I was experimenting with images illustrating how social media distorts our perceptions, amplifying rage. (actual post in replies)

Today's writing music: Sines and Singularities by Bluetech. This album got me through grad school (the second time around, when I studied journalism in Hong Kong). It still gets me focussed when I need to lock in. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW8S...

Musk just announced that you'll soon be able to control your Twitter feed by telling Grok what you want to see. Guess what. WE'RE ALREADY BUILDING THAT FOR BLUESKY Join us.

I've been hearing recently from both libs and cons that the other side is such a threat that it must be crushed. I think this makes dialog all the more urgent, precisely to preserve our ability to disagree and have it matter. Am I naive or enlightened? www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/why-build-...

Today's coding music: deadmau5, but no words www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOD-...

Lots of arguing about whether left or right supports political violence more. tl;dr: - right has done more in recent decades www.congress.gov/116/meeting/... - left did way more in 1970s www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_I... 1/2

An exceptionally shrewd operator. Also: the insanity of a society that makes this front page news fora week, whereas the far more transparently political assassination of the Minnesota House speaker was just a blip.

Looked at my data collections for state-backed activity. If the report were a picture:

I actually feel less confident about my posts being seeon the BSky vs. Twitter. The problem is, what if my peeps aren't online when I poast? Maybe we need an ICYMI feed? (In Case You Missed It)

How many people actually approve of Kirk's murder, on BlueSky and on Twitter? I got tired of anecdotes saying we are surrounded by bloodthirsty extremists, so I took a sample and counted. www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/how-many-p...

Here’s why I don’t cheer the shooting: Morally, it’s repugnant. Strategically, atrocities provide political cover for escalation by the aggrieved party. The audience here isn’t the politicians but the voters.

I don’t know if it’s just who I follow but I’d love an “anything except bitter about politics” feed. With the open source feed builder we’re making you will be able to do that by writing a prompt.

What if we made a BlueSky feed called "Stuff You Like" which was literally just the posts you're most likely to press the <3 button on? Basic b*tch algorithmic feed, but maybe if it was totally transparent it would be useful. "Press the button, get more of that."

The slogan wasn't "égalité, fraternité, and strategic deplatforming of the other side," I promise you.

I love research projects that are easy to describe but annoyingly hard to do. Here’s one: run classifiers on masses of online speech to see what actually correlates with political violence. Use DSA article 40 powers to get the data from platforms.

Many symbolic capitalist spaces are highly censorious and intolerant. Almost all symbolic capitalists have college degrees. Seeing this, many assume higher ed institutions must be transforming otherwise normal youths into weirdos. My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) demolishes this narrative.

The Babel Fish has arrived. We will see if Douglas Adams' other prediction holds true: "by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, [this] caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/...

So, you know that idea that depressed people are just more realistic? Turns out, that was based on ONE study in 1979, and it doesn't replicate. So now you have one less excuse to be depressed. You can be realistic AND have a happy life. Yes, even now. vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/new-stu...

Many such cases. Opinion diversity is increasingly being built into algorithmic systems. Other examples include community notes and bridging-based ranking (which we are building for BlueSky!)

I love living in California and I love having European collaborators but that does mean way too many morning meetings, amirite?

I get ~10 unsolicited, unpersonalized emails a week from students -- undergrads and high school, from all over the US and many from India and Pakistan too -- asking to work on research projects with me. Are the kids alright?

Highest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago

Here's a scenario that someone should ask RFK Jr. about: an under-65 person with no major health conditions who is providing some in-person support for an older family member undergoing treatments that weaken the immune system. Can that person get a COVID shot? It's me, and I can't.

I am both bullish and bearish on AI replacing people in the workforce. Here’s an example of a customer service bot going wrong. x.com/itsandrewgao...

TIL that Republicans actually want MORE immigration then they did a year ago. Percentage who want less immigration has fallen from 88% in 2024 to 48% now. news.gallup.com/poll/692522/...

So we're building a modern algorithmic feed for BlueSky (opt-in, of course). We want it to make you better informed about politics, minus the rage. Particularly to help you understand what folks on the other side think ESPECIALLY when you don't agree with them. Is that a thing people here want?

The Octopus thought experiment sucks. If your instinct is like "LLMs can't learn anything about the actual world from mere text" AND you are intellectually curious, here is your reading list. 1/4

Depolarization might not mean erasing divides, but “repolarizing” around shared values like democracy, fairness, or anti-corruption. @jennifermccoy.bsky.social explains in a NEW episode of the Better Conflict Bulletin podcast with @jonathanstray.bsky.social 👂📖⤵️

If you are posting about something sensitive, or if your post starts receiving replies that you don't enjoy: 1. You can limit interactions (replies and quotes) to certain users or no one. You can do this before or anytime after posting. As an example, I've limited interactions with this post. ↳

An amazing example of productively engaging with conflict from @randomwalker.bsky.social, in this case between the "AI Ethics" and "AI Safety" communities. We could certainly use more of this on BlueSky. x.com/random_walke...

After consideration, I will post occasionally, but heavily censor what I share compared to other sites. I tried making the transition, but talking about AI here is just really fraught in ways that are tough to mitigate & make it hard to have good discussions (the point of social!). Maybe it changes

The best I've read on the situation in LA over the weekend. www.persuasion.community/p/11-theses-...

GPTo3 feels I asked it to do too much work and decides to lie to me...

Of course organizing can happen through friendship but sometimes you organize with someone who annoys the shit out of you and sometimes you decide to converge with other collectives on an issue where you can work together and then part ways

I had a multi-week Discord thread about politics blow up -- ironically it was a discussion about conflict resolution that went wrong -- and now I'm using AI on the transcript to do close analysis of where and how things went off the rails. Surprisingly helpful.

Tempted to run a little experiment: post an opinion article on trans policy both here and X, compare replies.

Everyone thinks the people on the other side are more "extreme" in their views then they actually are. It's a consistent, symmetric, large effect. But why? www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/why-do-the...

Had an unfortunate key management bug. Now I'm watching keys scroll by on the terminal, testing for successful decryption. Gosh, I haven't done this since I was a teenager.

It me. I'll soon be working on implementing recommender infra for BlueSky, so you can use a prompt to control your feed... just that one feature...

A practical idea for how to make AI that doesn’t interfere in human politics — a talk I gave at Google yesterday. docs.google.com/presentation...

Everybody got theory of mind until they start talking about the outgroup.

Human conflict spans eight orders of magnitude in scale. Only about half of physical theories have that range, and basically nothing in engineering or social science... so... we should expect to need many different theories of conflict from dinner tables to nations.

Fellas is it cheating to write your code and then have the AI write the tests?

Learned a lesson about conflict today: If, on your first meeting, they learn that you are against them on one issue, they will assume you are against them on all issues. This is stereotyping, but it's also rational. Polarization makes all issues align. Freethinking weirdos are unusual.

Things that greatly worry me about AI: - conflict-increasing algorithms - hyper-capitalistic AI agents - mass unemployment Things that do not much worry me about AI: - carbon emissions (still less than 1% global) - copyright violation (will get sorted out, ala Google Books)

Did you know there have been more anti-Trump protests in 2025 than the same period in 2017? But does this matter? In this week's issue we ask: does protest even work? Lots of evidence on this question! www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/does-prote...

I'm using copilot agent mode to write my code now and my first reaction to this insane magic is WOW and my second is IT'S NOT FAST ENOUGH. "Waiting for the AI" is the new "compiling." Plus ça change. Time to get a sandwich.

"a timely and intellectually rigorous contribution, offering a principled and empirically grounded approach to democratic fairness in AI systems" I really appreciate that, Reviewer 2. (Ok not from a reviewer but actual feedback I got on this) humancompatible.ai/news/2025/02...

📣 Algorithmic Gatekeepers: Human Rights Impact on #LLM content moderation Our latest report dives into the rising use of LLMs in content moderation, such as flagging, removing, detecting behaviours, and asks how we can use these models responsibly to reduce harms. ▶️ ecnl.org/publications...

We tried optimizing for truth, hoping that would lead to trust. I don't think it worked very well. Instead let's try optimizing for trust, hoping that it leads to truth. This is my view on "misinformation" and how we should think about designing future AI information systems.