This report hits on many important issues & identifies important problems that could be addressed. But it fails by writing about the problem of trust, from the outset, without even mentioning the decades of concerted attacks & lies coming from the far right authoritarian party & right-wing pundits.
a chart showing 3 msft gas data centres vs countries
a chart showing 3 msft gas data centres vs countries
New @stand.earth: Microsoft's 3 new gas data centres will
- Increase Microsoft's emissions 160%
- Have higher emissions than power sectors of each of Greece, Ireland, Sri Lanka, NZ etc...
- Have higher emissions than pwr sector of 15 lowest-emitting countries combined
stand.earth/press-releas...
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-co...
🧵 New report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇
1/10
Particularly alarming that this includes Lebanon & Gaza. I had just shared imagery from March 18 showing the demolition of villages along the southern border of Lebanon by the IDF and now not even that imagery is available: bsky.app/profile/godi...
Mass demolitions haven't stopped in Gaza, either.
This is a fantastic reflection and I was all there for it! Given that health outcomes are mentioned, I would love to know why the focus on truth discernment and not other outcomes like behaviour which could be prioritized instead imo (see www.nature.com/articles/s41...)
Most of the media reflects neither reality nor public opinion. It reflects the views and demands of those who own it: the Oligarch Class. They employ editors and journalists to channel their demands and sell their fictions. Hence the endless attacks on net zero.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Fun fact: plastic recycling basically doesn't exist.
Only about 9% of all plastic ever made has been recycled, and only 1% more than once.
www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1...
Lisa is an amazing researcher and colleague, this is a position to really consider!
Recommended read from @courtneyr.bsky.social on the Coalition for Independent Technology Research lawsuit against the Trump administration for chilling speech and retaliating against researchers working in the public interest to study phenomena on tech platforms. (I am a member of the Coalition.)
“Consumer software that generates text, images and videos are uniquely energy inefficient,” says Ketan Joshi, an Oslo-based climate analyst associated with the Australia Institute, due to the “vast datasets and computational strain of pattern-matching that happens underneath the hood”. Asking an AI chatbot a question consumes a great deal more energy than finding the answer via simple web search or calculator. It adds extra demand for no good reason, he says, a bit like driving to the shops in an SUV instead of riding your bike. “You might still get the shopping done, and that single trip alone may not even look all that bad in terms of cost or emissions, but what happens when that’s all of your trips, and when all of society starts doing this?”
Spoke to the Guardian about the idea of quitting LLMs for climate:
-“I see this all as very much part of the tactic of trying to embed these systems into society and instil dependency in a fashion similar to the growth of single-use plastics in the 1970s.”
www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Koch Bros still pretending to be liberal, spending some crumbs on financing a neoliberal infrastructure while putting their real money and support behind the GOP and profiting massively from their authoritarian regime.
David Autor (@davidautor.bsky.social) just wrote a very kind and thoughtful review of "The Means of Prediction" for the Journal of Economic Literature (@aeajournals.bsky.social):
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
Independent tech researchers accuse the Trump administration of trying to silence them with threats of visa revocations and deportation. It's leading some to change the focus of their work, self-censor, and even leave the country.
OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.
The real story is that foreign govts try to "interfere" all the time. In 2020 and 2024 we had mechanisms to catch them, call them out, & mitigate damage. Now, those mechanims are gone & the Trump admin would prefer to exploit "foreign interference" to justify a federal take-over of elections.
The essay claims users can eliminate risk from LLMs as long as they exercise (content-based) epistemic vigilance + active participation.
But this argument misses half the story of epistemic vigilance - arguably the more important half. Let's take a look at source-based epistemic vigilance.
4/
Per protocol analysis strikes again!
Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.
It does not.
It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.
🧵 1/
📢 Reminder: Applications are still open for Summer Institute 2026 @mpib-berlin.bsky.social (June 8–16)!
This year's theme focuses on AI and decision-making — a great opportunity for early-career researchers in this space.
⏰ Application deadline: March 16
🔗 www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/research/res...
Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model.
This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine.
🧵/
So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w
Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?
www.techdirt.com/202...
Call for Proposals: Data Collection for Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath January 27, 2026 We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se- lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com). Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’ choosing. The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi- pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.
🎺 Call for proposals 🎺
1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment
2️⃣ run a novel experiment
on repdata.com
3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies
4️⃣ publish your study
details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_...
applications open Feb 1
please repost!
This is your periodic reminder that I have a "Dear Nina" advice column where you can ask me your disinfo/digital harms questions.
Seeing your crazy uncle at a wedding?
Yoga friend fall down a conspiracy funnel?
Want to scrub your info from the internet?
I'm your gal 💁🏻♀️
forms.gle/P6WbpFaqMrSv...
You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.
I served as a consultant for the United Nations Development Programme on AIs consequences for development, the report is here and spends considerable time evaluating the claim that ai will necessarily erode labor demand.
hdr.undp.org/content/huma...
Perhaps today is the day we should all learn the term “agnotology” and think about the many mechanisms of ignorance and what/whom it serves.
🌎 If we seek 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 #𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, we must strengthen public resilience to 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 #𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
👉 That's why we're pleased to share the #ClimateFactsMatter campaign by @euclimateaction.bsky.social, incl. a digital handbook co-created w/ experts from EDMO + EDMO Hubs: edmo.eu/edmo-news/cl...
This is not a drill, we need to be ready to counter and we're not.
