Robb Willer

And here I thought that "Operation Resolute Sword" (Iraq in 2004) was the most ridiculous and revealing military operation name in US history.

De La Soul: Tiny Desk Concert YouTube video by NPR Music

youtu.be/5AVYDHTOixU

hell yeah

Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course? The human subconscious is such an interesting thing. No matter how much you think you’ve got it figured out, it’ll always spit out the most random stuff. Take me, for example. After coming home from a...

Commentary: Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

Damn

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about...

🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples?

We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

Are you Chicago-bound for SPSP 2026?
Quick plug to the Politics & Social Change Lab affiliates presenting talks & posters on coalitions, issue advocacy, media framing, inequality, social media & well-being, and other topics. Very proud of them and their work! 😀
Details below 👇

"Call for International Doctoral Students: Short-Term Research Visit at the Social Media Lab" socialmedialab.ca/2026/02/24/c...

This symposium looks terrific! Too often we use theories in unscientific ways, allowing zombie theories to wander the literature despite substantial disconfirming evidence. The answer isn't to retreat from theory, but to recommit to the creation of falsifiable theories. I'm psyched to attend this!

"The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

Thanks @pnasnexus.org for sharing our new work on AI authorship labeling and persuasion...check out their post to learn more!

Paper link: ow.ly/KXeE50YhHag

Isabel O. Gallegos, Chen Shani, @shi-weiyan.bsky.social, Federico Bianchi, Izzy Gainsburg, @jurafsky.bsky.social,
@robbwiller.bsky.social

Interesting!

The question of our time is how do you artistically rebel — and win — against a totally flat cultural landscape? And before my readers, who I assume are all approximately 36 years old and very tired, say, “so what, who cares?” This does matter. I mean, just look around right now lol. You know things are bad when even OpenAI President Greg Brockman is posting stuff, like “Taste is a new core skill.” If people had taste, your company wouldn’t exist, Greg. But if everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that? Well, I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself. Culture right now is determined not by human teams of editors and producers picking and choosing what youth culture gets the spotlight, but, instead, by the unthinking algorithms that power YouTube and TikTok. Which means the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool by young people will, slowly, but surely, be whatever is unacceptable on those platforms.

A post so smart I'm almost afraid to share it.

www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-t...

It seems nuts to me that CNN has partnered with an online gambling site (Kalshi) and hypes their betting lines as “news” to report.

Rigorous design & evaluation of LLMs' provision of election info is essential.

NEW PAPER by two-time fellow @robbwiller.bsky.social & collaborators, "A nonpartisan source grounded AI voter guide is perceived as trustworthy and affects voting intentions"

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

⬇️ Robb's 🧵

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

LLM outputs are very "mean-y", like an avg of everyone's writing style. And I find it's hard to prompt it out of that style. The models have a persistent tendency to play it safe, stylistically.

Maybe it's good news, that there is writing and analysis of ours that's not so easily replaced.

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Idk, I'm still inclined to just continue evaluating blogposts on the quality of the argument, writing, etc. I agree that poorly written, mediocre LLM output is a waste of time to read, but I see analogous human writing similarly.

SWALWELL: You said you wanted to see a deportation process that was 'like Amazon Prime but with human beings.' How many times has Amazon Prime shot a mom 3 times in the face?

LYONS: None


SWALWELL: How many times has Amazon Prime shot a nurse 10 times in the back?

LYONS: None

How can you say that such a study is necessarily misguided without reading it? What if the paper addressed the sampling, latent assumptions, fair comparison, etc. points you make here, would it still have to be misguided?

49 years ago today

The Clash begin recording their debut album at CBS Studios in London with producer Micky Foote. The album was recorded over three weekend sessions.

📸 Caroline Coon

#punk #punks #punkrock #theclash #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Thank you for leading us, @kristianvsf.bsky.social!

The Way Back After Backsliding: Public Opinion and the Restoration of Democracy - Kristian Frederiksen, Robb Willer, Michael Bang Petersen, 2026 Abundant prior research has analyzed the mass public’s role in democratic backsliding. Comparatively little research has studied democratic restoration, the reh...

Great to see "The Way Back After Backsliding: Public Opinion and the Restoration of Democracy" with @robbwiller.bsky.social and @m-b-petersen.bsky.social out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

How to motivate collective action on climate One of the most effective ways to move individuals to act together on climate involves showing them how past collective actions have delivered structural change, a new study finds. What doesn’t work? ...

@stanforddoerr.bsky.social profiled new research by Stanford PACS faculty affiliates @madalina.bsky.social and
@smconstantino.bsky.social, Faculty Co-Director @robbwiller.bsky.social, and co-authors testing 17 different interventions intended to encourage people to join a collective #ClimateAction.

Election information often feels overwhelming. What if you could get personalized, nonpartisan info about the candidates and issues on your ballot? We built an AI voter guide to help. Check out our new working paper to learn more!

Clickable link to the working paper here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

H/t to @ballotpedia.org for their terrific work producing an excellent source of political information. Also to @yamilrvelez.bsky.social, @semrasevi.bsky.social, & Don Green for contributing to this growing area of study on AI voter guides.

**Major** kudos to @jsmernyk.bsky.social &
@jonnekamphorst.bsky.social for leading this project, and to co-authors Keshav Sivakumar and @adambonica.bsky.social

And thanks as well to
@pascl-stanford.bsky.social and the AI for Public Benefit Lab for supporting this project!

In summary: an AI voter guide grounded in a high-quality, nonpartisan information source can provide trusted and trustworthy information, constituting a potentially useful tool for voters:

👉https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/whsm8_v1