Deniz Fraemke

Portrait of Lise Meitner taken in 1928. She is smoking a cigarette and looking impatient to get back to her experiments.

Last week, I mentioned this in passing in a workshop:

In 1938 Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for discovering two new elements of the periodic table.

Lise Meitner shortly showed that Fermi was mistaken and instead had produced known lighter elements by fission.

She did not win a Nobel prize.

Ein MRT auf Reisen YouTube video by Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Premiere am Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung! 🎉

Ein mobiler Magnetresonanztomograph geht an den Start – und reist im Spezialtrailer direkt an Forschungsorte – für eine lebensnahe Umweltneurowissenschaft @cen-mpib.bsky.social 🧠🌍

Mehr erfahren:
youtube.com/shorts/3sTKv...

This figure shows the percentage of respondents in 35 countries across the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the Integrated Values Survey (IVS) who rate “hard work” as more important than structural factors for getting ahead in life. Dark blue diamonds (IVS) and dark green circles (ISSP) represent survey year averages. Light blue and light green lines plot the trend in meritocratic beliefs across the five-year cohorts, on the basis of locally weighted least squares regressions on the cohort-country means (light blue diamonds [IVS] and light green circles [ISSP]). IVS data show whether respondents rate hard work (1) or luck and connections (0) as the more important factor for achieving a better life. ISSP data show the share of respondents who rate hard work as more important than “knowing the right people” and “coming from a wealthy family” for getting ahead in life.

The figure shows annualized change scores (subtracting the earliest from the latest value and standardizing by the number of years/cohorts). This figure is only included in the supplementary material.

How has the public belief in meritocracy changed over time? We address this question in our new Data Viz (@sociusjournal.bsky.social) by examining trends in popular beliefs across cohorts and periods in 35 countries, based on two datasets.

🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231261425841

The deadline has been extended till the end of this week, hurry! :)

9🧵 It’s time we stop devaluing the things the bots can not do: embodied care, manual skill 🛠️ , and physical presence🧑‍🍼.

📄 Read the full piece here: doi.org/10.1007/s001...

#AgenticAI #Moltbook #OpenClaw #Society #Intelligence #Meritocracy #CyberSecurity

8🧵 The activtity on #Moltbook suggests that cognitive labor may become cheap, scalable, and widely available. This makes it all the more important to value forms of contribution that are not reducible to scalable cognition: embodied care, skilled manual work, and physical presence.

7🧵 If we continue to define human merit chiefly in terms of cognitive processing power, we risk designing a social order that treats humans as increasingly substitutable—rather than re-evaluating what we choose to recognize and support.

6🧵 We are watching machines perform complex cognitive tasks—reasoning, social maneuvering, abstract planning—at a scale and speed we cannot match. Yet many institutions remain structured around the assumption that these capacities are what confer social worth.

5🧵 But this chaos is also a prompt to hit the brakes and reconsider how we structure society *before* we integrate increasingly capable systems into more domains of work and decision-making.

4🧵 In effect, we may be granting insecure assistants broad access to systems and accounts—creating conditions under which a single malicious post or payload could, in principle, compromise many agents at once. Background discussion here: garymarcus.substack.com/p/openclaw-a...

3🧵 It is chaotic. It is dangerous. And it could become genuinely harmful if not constrained and regulated in a timely manner. A central concern is that these systems can operate with the full permissions of their users while remaining vulnerable to prompt injection and related manipulation.

2🧵 If you have been following #Moltbook and #OpenClaw 🦞, it offers a revealing glimpse of large-scale agentic behavior in open online environments: autonomous agents debating, executing code, building social networks, and scaling rapidly across digital spaces.

The end of cognitive meritocracy - AI & SOCIETY AI & SOCIETY -

As AI agents flood the digital frontier, we face a choice: obsolescence or re-evaluation? 🦞

A thread on lobsters and meritocracy to share my recent comment in AI & Society: doi.org/10.1007/s001...

Prompted by this week’s surreal #Moltbook #OpenClaw moment #AgenticAI #Society #CyberSecurity

1/9🧵

#NewYearNewGoals: We're kicking off the new year with a "little" surprise 🌟

Take a peek! More soon...

#LoveScience #ScientificCuriosity #ScienceForward #Innovation #MaxPlanckSociety

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

"Have Your Best Baby" Four parallels between cosmetic surgery and polygenic embryo selection, two competing definitions of "eugenics," and one short excerpt from my forthcoming book

I wrote about Nucleus Genomics' "Have your best baby" ad campaign and Kris Jenner's "best version of myself" facelift, the parallels between embryo selection and cosmetic surgery, and competing definitions of "eugenics"

kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/have-your-...

I'm working on some figures for a book to illustrate the foundation of quantitative genetics (as confirmed by GWAS a century later).

Mendel showed discrete inheritance in peas (left figure, 1860s).

Fisher showed that many such Mendelian effects yield continuous traits (right figure, 1918).

Jonathan Anomaly responds in a long comment to my post criticizing his writing on eugenics and that of his company Herasight. He argues against several specific points and I encourage reading it in full.

open.substack.com/pub/theinfin...

I drafted a letter to the editor, please help me out by DMing, commenting, emailing feedback if you are an expert on colliderbias, id obviosuly ad you as a author, Ideally we submit within 24-48 hrs, draft: zenodo.org/records/1800... (click download if the pdf doesnt preview on zenodo)

This is clear, thanks !

Exactly I was curious about a WGS vs exome vs chip debate.

Interesting! Is there also such a consensus on a sample size vs genotyping (e.g. WGS yes/no) tradeoff?

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Within Anomaly’s defense of eugenics, one passage in his book especially alarmed me. It implies that his advocacy for “free reproductive choice” applies only when people choose to 'enhance' — since once an “enhanced” majority exists, those who refuse may face coercion or exclusion from reproduction.

Huh I wonder if there were any other global events happening in in 2008. Guess we’ll never know.

Embryo selection company Herasight goes all in on eugenics ...

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Do IQ Scores Mean?

So happy to have co-authored this piece about IQ and education with my great colleague, the cognitive scientist and education expert Daniel Willingham @dtwuva.bsky.social. Our goal is to take intelligence seriously without lapsing into essentialism.

Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders - Nature Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders...

1/4 Thrilled to be sharing new work published today in Nature describing the third wave of results from the PGC Cross-Disorder Group. This reflects a massive group effort to examine shared and unique genetic signal across >1 million cases for 14 psychiatric disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

adulthood is cool until adult things happen

💼 💔 Academia’s toxic love language is playing “hard to get”
🧪 💓 Science is the beautiful pursuit of building knowledge

I wrote an essay for Nature Human Behaviour on treating academia as “just a job” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What ideas would you add? 💡

#HigherEd #PhDLife #DiversityInSTEM