More openings! We’re looking for top talent to join us in Dublin, an EU Capital, great airport, minimal far-right presence! Community Engagement/Lab Officer (€50,207/year; ddl 17 Jan) Postdoc (€47,412/year; 17 Jan) 2 PhD Positions (€33,000/year; 20 Dec)

Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies. I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of "elections have consequences" I have ever seen

I am often approached by students that are insecure about the robustness of their results. These are students who have submitted a paper for publication, and after being rejected, start wondering how to make it more “bulletproof.” This is good. Reviewers often raise good questions and papers improve by taking that feedback seriously. But incorporating feedback requires sometimes reading between the lines, and here is where many students stumble. When a reviewer rejects a paper is not because they were convinced by the entirety of the argument and became skeptical all of a sudden when they reached “table twelve.”This seems obvious, but it is not. If it were, these students would rewrite their papers to clarify and reframe their contribution instead of trying to prop up the same argument further with additional tables and figures. So what often happens is these students get rejected again while they keep on adding things to their paper. They end up with a paper that is hundreds of pages long, which nobody wants to read, and that is more focused on describing caveats than explaining its goal. Often, what some of these papers need to improve is to narrow down & qualify their claims. Something that can be emotionally hard for a student holding on to text they took months to craft. But readers don’t care about the effort of the writer. They care about the clarity of the text. The sunk cost fallacy that pushes students to reuse their old paragraphs only hurts them. To become a better writer you need to understand that editing is a war where you don’t take prisoners. If a page or two are no longer contributing to the story, you must kill them. The effort that went into crafting them is not a good argument for their survival. For example, imagine you’ve written a section detailing six robustness checks for your model. If your core argument is already shaky, those six checks won’t save it. Instead, they’ll overwhelm the reader with detail, making it harder to understand the central point of the paper. A better approach would be to reassess your claim, narrow its scope, and focus on the evidence that matters most. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can rewrite something from scratch once you understand why it is not working. And you’ll be surprised how much better a version that doesn’t reuse any of the previous text can be. If all the previous text did was help you understand the weaknesses of your argument, then it served its purpose and died with dignity. Many students, however, find this process of ruthless editing unsettling. They fear that removing content diminishes the strength of their contribution. But the truth is, good writing isn’t about how much you can add—it’s about how effectively you can communicate. Academic writing, in particular, is not a competition for word count or complexity; it’s a test of how well you can guide your reader through your ideas and conclusions. Reviewers don’t expect you to build a fortress of data to defend every possible critique. Instead, they want you to sharpen your argument, clarify your contribution, and focus on the evidence that best supports your claim. By narrowing the scope, you often make your work stronger, not weaker. A precise, well-supported claim carries far more weight than a sprawling, overcomplicated one. So, the next time you face rejection or critical feedback, resist the urge to pile on more content. Instead, take the harder but ultimately more rewarding path to strip away the excess and hone your argument. Simplicity and clarity win in the long run. Writing is not about convincing yourself that you’ve said enough—it’s about convincing your reader that you’ve said something that matters.