Latest piece centering scenarios where AI could autonomously develop harmful capabilities like engineering lethal pathogens But lowering the barrier for malicious actors to cause harm is a risk that's real today So, of course we get stories about hypothetical risks: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

On morning Munich commutes, I see surprisingly little tech use. People read newspapers, nap, or chat. Occasionally someone knits, and I watch a bit wistfully. Kids seem perfectly well-adjusted: those in groups chat and tease each other, those commuting alone do homework or use phones.

"the crypto lobby is pushing Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which ... would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing or even piloting a government-issued digital currency ... without congressional approval" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/o...

"Acceptance of the scientific consensus was very high in the sample as a whole (95.1%), but also in every sub-sample (e.g. no trust in science: 87.3%) ... [P]eople are motivated to reject specific scientific beliefs, and not science as a whole." journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Motivated reasoning (and responding!) is a huge issue for polling - BUT, the magnitude of the problem also depends on what else is asked within a given survey: www.cambridge.org/core/service...

I thought GPT-5 was supposed to tone down the flattery 😂

A friend’s kid told me in 2015: “I can learn anything I want by finding a tutorial on YouTube.” Did I find it credible? Not quite, but the sentiment was fascinating. Still think about it sometimes and also wonder how many people now use video-sharing platforms as their search engines

Very cool that people can be open-minded

If you've felt that broadcast news is less informative, you're probably right. Information density of ABC, CBS, and NBC news segments has declined, according to LLM-based classifications: 5harad.com/papers/no-ne...

Thanks to the folks at APSA for organizing a great conference, and Vancouver for being a great host city! cc @janzilinsky.bsky.social

Finally, as I found in research my on nasty politics, elite rhetoric matters—especially from national leaders. Republican Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has sought to reduce the political temperature following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. www.axios.com/local/salt-l...

The pretty draft is now online. Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

People in Denmark have varied concerns about tech giants: - Impact on young people's development (83.5% concerned) - Role in spreading misinformation (81%) - Ability to influence public opinion (79.5%) - Economic power (79%) - Collection of personal data (78%) - Impact on social cohesion (75%)

So why do most of us rarely switch on the airplane mode? (Not dismissing what the respondents are saying, just wondering what exactly they are telling us about their unhappiness with the current tech)

Every generation discovers that the latest technology is destroying civilization. Every generation is wrong.

Different AI systems are optimized for different tasks. Expecting precise instruction following from current image models shows a misunderstanding of their architecture and training objectives:

I asked 4 AI models to rate the quality of different ideas (all about changing jobs, but for different reasons) 1) Models seems to take users' happiness seriously 2) Gemini flatters users the most, Grok is harsher as an evaluator 3) Overall, it doesn't seem like LLMs were excessively deferential

Here are my lecture slides on the behavioral economics of political persuasion Slides: zilinskyjan.github.io/information-... Repo: github.com/zilinskyjan/...

"Using ChatGPT to write your essays is like bringing a forklift into the weight room" Not quite. It's like bringing a fitness trainer to the gym with you; she's *willing to lift weights* for you, but stands ready to give you excellent feedback on your form It's up to students to choose the latter

Tried making an image of an economics seminar :)

If you want to understand the timing of Trump’s authoritarian political theater around DC policing, check out @janzilinsky.bsky.social in @goodauth.bsky.social. He shows how critical coverage of Trump and Epstein spiked with both liberal & conservative media goodauthority.org/news/the-eps...

I agree, plus there are use cases when the output isn't "right" but it still makes you think, forces you justify or adjust what you think - all useful habits! A "thought partner" example - which French historians glorify the revolution and who emphasizes that it was a civil war?

The Epstein files have managed to unite liberal and conservative media: A new analysis shows President Trump’s handling of this story has prompted critical headlines across the board. (@janzilinsky.bsky.social @goodauth.bsky.social) More, via Opinion Today: opiniontoday.substack.com/p/250807-top...

The Epstein files have managed to unite liberal and conservative media. A new analysis shows Trump’s handling of this story has prompted critical headlines across the board. Read the latest from @janzilinsky.bsky.social: goodauthority.org/news/the-eps...

I go to read an academic paper on ScienceDirect, and before I can even see the abstract, there's this "offer" staring at me.

Looking forward to seeing new and old friends there next month!

A key news driver seems to be the demand for release of new information. See terms like: files, list, records, documents, unseal, and release. (A quick analysis of the recent coverage of the Epstein case in US & UK outlets)

The NY Post and Fox News are ignoring this poll, at least for now. But Newsmax and Brietbart are reporting the unflattering news:

new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.

Very cool that people can be open-minded

The 4% didn’t pass an attention check…

Our recent paper on partisan cheerleading / faultfinding in public opinion surveys:

Thrilled to share the cover of my upcoming book, out February 2026 from @oxfordacademic.bsky.social NO OPTION BUT SABOTAGE The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Young people are experiencing significant emotional distress regarding climate change. For many, though, disagreeing with an item like "people have failed to take care of the planet" could feel equivalent to dismissing environmental problems entirely, creating social pressure to affirm it.

Lies spread faster than the truth. Right? Well, OK, it depends on what stories you select. (It helps to exclude a ton of true stories about the weather, traffic, or sports results) Incidentally, how did 2.5K rumors in the dataset become 126,000 rumors in the abstract?

Discussions of misinformation naturally group around three main themes: health misinfo, social media platform responses, and political lies and contested claims. Terms like "vaccine" bridge health and political discussions.

Misinformation discourse: The term itself connects multiple thematic clusters. - We see platform governance, political misinfo, and vaccine-related clusters. - "Facebook" and "Covid" are major structural hubs, bridging different conversation domains.

Lies spread faster than the truth. Right? Well, OK, it depends on what stories you select. (It helps to exclude a ton of true stories about the weather, traffic, or sports results) Incidentally, how did 2.5K rumors in the dataset become 126,000 rumors in the abstract?

What people already believe about politics seems to matter more than the information they consume cc: @acerbialberto.com @andyguess.com @simonchauchard.bsky.social @m-b-petersen.bsky.social

New paper with @yannistheocharis.bsky.social When it comes to health choices that seem to run counter to people's own self-interest, politics is overwhelmingly more important than individuals' cognitive styles or media diet: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A distinctly 2020s form of masochism:

Truly begging reporters to understand how LLMs work even a little bit

The July 2025 DOJ/FBI memo presents itself as a model of institutional integrity: victim-sensitive & dismissive of conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein Now DT asks his followers to... trust institutions! After how many years of equating law enforcement with a "deep state"?

I used to teach a course on voter learning and behavioral economics. Now posting the core material publicly on GitHub: Repo: github.com/zilinskyjan/... Slides: zilinskyjan.github.io/information-...

A shift from shared TV experiences to personalized YouTube feeds is changing American culture. And some of the YT content is probably harming kids. Though remember that TV was deemed terrible not so long ago? In a few years, will we say: "how healthy it was when people used to watch YouTube" ?

Brian Mann: "please- accept finally that social media is not a viable way to get factual information. It was a noble experiment. It failed. Traditional journalism, while imperfect, is the way. Please pay a little bit and use it."

One of the slides that students seem to like zilinskyjan.github.io/information-...

Walks in Wales - recommended

So excited to see this article in print! Incredibly proud of all the amazing work done on this article by my incredible co-authors, but extra special shout out to @hwaight.bsky.social & @solmg.bsky.social, co-first authors on the piece. See the 🧵 👇

I used to teach a course on voter learning and behavioral economics. Now posting the core material publicly on GitHub: Repo: github.com/zilinskyjan/... Slides: zilinskyjan.github.io/information-...