Paul Smaldino boosted
*
Jonathan Carroll

@bthalpin I found this example to be very interesting and wanted to see if I could golf it down a little with Distances.jl - I think it came out quite clean.

gist.github.com/jonocarroll/81

GIF
1
Paul Smaldino boosted
*
Brendan Halpin

I've been looking at @psmaldino's book on social simulation press.princeton.edu/books/pape for a potential new course.

I like it a lot but it uses NetLogo. I'd prefer to use Julia, so I spent a couple of hours this afternoon translating his first example.

Result: likely quite straightforward to teach from this book using Julia. Blog summary:

brendanhalpin.net/blog/posts/n

GIF
1+
Paul Smaldino boosted
Smudge The Insult Cat 🐀
fuck-customers The next person who tries to correct me when I say "Happy Holidays" is going to be told Happy Hanukkah instead. Very tired of hearing, "No, it's MERRY CHRISTMAS." I'm pretty sure Judaism was around a lot longer than your Buckstar's boycotting butt, Karen. batzendrick My boss once shared a great story about that. This happened when he was in a layover in North Carolina back when the "War on Christmas" bullshit was first becoming prominent. He had gone to get a pack of cigarettes, and after he paid for it: "Merry Christmas." "Happy holidays." "No. I said Merry Christmas." "Do you know what Hanukkah is about?" "No, what?" "Some people tried to make us worship their ways, so we rose up and killed them. Happy Hanukkah."
1+
Paul Smaldino boosted
Dan Gillmor

As warned, Reddit has taken a bundle of money from "Open"AI and will use it to further monetize what you -- and the volunteers who moderate it all -- contributed for free.

It's the norm now, and particularly slimy in this case.

theverge.com/2024/5/16/2415852

1+
Paul Smaldino boosted
Paul Smaldino

Evolution of Similarity-Biased Social Learning.

New preprint with Alejandro Perez Velilla. A long time in the making. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/j7ya

Humans often learn preferentially from ingroup members who share a social identity affiliation, while ignoring or rejecting information when it comes from someone perceived to be from an outgroup. This sort of bias has well-known negative consequences---exacerbating cultural divides, polarization, and conflict---while reducing the information available to learners. Why does it persist? Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that similarity-biased social learning (also called parochial social learning) is adaptive when (1) individual learning is error-prone and (2) sufficient diversity inhibits the efficacy of social learning that ignores identity signals, as long as (3) those signals are sufficiently reliable indicators of adaptive behavior. We further show that our results are robust to considerations of other social learning strategies, focusing on conformist and payoff-biased transmission. We conclude by discussing the consequences of our analyses for understanding diversity in the modern world.
0
Paul Smaldino

Evolution of Similarity-Biased Social Learning.

New preprint with Alejandro Perez Velilla. A long time in the making. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/j7ya

Humans often learn preferentially from ingroup members who share a social identity affiliation, while ignoring or rejecting information when it comes from someone perceived to be from an outgroup. This sort of bias has well-known negative consequences---exacerbating cultural divides, polarization, and conflict---while reducing the information available to learners. Why does it persist? Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that similarity-biased social learning (also called parochial social learning) is adaptive when (1) individual learning is error-prone and (2) sufficient diversity inhibits the efficacy of social learning that ignores identity signals, as long as (3) those signals are sufficiently reliable indicators of adaptive behavior. We further show that our results are robust to considerations of other social learning strategies, focusing on conformist and payoff-biased transmission. We conclude by discussing the consequences of our analyses for understanding diversity in the modern world.
0
Paul Smaldino

Lovely review of my book from Mirta Galesic/SFI

santafe.edu/news-center/news/n

0
Paul Smaldino boosted
Paul Smaldino

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Identity and Politics at IAST/Toulouse, May 15-16. Looking forward to this.

iast.fr/interdisciplinary-work

The Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) will be hosting an Interdisciplinary Workshop on Identity and Politics. This workshop is organized by the IAST Research Team on Leadership, Power, and Inequality (LPI). May 15-16, 2024
0
Paul Smaldino

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Identity and Politics at IAST/Toulouse, May 15-16. Looking forward to this.

iast.fr/interdisciplinary-work

The Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) will be hosting an Interdisciplinary Workshop on Identity and Politics. This workshop is organized by the IAST Research Team on Leadership, Power, and Inequality (LPI). May 15-16, 2024
0
Paul Smaldino

Re: recent SCOTUS decision on Trump's immunity, most folks are (prob correctly) focused on it as a delay strategy, assuming they will ultimately uphold the lower court's decision. 🤞 If they don't, seems like a clear signal that right-wing coalitions are committed to going all-in on authoritarianism.

0
Paul Smaldino boosted
Robotistry

@futurebird @stveje
NOT looking for suggestions.

Bemoaning the fact that on the iPad

1. You can't search for "no in-app purchases, pay up front, no ads, do not collect personal data" apps

2. There is no way to find the good apps without wading through a morass of terrible apps

3. Developer payment options are primarily: gather user's data and sell it; charge rent; ads / protection racket

Almost no apps operate on a "pay me to own the thing as is" basis.

1+
Paul Smaldino

New draft of a modeling paper I really love, by me and Zack Dunivin. "Dynamics of covert signaling: Modeling the emergence and extinction of identity signals."

Methods! We got coupled differential equations, agent-based modeling, random forest classifiers.
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3tz2

Results. See abstract.
Results. See abstract.
Abstract Covert identity signals permit the communication of group membership to ingroup members while avoiding potentially costly detection by members of other groups. If individuals are incentivized to detect others' group memberships, however, covert signals may not remain covert for very long. We propose a theoretical extension to the literature on covert signaling in which conventionalized identity signals can become destabilized when learned by outgroup individuals, to be replaced by the emergence of new signaling conventions. We formalize this idea with both analytical and agent-based modeling of ingroup and outgroup individuals who to learn about signals of group membership. Depending on the risk and associated cost of detection by the outgroup, the model yields three dynamic classes: saturation, where all identity signals become stable conventions and never go extinct; cycling, in which new signals emerge to replace old ones as they are learned by the outgroup; and suppression, in which informative identity signals never emerge. Our analysis has implications for understanding identity signaling, the emergence of conventions, coded speech, and the ebb and flow of fashion cycles.
Model diagram
0
Paul Smaldino boosted
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.

“Grandpa, if everyone knew what was causing climate change and how to stop it, why didn’t you?”

1
Paul Smaldino

I really enjoyed this conversation on the Converging Dialogues podcast talking about Modeling Social Behavior, models, theory, and the future of social science. convergingdialogues.substack.c

0
Paul Smaldino boosted
Steven Strogatz

The third edition of my textbook, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, was published today. You can preview the first 68 pages on Google Books, or take a look at the preface below to see what's new. The main new thing is a chapter on the Kuramoto model! Hope you enjoy it.

Page one of the preface
Cover
1+
Paul Smaldino boosted
Elio Campitelli

There's not enough "fuck you"s in the world to react to this shit. #LLMs should be tools used in the service of people; what in the world is this proposal to make people work for LLMs?!

Any and all changes to scientific publishing needs to be for so that other **people** can access them and understand them.

And the single most important change would be for Nature and other publishers not to charge 29.99 USD for a shitty 4-paragraph essay that they didn't pay for themselves.

#AcademicChatter

Adjust the format of papers to improve description by AI The chatbot ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models (LLMs) can make scientific research more efficient, but they can also introduce mistakes when they describe scientific work (Nature 622, 234–236; 2023). I suggest that small changes to the format of scientific papers could improve the training of LLMs. Describing the research method rather than citing a reference to it, for example, would enable the LLM to summarize methods accurately. Writing in the third person would identify individuals more clearly. This would require a significant shift in conventional scientific writing style, but LLMs do not recognize who ‘we’ are. The use of in-line citations by authors would improve LLM training by reducing the chance of a disconnect between a statement and its supporting reference. These should use just the DOI, without the journal title, volume and page numbers. The DOI makes it easier to verify that a reference is genuine (T. Day Prof. Geogr. https://doi.org/k5f6; 2023). Providing papers with an extended summary written in the third person and in a journalistic style could also improve AI-produced literature reviews. This summary would be more effective than a conventional abstract at highlighting the significance of the work. It would also enhance readability for both machines and humans, helping to boost societal awareness of scientific research.
1+
Paul Smaldino

I totally slept on the fact that today was my book’s UK (and EU?) release date! It should be available worldwide now. Get your snarky advice about modeling right here!

From: @psmaldino
qoto.org/@psmaldino/1111713998

1
Paul Smaldino boosted
Paul Smaldino

Publication day! The modeling textbook I started five years ago is finally out today. I'm proud of it, and really grateful to everyone who helped make it better.

PUP: press.princeton.edu/books/pape

AMZN: amazon.com/dp/0691224145?tag=i

Modeling Social Behavior book cover
1+
Paul Smaldino

I got asked to make a list of five books I like that are connected thematically with my own book. I like talking about books, so I did. Here's "The best books about (human) behavior that reward working through the math." shepherd.com/best-books/behavi

0
Paul Smaldino

Neat documentary about SFI. Around 16:30 you can see a workshop I ran in May sitting in the atrium (I am behind some other people and not visible, though you can see my hat peaking out). youtube.com/watch?v=8gjZ_dfzaD

0
Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.

Trending now

0 people talking
0
0 people talking
0

Resources

Developers

What is Mastodon?

qoto.org

More…

v3.5.19-qoto · Privacy policy