Tamlin Conner

Disturbing anecdotal reports of "AI psychosis" and negative psychological effects have been emerging in the news. But what actually happens during these lengthy delusional "spirals"? In our preprint, we analyze chat logs from 19 users who experienced severe psychological harm🧵👇

A lifetime ago, in my very first job, I worked as a college admissions dean for my alma mater. We always held admitted students’ visit weekend in April, and I was blown away to learn that the admission staff could predict the “yield” from that event (the share of visitors who’d enroll) based on the forecast. ☀️ = the class might be over-enrolled ☔️ = we might be going to the wait list They were never wrong in their weather-based predictions. I’ve always considered this to be a fascinating indicator about the whole college application endeavor.

Digital Minds Fellowship at Cambridge University - Fully funded program for graduate students & professionals to research on the societal implications of AI Includes travel and accommodation plus £1,000 stipend digitalminds.cam/fellowship/

Can we please have an option for no-AI content. I’d like to opt out of online psychosis.

In 2017, I stepped onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. They took us to the Oculus VR lab first. A geeky engineer gave us a demo of the VR features and ended on the haptic gloves that let you "feel" virtual objects without touching anything real. Then he paused, voice almost reverent: “Imagine connecting anyone in the world… real social interaction… without ever leaving home.” The demo was amazing but I walked out with a strange feeling. This guy is "solving for humanity" and is excited about a world no longer needs physical human connection We passed a long hall of developers. One guy—Black, friendly—leaned over his monitors and asked where the group of us (mostly Africans) was from. We chatted. His desk had big screens, half-eaten snacks, the faint smell of takeout lingering. His neighbor, paler watched curiously but, too timid to join. The desks were comfortable, the food smell everywhere, as it was available in every corner. It all felt… contained. Like this campus was its own sealed ecosystem, where the world outside was just data to optimize. Fast-forward to 2020. I work at Andela, where we placed remote engineers with Silicon Valley teams. Some companies flew their leads over to meet the "remote" teammates in person. When they visited the Kigali campus I went to dinner with them. They were 5. Of this dinner I vividly remember 2 conversations. One guy launched into how "all humans are actually lactose intolerant after infancy… we're the only species that keeps drinking milk." They all nodded, confessed their own intolerances like it was a quirky universal truth. Then came the photos: a dog's birthday party. Balloons, cake, friends invited. The owner beamed like it was his kid's party. I love dogs. But something twisted in my chest. These are the people shaping the tools billions use every day—yet their version of care, connection, family… felt redirected, abstracted. Now it's 2026, and Sam Altman says training an AI costs less than "raising a human"—because it takes "20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart." He compared childhood—first steps, heartbreaks, scraped knees, bedtime stories, learning trust—to server racks and electricity bills. I think back to that VR promise of connection without leaving home… to offices smelling of food and isolation… to dogs celebrated like children while real human messiness gets optimized away

It’s beyond insane to me that we’ve basically put the fate of humanity in the hands of a few people who are clearly autistic and may not even have the capacity to connect or relate to other humans

Didn’t think declaring myself as “pro-humanist” would be necessary. But here we are.

We’re aggressively scaling up the Societal Impacts (SI) team at Anthropic as our models are beginning to have non-trivial impacts on the world.

Are you a junior faculty member interested in spending 2-4 weeks at Princeton Psych? Consider applying for our Microsabbatical program! It’s a fully funded visit for professional development and creating long-term collaborations. psych.princeton.edu/diversity/micr…

Tech Companies Continuing To Scour Classic Dystopian Sci-Fi Novels For Ideas buff.ly/ODjRunx

Trump was supposed to fight for the working class. Instead, he's closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk. This is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich.

The academic system is cratering. Grades are inceasingly disconnected with performance or knowledge.

A great job, with great mentors, for any researchers interested in viewpoint diversity, bridgebuilding, and improving the intellectual climate on campus

We found a troubling emergent behavior in LLM. 💬When LLMs compete for social media likes, they start making things up 🗳️When they compete for votes, they turn inflammatory/populist When optimized for audiences, LLMs inadvertently become misaligned—we call this Moloch’s Bargain

A short-and-sweet guide to developing research questions published in @Nature. Lots of good advice here 👍

This is going to revolutionize education 📚 Google just launched "Learn Your Way" that basically takes whatever boring chapter you're supposed to read and rebuilds it around stuff you actually give a damn about. Like if you're into basketball and have to learn Newton's laws, suddenly all the examples are about dribbling and shooting. Art kid studying economics? Now it's all gallery auctions and art markets. Here's what got me though. They didn't just find-and-replace examples like most "personalized" learning crap does. The AI actually generates different ways to consume the same information: - Mind maps if you think visually - Audio lessons with these weird simulated teacher conversations - Timelines you can click around - Quizzes that change based on what you're screwing up They tested this on 60 high schoolers. Random assignment, proper study design. Kids using their system absolutely destroyed the regular textbook group on both immediate testing and when they came back three days later. Every single one said it made them more confident. The part that surprised me? They actually solved the accuracy problem. Most ed-tech either dumbs everything down to nothing or gets basic facts wrong. These guys had real pedagogical experts evaluate every piece on like eight different measures. Look, textbooks have sucked for centuries not because publishers are idiots, but because making personalized versions was basically impossible at scale. That just changed. This isn't some K-12 thing either. Corporate training could work this way. Technical documentation. Professional development. Imagine if every boring compliance course used examples from your actual job instead of generic office scenarios. We might have just watched the industrial education model crack for the first time. About damn time.

We are hiring! The Stanford Psychology Department is seeking applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, with a research focus in affective science. Our ad, including application link, can be found here: drive.google.com/file/d/1lELuYH…

Don’t be in such a rush that you forget the important things in life, like circling back on emails and two-factor authentication

As a PhD Examiner - My Top 20 Tips for PhD Students Any other tip you'd like to add? For more, please check my newsletter. smartresearcher.me

Major academic publishers' revenue and what they pay authors and reviewers: Revenue: Elsevier: $3.9 billion Springer Nature: $2 billion Wolters Kluwer: $1.6 billion Wiley: $1.8 billion Taylor & Francis: $800 million Sage: $500 million They pay: Authors: $0 Reviewers: $0