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> Even the controversial 2003 Iraq War offers a revealing case. For all the war’s many problems and deceptions, the United States abstained from seizing Iraq’s oil. Iraqi oil ultimately remained under Iraqi control, even as U.S. forces occupied the country. goodauthority.org/news/trump-m...

Second, we need to distinguish between two kinds of nasty rhetoric: A) Rhetoric used by marginal politicians or opposition figures to grab attention when they lack agenda-setting power. B) Rhetoric used by national leaders, and amplified by supporters, to demonize opponents or minority groups.

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Please share with all the awesome applicants you know!

Very cool to read this from @kenzonera.bsky.social and co-authors! From the abstract: "those low in conspiracy mentality not only believed less in conspiracies but also underestimated their prevalence" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Week 1 of 2026

Mechanisms of Europe’s “Death” since I was old enough to read newspapers: - Inability to enact “structural reforms” - Too much public debt - Excessive focus on curbing fiscal deficits (“austerity”) - Populism - Low birth rates - Absence of a European Silicon Valley - Migration - Stagnation

Research shows people dislike and want to block speech they believe is harmful. Wrote for @goodauth.bsky.social about this a few weeks ago: goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute is hiring Postdoctoral Fellows (Deadline Jan 23rd, 2026)! 💫 Reach out and apply if you're interested in working with me! I'm especially excited to work with postdocs on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs.

I pay a similar amount for www.hey.com largely to avoid Gmail or Outlook

Maybe the impact of chatbots on truth is actually greater than the impact of deepfakes (for now)

My latest for @goodauth.bsky.social goodauthority.org/news/what-we...

Mechanisms of Europe’s “Death” since I was old enough to read newspapers: - Inability to enact “structural reforms” - Too much public debt - Excessive focus on curbing fiscal deficits (“austerity”) - Populism - Low birth rates - Absence of a European Silicon Valley - Migration - Stagnation

This excellent paper is now out - Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Code: github.com/kobihackenbu... A useful summary by @lpargyle.bsky.social: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

[email protected]'s keynote in Oxford was fantastic. What comes after the traditional model of social media ends? 1) Algorithmic broadcasting platforms (everything turning into TikTok and Instagram reels) 2) Private and semi-private spheres (like group chats) 3) Chatbots and LLMs as new media

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna! ⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025 wratil.eu/files/MULTIR... 1/4 🧵

- Will certain people always continue "just asking questions"? Yes. - But citizens have the right to ask questions and, in a tolerant society, they could ask them without getting mocked - It's a bad case here, because how could anyone prove a negative? (Can't show "we're not altering the weather")

Liked this passage in @smotus.bsky.social's book - though there are places were non-confusing design is the exception and a cryptic design is the default...

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