Anne Urai

@anne-urai

Academic nomad | Doubtful decision-maker | Climate worrier | Assistant Professor @ Leiden University, views very obviously mine

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Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jul 3

#3 of #booksIveRead: Walden Two by BF Skinner. Thanks @stepalminteri.bsky.social for the tip!

The prologue, written in the late 40s, spells out all of the world's problems that have worsened and changed shape, but that have not fundamentally changed: namely those of human behavior, greed, power misuse and our collective inability to create a world for people to thrive.

The novel is fun and easy to read, and promotes a certain type of utopia based on collective living and an education aimed to eliminate feelings of jealousy, property and competition. This would make an interesting read paired with insights from real-world eco-villages, residential meditation halls, and experiments in cooperative living. Certainly worth the read and food for thought.

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jun 25

Meanwhile, at @unileiden.bsky.social

Btw, ironic that Anne has her exam on the climate crisis during a record breaking day

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 29

On the last day of #sbdm2026, @koumurayama.bsky.social presents a beautiful framework for understanding sustained curiosity over long timescales

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 28

We moved the posters outside! Robin Vloeberghs showing how decision criterion fluctuations capture variability in confidence Paper coming soon!

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 28

@svangaal.bsky.social presenting computational models of the ubiquitous inverted-u models www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 28

@dikshagup.bsky.social showing her beautiful work on a common source for history biases and lapses

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 28

Starting us off on day 2 of #sbdm2026, @athenaakrami.bsky.social focuses on the distinction between generative and discriminative strategies for decision-making

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 27

Right now, check out @isabellehoxha.bsky.social’s poster on using disentangled RNNs to decompose sources of variability in decision making and its changes with age

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 27

@seowxft.bsky.social shows what gaps to bridge to align ideas of metacognition between lab and clinic

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 27

@epares.bsky.social showing normative models of evidence accumulation in volatile environments

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 27

@mael-lebreton.bsky.social starts the day with SDT models of probabilistic confidence judgments to explain differences between free, agentic choices vs observed/replayed decisions. Confirmation between internal beliefs and elicited reports is key

Anne Urai@anne-urai· May 27

Let’s go #sbdm2026! Looking forward to three days packed with decision-making

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Feb 9

Trying to question the new norm of students staring at their laptops + me having to shout to get them to pay attention to me. This worked wonders - will add to every new lecture

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jan 29

This evening (29 Jan) at 20:00 CET, I will host a @scientists4future.nl webinar by Jeroen Oomen, to discuss his new book Captured Futures - the drama of environmental politics. Join us tonight scientists4future.nl/en/events (recording will be shared on YouTube after)!

Environmental politics ‘as we know it’ cannot deliver. Despite all efforts, politics is unable to bend ecological trends. Introducing what a Nature review called "arguably the most important book on environmental politics in the past decade”, Jeroen Oomen argues environmental politics is ‘captured’. This capture runs deeper than simply lobbying or a lack of political will. Examining environmental politics as drama reveals how all actors play their roles, environmental politics has become trapped in ways that both reproduce its own failure and restrict people’s ability to imagine alternatives.

For Jeroen Oomen, and his co-author Maarten Hajer, this is deeply worrying. Environmental politics now generates ever more speculative technological proposals in a desperate attempt to signal success, while also generating backlash to its own aims and policies. Yet there is also reason for hope. It’s never too late for institutions to free themselves from capture. In fact, Captured Futures stresses the contingency of political institutions – and hence, also the contingency of capture. If people recognize that the rules of the game today are failing – or worse, rigged – they can simply stop following them. The question then is: how to reimagine the rules of the game? Captured Futures suggests a new, more cultural approach to environmental politics could have more leverage on the societal imagination. Combining this with the formulation of new discourses and using alternative ‘dramaturgies of change’, Jeroen highlights how to find more effective and more inspiring ideas about how to approach the future and, ultimately, liberate environmental politics.

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jan 5

Feel like this fresh year needs some serious culture change? We got you covered! With @clarekelly.bsky.social @eikofried.bsky.social Anna van 't Veer 📝 rdcu.be/eXja4

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Nov 17

Thanks @thetransmitter.bsky.social for this Rising Stars of Neuroscience award! I'm not at #SfN so I did my best to take a photo of the trophy I received (fun to snap a picture of the text' shadows). www.thetransmitter.org/early-career...

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Nov 5

Very proud to have launched our manifesto and report to make Dutch academia more sustainable - a moment to celebrate after two years of hard work with the Green Young Academy, DJA and many inspiring colleagues dejongeakademie.nl/en/news/3148...

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Nov 3

Hi @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, perhaps weird Q: with @phil-johnson.bsky.social we have submitted a preprint which we'd love to list in a grant (deadline Tuesday 4th Nov, ~24hrs from now). Any bioRxiv affiliates who have time to take a quick look? 🙏

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Sep 29

Join me for a webinar with @swaziadam.bsky.social, co-hosted by @scientists4future.nl and @scientistrebellion.nl What Now for Social Science and Local Collective Action? 13 October 2025, 20:00-21:00 (NL time)

Our social mobilisation for climate action has been too tiny to leave fossil fuels in the ground, global heating is accelerating, fossil finance and extraction are at record levels, the green technical transition is deeply inadequate when done for profit and assuming growth-as-usual, international law is trashed in the face of genocide, and there is now in the US, and elsewhere, a backlash against the already meagre policy gains. Beyond the problem of carbon pollution we are superseding 7 of 9 planetary boundaries.
In this presentation I will invite a discussion of the implications of these facts for our emotional lives, the kinds of struggles we might wage collectively, and the kind of social science we might do.

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Sep 16

Also thought back to davidgraeber.org/articles/it-...

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 15

Upstairs #ccn2025, @isabellehoxha.bsky.social is sharing her recent adventures capturing choice variability with disentangled RNNs

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 15

Poster time #ccn2025! Come see @phil-johnson.bsky.social talk HMM models of engagement and dynamical models of arousal

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 14

A double-well model can help disentangling different population-level mechanisms for the role of neuromodulatory activity in behavioral state transitions Next: fitting the model to trial-by-trial data!

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 14

@phil-johnson.bsky.social presenting her work on estimating latent engagement states in @intlbrainlab.bsky.social mice #CCN2025

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 14

Closing words of warning

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 14

@davidpoeppel.bsky.social points out the elephant in the conference: whichever direction of the planet we look, things are bad. Einstein, chomsky and arendt point out to us that silence is not neutral 👏 #CCN2025

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 13

Don’t miss Robin Vloeberghs’ poster 92 now: an explicit model of trial to trial fluctuations in decision criterion captures variability in confidence judgments

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Aug 12

@isabellehoxha.bsky.social rocking her first #CCN2025 poster on her work with @stepalminteri.bsky.social on range adaptation. Stay tuned for her second poster on Friday afternoon, and @phil-johnson.bsky.social’ talk on Thursday!

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jul 4

What a week @Global Tipping Points conference @gsiexeter.bsky.social From stark warnings on very-near climate tipping points to identifying feedback loops, system rules (in finance, markets and culture) and mindset change we need for climate action 🌍 Heavy-hearted but determined & inspired ✊

Anne Urai@anne-urai· Jul 4

My latest: a short review on latent variable models to help uncover trial-to-trial structure in perceptual decision-making strategies authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMiv4sIRv...