Sylvia Wenmackers

Today is the deadline to submit your abstracts for our minisymposium, 'Life As It Could Be: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on #ALife'! So wrap up those abstracts and come join us! It's going to be a fun event! 🦠🖥️ 🔗 hiw.kuleuven.be/clps/events/... #HPBio #philsci #philsky #academicsky #AI #evosky 🧪

Freire in Education for Critical Consciousness (2002/1973): > If [people] are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time, and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in the wake of change. They see that the times are changing, but they are submerged in that change

I miss Helen’s energy and the enthusiasm that they brought to philosophy and everything they did. We could all do with being a little bit more Helen. 💜

What does it take to be an intellectually responsible scientist in the age of AI? I propose an epistemological framework grounded in intellectual virtues, such as curiosity and intellectual scrutiny, to guide the use of AI in science. In highly recommended Episteme! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Join us for “The Future of Science: How Intellectual Virtues Guide AI-Accelerated Science” and the launch of our lab! 📍 Eindhoven, 5–6 November Abstract deadline: 15 October Free participation sikimiclab.com/future-of-sc...

I am really happy to share that I have started as PI of an @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social-funded 3-year project @clpskuleuven.bsky.social. I'll investigate how scientists conceptualize, model & measure environments across the life, cognitive, social & Earth sciences! #philsci #philsky #evosky #envhum 🧪

The prophesy said that the utilitarians' prosperity would take the perpetual misery of a single child. (But what about the ones who walk away? Joke's on them: they will be left behind!)

Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism.

My short viewpoint article "The Enshittification of Mathematics" is out now in the Mathematical Intelligencer! link.springer.com/article/10.1... Gift link here: rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a Check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested! 💩🥳

Have you been thinking about the main challenges or theoretical frameworks of #ALife? Do you want to discuss the current directions & future prospects of the field? Then come to Leuven & join us in a great interdisciplinary environment open to both scientists & philosophers #philsky #MolBiol #HPS 🧪

Tonight's graphite on paper.

Are you interested in the past, present & future of Artificial Life (ALife) as a scientific field? 🚨 We are hosting an interdisciplinary minisymposium this December, so send us your work & come along! Please share widely! 🔗 hiw.kuleuven.be/clps/events/... #philsci #academicsky #evobio #AI #HPS

Wonderful to see that Helen De Cruz has won the International Society for Science & Religion's General Readership Book Prize for her work, Wonderstruck! This illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living. Learn more: buff.ly/IYNfe0Q

My two brains: (1) Putnam's two brains: getting a bit crowded in this vat. (2) Boltzmann's two brains: poof! (and they're gone)

Earlier this year, Alicja Kwade had a magnificent solo-exhibition in museum M Leuven. In the catalogue, I compare her sculptures with scientific models: "In the sway of a simple model; A philosophical reflection on Alicja Kwade’s pendulum". Pdf: www.sylviawenmackers.be/documents/We... #Art #PhilSci

Postdoc in history of physics @ Radboud University in The Netherlands on "Origins of Irreversibility" part of larger grant to explore fundamental questions concerning entropy, chaos, & irreversibility #HPS ⚛️ Deadline: 14 October 2026 Duration: 2 years, starting 2027 www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

🔬 RESEARCH SHOWCASE | Is scientific research really becoming less disruptive? VUB & KU Leuven researchers uncovered how missing citation data exaggerated the reported decline, using VSC high-memory computing to analyse millions of papers. 👉 www.vscentrum.be/post/a-hidde... #HPC #Research

Both basic and applied research suffer from overpromising rhetoric, says integrity researcher and psychiatrist Joeri Tijdink. He calls for more honest communication in which #reliability, #rigour and #reproducibility are the main product of science. 👇 www.horizons-mag.ch/2026/09/03/a...

Charming weekend scavenger hunt from twigandtoad.com

Back in 2015, my footnotes in "Children of the Cosmos" were mentioned in the jury report of the @fqxi.org essay competition. I still believe it was mainly due to this one. 🤠💃

Interesting 📰 @theguardian.com by @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social on non-neural cognition: www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte... Confronted with this polarizing debate, @philosobio.bsky.social & I wrote a balanced take on basal #cognition from an #evobio lens 👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #HPS

Love this quote: “I have really always thought of science fiction - from Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley onwards, through Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and, of course, Margaret Atwood - as a women’s genre. It is a way of talking about the world as it could be, not as it is.

A bit of an inspection paradox: 🤓 I was part of 5 thesis defenses today and didn't see any women there. Yet, for the other jury members, their colleagues' gender distribution was 50/50, and for the students, jury's gender imbalance was never <1/3. Anyway, my working day didn't pass the Bechdel test.

First author of the critique @vincentholst.bsky.social presented "How Open Code and Data Unveiled Errors in Measuring Scientific Disruption" at STI 2024 in Berlin. Slides available here: data.research.vub.be/sites/defaul... Yes, we firmly agree on the importance of open science in these matters! 🔓

The program is out! Looking forward to three days of great talks on the history of philosophy of technology! All welcome in Maastricht #philtech #histtech #sts #hopos #hopot2026

Me reading psychology: sheesh people should really be more precise in their language. Me reading analytical philosophy:

I’m excited, and still quite dazed, to share some big news. Starting this fall, I'll be an Associate Professor (Maître de Conférences) in Philosophy & History of Biology/Biomedical Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. 🧪🦣💀🏺 philinbiomed.cnrs.fr/andra-menega...

Yesterday marked 10 years since the publication of our article on how Excel spreadsheets cause autocorrect errors to genomics data. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7 #bioinformatics #genomics

Perspectives on Scientific Error 2027 is heading to Copenhagen, Jan 27th to 29th PSE brings together philosophers of science, statisticians and metascientists around 1 question: how do errors get into the scientific record, and what can we do about them? Register your interest at errorsin.science

“Trustworthy scientific knowledge requires more than replicability. It flourishes when a scientific community is sufficiently diverse (in people and in methods) and open to criticism.”

The extent to which new scientific papers and patents shake up their fields has been hotly debated in recent years. A new paper adds another layer of complexity to the argument

So how can the process be improved? Some ideas to initiate a discussion: substantiated critiques should be handled faster than original research, not twice as slowly, and articles under substantiated critique should carry a visible flag while the exchange is under review. 7/7

We know that it is difficult for outsiders to grasp the full details of all analyses, but we believe everyone can see what they are doing here. As much as we want to focus on the science, we cannot let these these tactics go uncommented. At some point, Brandolini’s law takes its toll on us. 6/7

Additionally, they use questionable language. Every children's book they name is classified as a ‘Book’ in SciSciNet. We ran multiple robustness checks, including one that removes all books, all of which can be found in our supplementary information. Our results remain unchanged. 5/7

As another example, Park et al. stated the raw rewired curves to be available upon request in their original peer review file, never supplied them despite repeated requests, and now question the reconstruction this made necessary. They have still not shared their figure. 4/7