Back when I was a computer science student or PhD candidate in AI, I would have never in a million years imagined I’d be spending countless hours doing qualitative, theory guided, analyses and with such certainty it is the right thing to do.
In a new paper, SFI researchers examine the Boltzmann brain, a thought experiment that raises fundamental questions about memory, entropy, and time. The work clarifies how arguments for or against these ideas depend on assumptions about the past that are not fixed by physical laws alone.
Our data shows a ten-year trend towards disengagement from online news, with interest in news falling and news avoidance rising
Our researcher Craig T. Robertson examines why this may be happening and what news organisations can do about it
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-...
Are we measuring the patterns of digital media consumption incorrectly? This question is relevant to several phenomena such as news avoidance and spreading false information.
I explore this in my latest #substack post
substack.com/home/post/p-...
list of banned keywords
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
Analysing data on Portuguese teenagers speaking about falling in love. It seems love has been outbid—one-night stands are practical, money is king, and romance is a relic.
I watch as sentiment is buried, its epitaph written in bank statements.
#conversation
Misinformation isn't random - it's strategic. 🧵
In the first cross-national comparative study, we examine 32M tweets from politicians.
We find that misinformation is not a general condition: it is driven by populist radical right parties.
with @julianachueri.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1177/1940...
Meta confirmed that the company will allow AI-generated users on its Facebook and Instagram platforms
The AI-generated users will be labelled as AI and look and act like any other users. www.ft.com/content/9118...
If you're following the OpenAI o3 announcements and are curious about the "ARC-AGI" benchmark and why I think solving these tasks by brute-force compute defeats the original purpose, here are some past posts about this from my Substack: (1/3)
🚨New WP🚨
We examine news sharing on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)But low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE, even BlueSky!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
In this article we identify six potential pitfalls for federated social media like #Mastodon & #Bluesky
1. Distributed governance
2. Commercial capture
3. Inclusive access
4. Moderation at scale
5. Reputational anti-halo
6. Technoromanticism
ijoc.org/index.php/ij... #commsky #openaccess
Happy birthday dear Margaret (Maggie) Boden 💕
Logged in here after five months and things look very different. So many people from complex systems and network science are now here ✨💕✨
One of my #sejkko_lonelyhouses — but AI generated. Feels kind of weird.
I wonder whether the extreme right politicians in Portugal feel in any way responsible for how their hate has percolated even to our children. Some say they condemn what just happened to a child in Lisbon, condemn... it can be such a cold word. I am heartbroken 💔
I'm closely observing how influential figures like J.K. Rowling, R. Dawkins, and J. Peterson leverage their impact. I'm also reflecting on my own preconceptions, considering the importance of embracing complexity in thought rather than falling back on Cartesian simplicity.
As if John Sugar wasn’t cool enough already—👽
https://mashable.com/article/sugar-alien-twist
Today I learnt that the first recorded use of the word identity—as “identitie”—took place around 1570. From the Latin identitas (sameness), it now encompasses our so many notions around self and social dimensions. What will this word mean in 100 years?
Our lab will be at the #complexnetworks conference next week to present preliminary findings on the use of explicit replies by secondary school students in online group debates.
Do they use replies for deepening the conversation?
For something else?
Does it matter?
New checklist by the Research Quality Committee at NeuRA stresses preregistration, open data and code, solid sample size justification, reporting exact p-values and no claims based on non-significant results. neura.edu.au/resources-to... All sensible recommendations.
neura.edu.au/resources/co...
Analyzing Modularity Maximization in Approximation, Heuristic, and Graph Neural Network Algorithms for Community Detection.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10898
Totally.
Just sent off another "NO" to a conference: to the Vienna Institute for the Retardation of all Knowledge. This Vienna Crowd—a mass of nasty and unhappy creeps, I just couldn't stand it. But why do I say no to all conferences? Because I want to lead a peaceful life, because I want to stumble along at my own speed, produce my nonsense at my own speed, watched only by a few friends and knowing the reactions of these friends only (Anita, Karen, Susan—broads first—and you and your mafia). I am a contentious fellow, and if I am at a conference I get worried about "my position in contemporary thought," like Sir K whom I understand very well. I don't want to be worried in this way, it is time-consuming, and demeaning. And it is absolutely idiotic. But I have this weakness—so I'd rather stay away. Having a battle with you and Elie or Worrall is an entirely different thing, it is a most enter-taining and interesting way of expressing our friendship and I would not want to be without it. Your pap
Paul Feyerabend, not a fan of conferences. From a 1974 letter written to Imre Lakatos (in "For and Against Method") 🧪
Big fan of listening to AI tech consultants talking about the effect of AI on news, audience trust, and the public sphere without a single shred of evidence.
This, in October, is insane.
🔔 Job alert - There's a fully funded PhD Scholarship in Network Science to work with me and join the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University London. Great opportunity to join the new NetSI London hub!
Application deadline: 31st Oct 2023
Feel free to reach out for more info/details etc.
Many reviewers of extended abstracts seem to expect that, when looking at the document, they become one with Shiva (or some other deity) and get access to the paper that will be, and even beyond.
Seriously. Scope, please. Thank you 🤟🏾
Daniel Dennett talks to Closer To Truth about his new book, consciousness, free will, and AI youtu.be/90BTBqRPbqk?...
They explored structural features from the early steps of the tree as well as user + content + timestamp features of the root node only.
Contextual features were very limited, but improving this aspect is difficult. (2/2)
