Do we really need representatives in a democracy? Our paper shows how systems based on collective intelligence could be used by citizens to identify and find solutions to their problems even at a national scale! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

So, somebody wrote a comment on one of my articles. Their core message is rather sound (indeed it's the same as what we wrote in our article). The problem is that they make so many mistakes I don't really know what to make of this... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Today we have the first public event of the Special Interest Group on Strongly Empirical Modelling, with a talk from Bruce Edmonds titled: Towards inferring clusters of “cognitive models” from survey data. See you at 2pm CET! ethz.zoom.us/j/66230792870

Why do people prefer using statistical tests that nobody ever heard of instead of just bootstrapping? (I'm really asking, it's not a complaint or sarcastic or anything) Wouldn't bootstrapping also make results more understandable?

Another figure from a (now retracted) scientific publication. I'm not an expert, but I feel proportions may be a little off... www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/...

Yes, this is a real image from a scientific publication 😅 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some years ago I applied ResIN to a Harry Potter dataset. The more two people are similar (in terms of how they relate to other characters), the tighter their connection. As you can see, the HP world is heavily polarized. But now my question is: why did I do something like that??

Apparently, ignoring all those predatory journals made me very popular with girls! (btw, all these emails are from a single day)

To cite this meme: Photoshop et al. (2025)

How can we develop a better understanding of Complex Attitude-Identity Systems (CAIS)? Here👇we introduce a theory of Belief Networks to explain how to accurately measure them. This will help us understand how beliefs connect, evolve and shape identity. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Today, both Samuel Moor-Smith and I will give a presentation at the Social Simulation Conference. If you are interested in the validation of ABMs, their classes of equivalence and how psychometrics plays an important role, join us!

I am finally back from holid... what happened here? Did I sleep for 50 years?

How many chips are in a bag of chips? Measurement and conceptualization can lead to radically different outcomes. www.nature.com/articles/s44... @justanormaldino.bsky.social

Looking wise while totally lost — a timeless academic tradition.

How well do *opinion dynamics* models perform on empirical data? Results are here and... let's say they are not the best... I think we really need to focus more effort on improving models' realism and testing procedures. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Should I discuss anything else in the Conclusion section?

Tired of AI images that look like Studio Ghibli's? Me neither, but here's Dragon Ball style, for no specific reason.

Not sure what kind of black magic Adrian Lüders used to write this article, but we're in the New York Times... again! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...

A viral post claimed that, in our study, we showed that Democrats are close-minded. Here are my thoughts and explanations of what the article is really showing. youtu.be/lgumeckzhWM

I'll be at the ISA Forum of Sociology in Rabat this week. If you're around, let’s connect!

Yes, every opinion dynamics model is actually a class of equivalent models. This can be used both (1) to verify equivalence between models and (2) to improve the testing of the model against empirical data. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

If you have nothing better to do today at 8 pm CET, join me for a live session on some of the most common questions I receive. www.youtube.com/live/NpOKfdn...

I ordered this new ABM from IKEA. Quite interesting 🤔

You can listen to the Computational Social Science podcast on all of your favourite platforms. (Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, ...) www.buzzsprout.com/2226458/epis...

The sentence "complex systems are more than the sum of their parts" is very inspiring but also very confusing; at least, it was like this for me when I started studying them.

Being in ABM means initially wanting to work with social scientists, and then spending 90% of meeting time explaining why adding 20,000 more parameters won't improve the model.

For those wondering: yes, the YouTube channel and Podcast are coming back soon. Unfortunately, academic life leaves little time to do anything else, so I had to suspend them for some time, but now we are back! And thank you very much for your support! 🙏

Apparently, one of our studies went viral thanks to this image, which oversimplifies the findings (image not by us, by the way). I think this is the problem with science communication: people really like simplicity, but science is based on nuances and complexity.

A quick excerpt of today's session.

🚨 Join us tomorrow at 13:30 CET for a discussion on incrementality in social simulations 🛠️ Why don’t social simulation models evolve incrementally like in other fields? Should they? Can they? Bring your ideas, experiences & questions—everyone's voice matters! www.socsimfest.eu/programme-20...

Dear Funding Agencies, below is my proposal for your consideration. Please let me know if any parts remain too complex.

We often suppose that things like intelligence and opinions not only exist, but can be measured in a “correct” way. So our goal is to reduce the error as much as possible to get closer and closer to such “correct” measurement. [1/7]

Ah, yes, "Avengers infinity job hunt", my favourite movie!

Working with an agent-based model? Start with a vision—but stay flexible! As your model evolves, check what it’s actually revealing. Your original plan might not hold up, but new and unexpected insights could open better paths forward. #Modeling #AgentBasedModel #ResearchTips

Academics of the internet, can you please explain how you can make a family if you don’t know where in the galaxy you will be in 2 years? I can’t find any answers in the literature. Also, here’s ChatGPT's interpretation of this post.

"if it is an interval level, for a score of 3, one should be able to answer the question: '3 what?' " asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Are we mistaking analogies for empirical truths? In this article, we discuss the tendency to overestimate a model's applicability based on its analogical appeal rather than empirical validation. rofasss.org/2024/05/06/d...

Probably the best account I've ever seen 😂 👇👇👇 @in-a-model.bsky.social

Year 2 of testing if Chatgpt can write a joke about agent-based modelling: "Why don’t agent-based models ever get invited to parties? Because they always act independently and cause emergent behavior!" I'm not sure we made any improvements here...

Any good sources or advice for storytelling in a working/professional environment? A lot of the material I find, even when marked as work-related, provides suggestions which are too close to how you'd write a novel, and when somebody tries to put them into practice, it just doesn't work.

Proud to see that we live in an era where humans can once again beat top-quality AI at chess. #goodJobHumanity (snapshot from a ChtGPT vs DeepSeek match)

Recently I tried posting the same content on both X and Linkedin... there was a difference also in the past, but usually it was 2x, now we are close to 10x 😓.

Happy to announce that the ResIN R package's downloads level... it's over 9,000! 💪💥 (yes, that was a cringe reference to the meme) Super congratulations to @philip-warncke.bsky.social who did (and is still doing) all the hard work to make this package possible!

🔬 Researcher Life in a Nutshell 🔬 Me: "I’ll just check this one paper real quick." Also me, 6 hours later: Has 137 tabs open, joined a new research group, accidentally reinvented the wheel, and now questioning the meaning of life.

🚨 New paper 🚨 Can big data solve all our measurement problems? Measuring constructs like opinions, happiness, etc. is problematic as it depends on various choices, including the choice of variables and model. [1/4] pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/sr...

Thought-provoking question: Should "The Sims" be considered an agent-based simulation? Why do you think that?

Recently I've seen multiple personality tests that rely on formats like the one below, which I found very confusing. [1/n]

In my experience, a simple but reliable way to build #ABMs is to alternate between phases of complexity and phases of simplicity.