lexbouter.bsky.social @LexBouter

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic. - Carl Sagan

At the National Open Science Festival, already very happy to meet so many people working on opening up our science. We will be presenting Metacheck in a hands on workshop later today.

Now Joeri Tijdink is talking about wellbeing and research waste in academia. You can jump in the live feed to follow along!

Daniël Lakens @lakens

2 weeks ago

We are excited to announce that we are going to broadcast the second day of Meta-Research Symposium 2026 (this Friday on October 9th) for those who were interested but unable to join in person. JOIN: teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/… PROGRAM: docs.google.com/document/u/0/d…

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“Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.” ― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

🇺🇸🧐Thirty senior American psychiatrists and mental health experts have signed a statement declaring President Donald Trump mentally unfit to serve, warning that his sole authority over U.S. nuclear weapons poses a danger to the entire world. According to the doctors, Trump’s behavior over the past year has shown “objectively observable signs of serious medical concern.” They cited: — a significant decline in cognitive functioning, — episodes of apparent drowsiness during critical public appearances, — severely impaired judgment and impulse control, — loss of self-control, — and grandiose or delusional beliefs, including claims of infallibility and imagery portraying himself as a figure with a “divine mission.” The physicians argue that Trump now represents a “clear and present danger” and called for urgent action to remove him from office. “It is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be president of the United States,” the statement reads. The letter invokes the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allows the vice president and cabinet to declare a president incapable of performing the duties of office. One of the signatories, Dr. Henry David Abraham of Tufts University School of Medicine, warned about “the buildup of psychiatric symptoms in a person who has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.” He pointed to Trump’s April 7, 2026 Truth Social post regarding Iran, in which Trump wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” According to the doctors, the warning signs include: — grandiosity without restraint, — paranoia, — impulsivity, — vindictiveness, — uncontrolled rage, — and a sense of omnipotence in a man with unchecked control over nuclear weapons. Psychiatrist Bandy Lee, another signatory, said the issue now “transcends politics and concerns the survival of humanity itself.” The statement was submitted to the U.S. Congressional Record by Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed. The doctors emphasized that their declaration is “medical, not political,” and includes professionals with both conservative and liberal views. Source: The BMJ

🔬 Join us for the #OSIRIS Final Symposium! 💬 Registration is now open for two days of discussion, exchange and reflection on how we can continue to support more transparent, trustworthy and reproducible research beyond the project’s lifetime. 📄osiris4r.eu/newsevents/the…

The excellent thought-provoking Steneck-Mayer keynote lecture by Robbert Dijkgraaf during the 9th World Conferenece on Research Integrity is now freely available at: vimeo.com/showcase/12263… All 14 2026 9th WCRI videos available at: vimeo.com/showcase/12263…

Norway's Prime Minister rips apart Trump's stupid letter. Love this! Every leader that receives a letter like this from DJT should do the same. Thanks for your attention to this matter! BRILLIANT!

“If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.” — Carl Sagan

A British writer penned the best description of Donald Trump I’ve ever read: “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: • Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are. • You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump. And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?' If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.” -Nate White

I asked Claude to rank the presidents in these tiers according to the scholarly consensus. Then I asked ChatGPT to make the image. I did not move anyone according to my own personal preference.

This is so spot-on that it’s impossible not to share... An Australian’s response to yet another Trump tirade about how “NATO does nothing for America” absolutely destroys him: “Mate, you run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a monthly car payment, and people are forced to ration it just to stay alive. A country where medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are afraid of abortion laws and hesitate to treat miscarriages. You imprison more of your own citizens than any other country on Earth. More than China. More than North Korea. In the ‘land of the free,’ two million people are behind bars, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of a crime. They’re simply too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed country where this is happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your children practice active-shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell your friends shares in defense companies. Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years. Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you. And now a convicted criminal — found by a court to be liable for sexual abuse, who defended a pedophile, slept with a porn star, and has led the biggest political dumpster fire since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another catastrophe. And you call Greenland badly governed? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody there goes bankrupt because they get sick. Nobody dies in silence because an insurance company refused to pay for treatment. ‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed help.’ When exactly, champ? September 11? Because that was when NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history — for you. Service members from dozens of countries went to Afghanistan, fought, bled, and died for you. Australia wasn’t even a member of NATO, but we came anyway. For twenty years. And then you left at two in the morning without telling anyone and left everyone else to deal with the consequences. You don’t give a damn that the great people of Ukraine are being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown them a shred of compassion. So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you fake-tanned aluminum-siding salesman. The only thing here that’s truly badly managed is your damn mouth. And you still have the nerve to lecture the rest of the world?”

Bertrand Russell.

Carl Sagan’s view on why democracy needs scientifically educated citizens...

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“We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.” — Carl Sagan

41 years ago, Carl Sagan gave a clear and elegant explanation of the science behind global warming.

Our metacheck package now has an online manual! In 29 short chapters we explain how to set up metacheck (running all modules 100% locally if you want), and explain the 18 available modules. scienceverse.org/metacheck_book/ We are still in beta, and would love to get feedback!

New preprint: There is only one correct analysis. osf.io/preprints/psya… We take a critical look at recent proposals for multiverse or many analyst procedures, and strongly argue that epistemic uncertainty should be reduced, not “embraced”. >