Outsourcing an ML results interpretation problem: You are comparing classifiers A and B in terms of accuracy on a small number of datasets (say, 15) with small test sets in the range of 100-200 obs. (1/3)

I've written a blog post about using metric unfolding to extract latent dimensions from data, using the ANES feeling thermometers & BES 'like' scales as examples. It's a high-level intro to unfolding and using the smacof R package. These plots are the results. philswatton.github.io/2025/11/05/e...

"If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter." --Brett Kavanaugh, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/03/c...

Great piece, very much looking forward to part 2. Excellent critiques both of various right-wing ideologies around tech and of left-wing disinterest in tech.

The UK's liberal democracy is not being defended by its mainstream politicians in Labour or the Conservatives. Only third parties seem alive to the threat. Unless something changes, and soon, we will fibd ourselves experiencing our own version of Trump's US.

🚨NEW BLOGPOST🚨 Since the government can't seem to see it, I explain how and why a simple act of Parliament can bring the Andrew affair to the end - and why they should do it. joxleywrites.substack.com/p/parliament...

One of my issues with Politico is that its jaunty, gossipy tone jars with the dangerous turn in UK politics. A "mostly clanger free conference"? A recording of the Shadow Justice Secretary complaining about seeing "no white faces" surfaced and was the talking point in interviews and coverage...

Just caught up on this fantastic essay by @sundersays.bsky.social in @renewaljournal.bsky.social. Brilliant, punchy, to the point on Labour's lack of serious engagement with multiculturalism, and a much-welcome rebuttal to those who advocate for Labour to accommodate Reform's radical right populism.

I wrote a slightly longer response to the NS piece on my substack. You can read it here: dysfunctionalprogramming.substack.com/p/some-comme...

The thing I most hate about this kind of reasoning is that it regards the question of whether or not Farage is a racist as unimportant or incidental. All that matters is what an imagined median voter likes right now. Politics as anything other than triangulation regarded as a misstep.

Short article covering the psychometrics and LLMs work we published a few months back. Hopefully, more readable (i.e. less maths!) :) @philswatton.bsky.social cetas.turing.ac.uk/publications...

Quite. So many Labour people on this website visibly have no idea of just how bad things have got for ethnic minorities since they came on, and how their visible indifference lands.

Brilliantly lucid piece from Phil - well worth a read.

New piece by me. I wrote about what the political methodology literature tells us about the uses and abuses of surveys, why a polling-first political strategy is a mistake, and why a clear set of values and a clear political vision is essential for reconciling contradictory pressures on policy.

It's good to see these MPs continuing to stand up for the role of deliberation in democracy and for the scrutinising role of parliament. If Farage does become PM in the future, a concentration of power in the executive will prove a catastrophe.

really feels like housing affordability is one of the most important political issues of our time, affecting nearly every aspect of our lives, and everyday our mainstream political discourse is about whether sour cream is woke or not

A pandas quirk I recently discovered:

An *amazing* opportunity to work at @gesis.org as a senior researcher with the #CSES project and have a big impact in the field of voting behavior and elections!! Deadline for sending in applications is August 15! #PoliSciJobs

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

Sarah Mercer, Daniel P. Martin, Phil Swatton Applying Psychometrics to Large Language Model Simulated Populations: Recreating the HEXACO Personality Inventory Experiment with Generative Agents https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00742

Had a lot of fun collaborating on this project, exploring what personality dimensions are simulated by a population of LLM agents. A big thank you to Sarah for involving me

Paid research assistant opportunity with the British Election Study for UK-based graduate students. Help us validate turnout in our surveys against Electoral Commission records

Wow—the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named after Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide) says plainly: "No more discussions, meetings, reports, sessions, summits…IF YOU HAVE THE POWER, YOU MUST USE IT." "HISTORY WILL DETERMINE THE RECTITUDE OF YOUR ACTIONS."

The Pope has a math degree, it should be noted. Probably the first Pope who knows what a metric space is.

I've written about how the party went from tightly controlling selections to tightly controlling the whip, and the limits of that strategy when you a) win huge numbers of seats b) do things your base doesn't like and c) have famous MPs like Abbott. www.newstatesman.com/uncategorize...

I'm trying to think about how I would have reacted if shown this headline five years ago

I do wonder about the longevity of the business model of OpenAI et al. when others are open-sourcing LLMs: ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

📣 NEW PAPER ALERT! 🚨 "School subject choices in adolescence affect political party support" Just published in @wepsocial.bsky.social with @nspmartin.bsky.social and @rolandkappe.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1080/0140... 🧵👇

This thread is brilliant at capturing how being on the receiving end of enshittification feels. Agree that it's astounding it doesn't receive more attention from the left, but equally easy to imagine the right fighting elections on anti-enshittification platforms

TIL: Macmillan attempted to have the Conservative Party renamed to 'The New Democratic Party' in 1946

Latest website blog post from me: philswatton.github.io/2025/07/12/c...

Just as we spent a few years memeing each other into remembering not to take things written on the internet for granted (e.g. below), we're probably going to need to spend some time doing the same for the outputs of chatbots.

Some technical reports from my work at the Turing are now available online ⬇️ Selective Forgetting in LLMs - www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defaul... Closed-Domain Event Extraction: Literature Review - www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defaul...

seaborn.objects out here just utterly roasting me in its error messages #data

Please remember this torture happened to *every single person* who was kidnapped by ICE and sent to a foreign concentration camp without due process. It doesn’t matter if they were citizens or even if they were criminals. Every case is a violation of our Constitution and of Trump’s oath. #IMPEACH

This is the latest paper I've come across giving evidence of convergence in LLM responses/behaviour. Surely reflects a use of similar training data/regimes?

A really bizarre thing about AI/ML is that the use cases non technical people come up with are entirely conditioned by their experience of chatbots, and correspondingly either come up with terrible ideas or reject it out of hand.

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.

‼️ There are a few more days left to apply for the PhD positions in my group at KU Leuven. Make sure to send in applications by July 4! 👇

Where 'Blue Labour' originally came from and why a nostalgic Maga-esque version of it has nothing to offer to anyone these days. Excellent piece.

Remains the case that possibly the best wedge issue for Labour to use vs Farage is anti-Trumpism

Delighted to see my article, "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory," in print in @poppublicsphere.bsky.social. It is my favorite thing I've written, and I hope you'll read it. Like most people, I learned in school that political theory began in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. This is wrong. (1/)

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

Some brief reflections on the methonenstreit in the social sciences and the possibility of applying the scientific method to history, prompted by Isaiah Berlin: philswatton.github.io/2025/06/18/i...

Fantastic blogpost. Completely right on the fact that the social problems from this technology emerge from pre-existing human behaviours. Dead on the money in terms of the role of self-selection in the consumption of mis and disinformation.

TIL: Gödel believed one implication of his first incompleteness theorem (no consistent system of axioms can prove all truths re natural numbers) was that human intuition was capable of perceiving truths which logic could not. He believed this implied a fundamental limitation to machine intelligence

Would love to know how votes changed between parties here

Fascinating digression. "this cosmopolitan right of hospitality is rooted in Authentica habita’s recognition that all scholars are, in a literal and metaphorical sense, exiles from their homes from a love of knowledge ... The scholarly life entails a kind of renunciation of ordinary citizenship"

Brilliant piece and very relevant for anyone interested in political party strategy. Particularly the core point - that remixing issues is not a very effective means for a party to break through as opposed to being the issue owner of a new issue dimension