AI loves to be “genuine!”

Eugenicist ideas, even those disavowed by some of the prominent scientists involved like Galton, Brigham, and Goddard (because it was clear that they were more or less opinions clothed in the veneer of science), have been promulgated over and over again.

Unfortunately, this is part of a long and storied American tradition dating back to its founding and even Founding Fathers! Peter Schrag has an illuminating, and at times seemingly ludicrous, book about the history of nativism and the role of nativism.

"As he later said in his Nobel autobiography, 'my very strong desire to work in quantum field theory did not seem likely to lead to quick publications; but I had already found out that I seemed to be able to get jobs even if I didn’t publish anything so I did not worry about publish or perish.'" 2/2

Love this attitude:

"In 1963 Wilson joined the Cornell physics department and was soon given tenure even though he had hardly published."

news.cornell.edu/stories/2013...

1/2

😂

I would like to say I’m shocked about this but this is only the latest in a sequence of actions against common sense and scientific evidence that are beyond the pale.

If you want to be part of this research, this will be one of the pillars of research in my new group at Seoul National University’s #SNU physics department. If this resonates — as a potential group member, collaborator, or funder — I'd welcome hearing from you.

Events today make it abundantly clear that we don’t understand what’s going on, yet the people who are pushing for fundamental advances on the topic are on the sidelines.

But sadly this work is nigh unfundable because it’s interdisciplinary. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had one exception to this rule, where the theoretical #physics basis of this work was taken seriously and my work was supported by the @fwf-at.bsky.social for an #ESPRIT #Fellowship.

AI sustains higher strategic tension than humans in chess Strategic decision-making requires balancing immediate opportunities against long-term objectives: a tension fundamental to competitive environments. We investigate this trade-off in chess by analyzin...

4. And most recently how does AI change collective strategy?
arxiv.org/abs/2508.13213

Data-driven conflict classification exposes weak predictive indicators Abstract. Models and theories of armed conflict are effective when tailored to distinct conflict types, but existing classifications are often heuristic. W

3. What mathematical frameworks do we need to develop to understand how actors make decisions across scales?
doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

2. How does conflict behave at different scales and how are the scales related?
link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/...
arxiv.org/abs/1903.07762

Discovering the mesoscale for chains of conflict Abstract. Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales in time, from the instantaneous to multi-year development, an

1. How does one define and identify a conflict from micro-level data?
doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

Since then we’ve been pushing at the foundations, crafting from step zero the types of tools and analysis to build physics model of conflict spread:

It seems like a natural and easy step would be to apply our work on monkeys to war. But this turns out not to be the case at all. In monkey society, we can observe every aggressive act and every reconciliation. In human conflict, we can't agree on where one conflict ends and another begins.

But it also leads to a less obvious conclusion that conflict duration is less predictable than of peace. Conflicts can blow out of control and that's why we talk about a "heavy tail" or "black swans" in conflict. Lots of #fatalities are not surprising and that is a risk we always face.

The statistics of conflict indicate a process that requires every pair in conflict to settle down, peace is broken by any single aggressive action. This leads to an asymmetry, which is that peace is much easier to end than conflict.

Some years ago now, a group of us in the Center for #Collective #Computation and #Complexity were studying #conflict and peaceful episodes in #monkey society. The logic for #peace being more fragile is intuitive:

rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/lookup/doi/1...

#Peace is fragile.

And #conflict is much more #complex than a few world leaders deciding where to shoot missiles or send troops.

A little thread coming from our years of work on the #physics of #conflict...

🧪🦋

Also leads me to think that it would be interesting to study types of non-citations, and in a way these are even more interesting than the current furore over citations...

Everyone complains that #GPTs make up references, but that makes me wonder. When do they *not* #cite things?

Presumably, this "enhances" the #novelty or #innovativeness of ideas that it has.

I think we should use AI as a community to write fewer and better papers, not more.

but these examples are superficial treatment of really interesting problems, whereas AI can really open doors to inaccessible analysis. But why is it being used to minimize cognitive effort instead of maximizing it?

Two papers so far this year that have crossed my desk for review that are more or less AI applications of previous work with slight modifications. In principle, little problem with new tool use...

Largest trees are also the fastest growing, so that’s likewise bad for the future.

Funny to see how myths put forward by Montesquieu in the 1700s about climate and vigor (hot=sloth) and geography and servility of spirit (plains=slavery) persisting today.

Further into Fukuyama…

He writes about public goods as things that cannot be taken up by the market b/c there is no incentive (e.g. clean air). Don’t see how this isn’t possible in principle.

Anything can be enshitiffied to the point where any marginal relative gain could be profitable to sell?

And from Alexander Hamilton:

A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice a bad government.

When an American thinks about the problem of #government-building, he directs himself not to the creation of #authority and the accumulation of #power but rather the limitation of authority and the division of power.

- Huntington