Andy Wills

Hi, I'm Andy J. Wills, Ph.D. (he/him) and a Professor of Psychology at the School of Psychology , University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. I have researched cognitive processes in biological intelligences (mostly humans), and taught psychology to undergraduates, for over 25 years.

This is a personal website; it is not affilitated with or endorsed by my employer.

The decline of physical communities

What research culture in UK universities has lost, and what will replace it.

Posted on March 31, 2023

I’ve been based at the University of Exeter this week, a place I worked for 12 years and where I’ve maintained good relationships with several people ever since. In the 12 years I worked here, it was a good, bad, and indifferent experience for me, at various points. But there... [Read More]

Tags: misc

Why I'm currently declining some unpaid peer-review requests

Industrial Action in UK Higher Education

Posted on November 30, 2022

TL;DR: Due to Industrial Action, I am currently limiting the number of new, external, unpaid peer-review jobs I take on. I will still take on some unpaid reviews, proportionate to my own use of the peer review system. Beyond that, I’ll decline requests for unpaid reviews. If you’d like to... [Read More]

Tags: misc

GPT-3 does math

You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this?

Posted on September 27, 2022

Having mainly focussed on object classification in my career, I thought I’d have a peek at what AI language models have been up to in the last few years. I started by asking it some questions related to immigration, which I won’t post here because one of the answers was... [Read More]

Tags: compcat

Coffee as a unit of account

Posted on April 1, 2022

It seems to be increasingly common to use the price of a take-away cup of coffee as a way of saying something is affordable - the most recent example I came across is that COVID tests, which were free in England until today, are now “less than the price of... [Read More]

Tags: compcat

Why a model fails

The difference between knowing that it fails, and why it fails.

Posted on February 3, 2022

In a peer review I got a while back, someone wrote “Sometimes understanding why a simple model fails is far more informative than showing that a complex model succeeds”. (You know who you are, if you’d prefer to be named, drop me an email). I wrote a paragraph in response... [Read More]

Tags: compcat