Uh, so yeah, big day & bfd for us, honestly.

"We normally change 90K but we'll charge you 60K and can't tell you why" is hardly befitting of the most important institutions for economic mobility in the U.S.

Anyway I wrote about this back in the day @techpolicypress.bsky.social and have recommendations: www.techpolicy.press/enrollment-a...

Enrollment algorithms are contributing to the crises of higher education | Brookings AI is becoming increasingly common in higher education.

Disguised as the field of "enrollment management," many (even most) universities use complex algorithmic stacks for this personalized pricing, so, it's incredibly obscured from the applicants, not to mention largely inexplicably

www.brookings.edu/articles/enr...

It's worth engaging w/ the first contention of the Yale Committee Report: universities aggressively adopting personalized pricing has significantly reduced trust in higher ed: president.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

This number is striking: half of Americans think college costs are the same for everyone

🚨Penn MEDIATED is hiring for a summer AI Auditing Engineer as part of our LLM Civic Discourse project - a great fit for a passionate PhD student or Postdoc.🚨

The engineer will develop and deploy a software tools for longitudinal monitoring of LLM political outputs

infodem.upenn.edu/job-openings/

It's also worth noting meaningful limitations of this type of research - like this from @citap.bsky.social + @katestarbird.bsky.social.

This is a real problem, and it's why we're investing in new methods for the computational measurement of narratives, beyond false facts.

bsky.app/profile/kate...

An interesting note that I'd missed about Australia's Social Media Minimum Age law is that they are running a multi-year study following 4,000 families to evaluate the impacts of the age requirement on mental health, digital habits, family relationships, etc

www.esafety.gov.au/research/soc...

bsky.app/profile/timk...

1/
I have exciting news: @dfrlab.bsky.social ‘s Digital Sherlocks is back! 🎉
This one is personal — as a #DigitalSherlocks alumna myself, managing and relaunching the program is a special moment.
For the first time, we are also partnering with @penn-mediated.bsky.social !

This is the gets-me-up-in-the-morning-work.

And grateful to get to work with the excellent @sayyara.bsky.social, @etbrooking.bsky.social & Graham Brookie.

Hope you enjoyed! Chile is a spectacular country.

And if it was too much to read, no worries, I'm as apathetic as this llama (or yama, as they say, and which is obviously the more fun pronunciation).

9/9

8/9

7/9 (seriously so much better than rain)

6/9

5/9

4/9

3/9 (with for sure my favorite photo of the day)

2/9

Ok, it's my birthday and I don't that much going on (teaching a yoga class and a small dinner at Laser Wolf)

But I thought it'd be fun to share the adventure I went on a year ago today, hiking to the Parinacota Volcano in Lauca National Park in remote northern Chile

1/9

One reason I was psyched to come to Penn was to work with @appc.upenn.edu and Kathleen Hall Jamieson - both because of past contributions (FactCheck.org), but also bc of new research, like this on providing mental models of how a concept works to reduce misinformed thinking + combat false claims.

Congrats Will! That’s great news and well deserved!!

To speak plainly: the CEO of the world’s largest social media company should not make commitments about content moderation — on a contested political question, during a period of active public debate — by private text message to a government-adjacent figure with whom he is deeply commercially entangled. To do so is to replace a content policy based on principles including equality and fairness with one based on oligarchs trading favors in secret.

I wrote about Zuckerberg's texts with Musk and how they undermine the principles of a fair and equal platform for everyone www.platformer.news/zuckerberg-m...

Oh hey! I found something that AI's sycophancy is really useful for! More effective recruiting fraud!

(This is not the first one of these I've gotten, and some are pretty good - be careful out there friends).

We're proud to introduce Penn MEDIATED’s affiliated faculty members—distinguished by their rigorous empirical research advancing our collective understanding of the information ecosystem and its impact on democracy. A thread 🧵 (1/n)

Rough updates from two of the most important indicators of American democracy:

@freedomhouse.bsky.social (more focussed on rights/freedoms): US drops 12/100 points in 12 years

@vdeminstitute.bsky.social (more focussed on governance, restraints on autocracy): US drops 28/100 points in 12 years

Erik Santoro is a new Wharton professor with a great research portfolio on the impact on interpersonal conversations on political beliefs and polarization, and an affiliated faculty member with @penn-mediated.bsky.social

infodem.upenn.edu/faculty/

This Erik Santoro paper really is fascinating - I would have absolutely bet that engaged listening would increase persuasiveness of political arguments.

But, not so much.

infodem.upenn.edu/research-com...

This is such fantastic work - congrats Waldo, Robin, et al!

Ok I know I'm in some sort of Bluesky purgatory for creating this account and then not posting for two years in my govt job

But HARVARD IS AN AI STARTUP NOW. WHAT. why is no on else concerned where are my people

Does... the school... do other things?