Milan van Lange 🟥
@milanvlange.bsky.social
Radical Research and Digital Documents at NIOD | Volunteer at Dutch Cyclists' Union | Interested in history, data, ethical tech, text mining, urban planning, bicycles, cars, climate change, minimal computing, and brutalism.
Reposted by Milan van Lange 🟥
Second, if we uncritically adopt AI in psychology, we outsource programming of our experiments to companies. This undoes a lot of open source: experiments are under industry capture, written without formal specifications. It deskills us: psychologists spent the last decade learning to code.
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![4 Outsourcing Programming to Companies
[Sanford’s mechanical vernier chronoscope] had
two pendulums, one set longer than the other but
both set at known lengths. When the stimulus
appeared, the longer pendulum was released mechanically. When the participant pressed the key in
response, the shorter pendulum was similarly released. By counting the number of swings it took
the shorter pendulum to catch up with the longer,
experimenters could use a mathematical formula
to calculate the difference in time between the two
events. (Evans, 2000, p. 322–323)
A century later, all this is now done by programming computers to display stimuli, and collect and analyse data. The largely
harmless and perhaps even beneficial (cf. Guest, 2025) transition
to computational experimentation, where all instruments (e.g.
EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking) are hooked up to the codebase for running experiments and the database for storing participant data,
has been completed through: the adoption of programmes such
as SPSS for statistics (Landau & Everitt, 2003) and E-Prime for
presenting stimuli (Spapé et al., 2019); and training psychologists
to use programming languages (e.g. R, Python; British Psychological Society, 2017; Peirce et al., 2022). The last part, from the
mid 2010s onwards, where psychologists spent time and effort
learning how to program is a massively laudable case of reskilling
(N. D. Anderson, 2016; Guest & Forbes, 2024; Scherer et al.,
2019)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreib4ovbeiidibx2mjxl4hgju2sgosrfsq5d4awmi6u2d76wr3phbkm@jpeg)
![As Danielle Navarro (2015) says about shortcuts through using inappropriate technology, which chatbots are, we end up digging ourselves into “a very deep hole.” She goes on to explain:
The business model here is to suck you in during
your student days, and then leave you dependent on
their tools when you go out into the real world. [...]
And you can avoid it: if you make use of packages
like R that are open source and free, you never get
trapped having to pay exorbitant licensing fees. (pp.
37–38)
These were and are the reasons to switch from e.g. SPSS, which is
owned by IBM, to R or Python (Wills, 2019). The same and more
hold for being locked in and addicted to AI products, which have
closed or industry-controlled source code (Hao, 2025; Liesenfeld & Dingemanse, 2024; Liesenfeld et al., 2023; Maffulli, 2023;
Maris, 2025; Mirowski, 2023; Solaiman, 2023) , and mislead us
into overestimating our programming abilities (Lehmann et al.,
2025)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreihurkp2kmiy4ao2thwn3aor6zbvfh6vs2q6kcos5gqagtp3vivjo4@jpeg)
October 4, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Second, if we uncritically adopt AI in psychology, we outsource programming of our experiments to companies. This undoes a lot of open source: experiments are under industry capture, written without formal specifications. It deskills us: psychologists spent the last decade learning to code.
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6/
En 1400+ deskundigen roepen op iets kritischer met wat doorgaat voor AI om te gaan: openletter.earth/open-letter-...
Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia
openletter.earth
November 24, 2025 at 7:52 AM
En 1400+ deskundigen roepen op iets kritischer met wat doorgaat voor AI om te gaan: openletter.earth/open-letter-...
Reposted by Milan van Lange 🟥
‘Betrokkenen noemen het ‘kwalijk’ dat de minister de privacy van bewoners schendt voor ‘politiek gewin’ en de Silja gebruikt als ‘decor’ voor haar partijstandpunt.’
November 20, 2025 at 6:24 AM
‘Betrokkenen noemen het ‘kwalijk’ dat de minister de privacy van bewoners schendt voor ‘politiek gewin’ en de Silja gebruikt als ‘decor’ voor haar partijstandpunt.’
Reposted by Milan van Lange 🟥
Zo kwaadaardig.
November 20, 2025 at 6:55 AM
Zo kwaadaardig.
Reposted by Milan van Lange 🟥
(ja alleen als je een auto inruilt tegen een elektrische fiets is het natuurlijk prima, maar cijfers uit het stuk laten zien dat dat over het algemeen niet gebeurt. We zijn zelfs minder kilometers gaan fietsen de laatste jaren)
November 18, 2025 at 9:12 AM
(ja alleen als je een auto inruilt tegen een elektrische fiets is het natuurlijk prima, maar cijfers uit het stuk laten zien dat dat over het algemeen niet gebeurt. We zijn zelfs minder kilometers gaan fietsen de laatste jaren)