,” “agents for science,” or integrating LLMs into scientific pipelines, please let it be this essay by Kevin T. Baker: artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi...
December 16, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
simongreenhill.bsky.social
New paper: Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity
Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core
Three evolutionary radiations shaped the evolution of global religious diversity - Volume 7
www.cambridge.org
December 15, 2025 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
chiaradg.bsky.social
Our new paper is out! Orangutan long calls are strongly isochronous, yet surprisingly they can also shift into double-meter patterns — a small but intriguing clue to the roots of musical rhythm.
doi.org/10.1016/j.is...
December 1, 2025 at 12:09 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Just submitted corrected proofs for my first book!
Publication (open access) is scheduled for late Feb 2026 (but the preprint is already available if you don't want to wait: osf.io/preprints/ps...)
COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World's Music By Patrick E. Savage (to published by Oxford University Press in Feb 2026)
December 14, 2025 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
musiccognition.bsky.social
[Please share] Call for Fellowship Applications for Early Career Researchers from the Global South — to attend an international workshop on ‘spectral percepts’ and the Origins of Musicality in The Netherlands.

Deadline : 19 December 2025 (23:59, AoE).

See www.lorentzcenter.nl/index.php?pn...
December 12, 2025 at 7:19 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
thorbenson.bsky.social
I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork
Time person of the year cover for 2025
December 12, 2025 at 4:00 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
I largely agree, but we as educators are also failing to teach students how to efficiently read, write, and think critically. It has never been possible to read every word of assigned readings, and that's OK.
I wrote a reading/writing tutorial that applies in a ChatGPT era: osf.io/p37zj_v3
Figure 3. Stylised figure showing my proposed reading/writing order to maximise efficiency given diminishing marginal returns as you read academic research in greater detail.
December 10, 2025 at 9:07 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
I'm now thrilled to share the 2nd Stage 2 manuscript from our @pci-regreports.bsky.social programmatic protocol, led by Honours student Nelson Shi. In NZ English, we replicated song-speech acoustic differences and explored differences in social bonding effects:
osf.io/mk34q_v1
Figure 5. Mean distribution of acoustic features between singing and speaking. Compared to conversation, singing exhibited a consistent trend of higher pitch, slower tempo, and greater stability during singing, as opposed to conversation conditions. The blue dots represent the mean acoustic values for each participant (n=20). Figure 7. Exploratory analysis of mean social bonding scores before and after experiment. The figure depicts the mean change in social bonding scores (before and after the first experimental condition). The number of participants for pre-condition and post-condition are N = 23. There is an overall positive increase in the mean social bonding score across all groups, but the increase appears stronger for “Unison Singing” group than for the “Conversation” or “Lyrical Recitation” group.
December 10, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
thegmcconnachie.bsky.social
“I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theatre is AI can’t do it.”

Ethan Hawke is a dude 👌🏻
December 9, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
psmaldino.bsky.social
Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review.

Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...
sfiscience.bsky.social Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 17d
How likely are you to invest in a new business? Ask your partner to marry you? Move to a new country?

A new model by SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino and colleagues explains how wealth, experience, and environment shape our risk tolerance — and how those effects persist across generations.
Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve
How much risk is any individual willing to take on? That depends, in part, on their individual resources and environment, which shape the learning strategies that influence their personal proclivity t...
www.santafe.edu
December 9, 2025 at 9:58 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Do any publishers include abstracts in book chapter PDFs (as is done in journal articles)?
I asked Oxford, but they insist that they only include abstracts in the online version, not print/PDF versions. This seems like a waste given the abstracts are some of the most important/informative parts...
December 9, 2025 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
peercommunityin.bsky.social
PCI Statistics and Machine Learning (@pcistatml.bsky.social) is now open for submissions!!
statml.peercommunityin.org
For an updated list of all the thematic PCIs, visit peercommunityin.org/current-pcis/
PCI Statistics and Machine Learning
Peer Community in Statistics and Machine Learning
statml.peercommunityin.org
December 8, 2025 at 8:53 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
NZ continues to shoot itself in the foot with short sighted STEM obsession
Wētā FX, one of the world’s most successful screen technology companies, depends not only on advanced computing and engineering, but also on storytelling, design, digital humanities, creative production and cultural imagination.
December 7, 2025 at 8:46 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Nice to see cultural evolution of music represented!

royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
December 6, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
psych.peercommunityin.org
We're very excited to see the first recommendation by PCI Psych out now in Peer Community Journal! 🎉 Not only can you read the full article for free below, you can see the full peer review history and editorial decisions. It cost the authors $0. This is what scientific publishing should be.
December 3, 2025 at 3:33 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
In journal club today an astute grad student pointed out that these macaque tapping data look nothing like human beat synchronisation data. Nor, for that matter, like data from vocal learners like Snowball the cockatoo. Doesn't seem like evidence for synchronisation - are we missing something?
Human beat synchronisation data are generally centred on 0 degrees (i.e., synchronised to the beat) or phase-shifted 180 degrees Macaque tapping data generally don't appear centred on 0 degrees (i.e., not synchronised to the beat) nor to be phase-shifted 180 degrees Snowball head bobbing data generally centred on 0 degrees (i.e., synchronised to the beat)
December 5, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
edzitron.com
This is the conclusion, which I'm pulling out from behind the paywall because it'll probably be a free newsletter or podcast one day. I think the AI era is a reckoning for the tech industry, one where consumers finally realize they're being abused.
And I fundamentally believe the generative AI era is one where the tech industry has gone too far. Regular people are furious about AI - they hate it, it upsets them, it’s revolting, in part because of what it does, in part because it’s being forced upon them everywhere. It feels like the final insult from a tech industry that fundamentally turned on the customer, the ugliest form of the Rot Economy that defied consumers’ wants and needs in favor of what would inspire a market disconnected from any real value creation. They’ve watched the tech industry spend 10 years making its products worse as a means of expressing growth, and then crested that era by adding the world’s least-reliable, most-annoying software in ways that have become all but unavoidable. Technology is no longer synonymous with progress, but with a kind of parasitic gaslighting that tells us that if we don’t pray at the feet of whoever “the geniuses” are at any given time that we’re morons, that we’ll get replaced, that we’ll be poor, jobless, ignorant or unworthy of having any part of the future. The products being made by the tech industry no longer feel like they’re made for any living human being, but the abstraction of a person created in the mind of a product manager in Palo Alto or a venture capitalist that hasn’t set foot in a city in a decade. These people believe that the best products at the ones that must be forced upon users, who in turn will adapt to how the product works versus making products that solve a problem that a customer already has. Silicon Valley no longer leads us - it attacks us with ideas until we either give in or are tricked into engaging with Copilot on Word or Gemini on Google Docs or accidentally brush an AI button or because our bosses tell us “you need to be AI-first” without knowing what the fuck that means. The tech industry is well-known for finding ways to keep people on platforms, but has never had to face an era where it had to get people to come bac…
December 5, 2025 at 4:02 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
jamessteeleii.bsky.social
Just had our first set of reviews from @pci-regreports.bsky.social for our proposed study on RT during GLP-1-RA treatment.

Probably the most constructive and useful set of reviews I have ever had... and having them before starting the study makes them even better!

11/10 would recommend!
Preserving musculoskeletal health through resistance training in individuals undergoing Glucagon-like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonist Therapy: a controlled interrupted time-series analysis (Stage 1 Registe...
Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1-RAs) are increasingly prescribed for weight loss and cardiometabolic health but have been evidenced to lead to loss of lean soft tissue mass. Resistanc...
www.medrxiv.org
December 4, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
rachkendal.bsky.social
Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
@durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social
Picture of front cover of Theme Issue entitled "Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures." The image on the front cover is of a Yao honey hunter in Mozambique holding retrieved honeycomb.
December 4, 2025 at 11:07 AM