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Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦

@sobchuk.bsky.social

I use big data to research the cultural evolution of arts @ae.mpg.de More: https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/oleg-sobchuk.html

654 Posts1975 Follower 980 Folgt

Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 3d ago

Remembering when teenage kids were imprisoned for lesser hacking crimes www.ft.com/content/6510...

OpenAI says governments among ‘dozens’ of organisations hacked by its agents

Company says its models leaked images shared by users in a disclosure that is likely to further inflame AI safety fears

ft.com

Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 6d ago

a PhD position in LLMs, annotations, language and benchmarking @ University of Tartu. please share! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · last wk.

I don't agree with some things in this (very sharp) blog post, but it certainly offers a new angle on "AI and academia". Papers will become less valuable, prestigious institutions - more. But also (and here is me thinking) - direct communication unmediated by text. giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

The Weimar of knowledge – la bottega

giorgio.gilest.ro

Courtney Hilton @courtneybhilton.bsky.social · 2w ago

These AI-slop email enquiries from students are so depressing. I am not anti AI, but if you can't be bothered to spend the time to write me an email yourself—you know, just straight up with your brain; old-school style—I don't see why I should spend any time writing back.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 2w ago

Researchers investigated language change by studying Slovotvir, a Ukrainian website where users propose and rank alternatives for foreign-origin words. The site shows that people prefer shorter words, but not necessarily more common words. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/KWGE50ZNzaj

The study used an agent-based model. Diagram of a two-step agent action model. Ukrainian alternatives for the word дедлайн (deadline, a borrowing from English, possibly through Russian) are given as an illustration. In step A, an agent chooses a word based on the number of likes received by that word’s most-liked translation. In step B, after choosing a word, the agent chooses which translation to like based on each translation’s length and number of likes.

turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 2w ago

a new paper forthcoming in Social Forces! focusing on the killing of George Floyd & the BLM, I study the formation of generations, proposing that formative events can create within-cohort differentiation as much as between-cohort differentiation. read here: tkeskinturk.github.io/imprinting.pdf

Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts
Contemporary narratives of generational politics propose that formative experiences produce shared political opinions across an age cohort. In this article, I advance a theory of cohortization to challenge that view, arguing that large-scale political events produce differentiation within cohorts as much as differentiation between them. I investigate the implications of this framework through the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, analyzing attitudes toward law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans from 2016 to 2024. Using survey data from Cooperative Congressional Election Study, American National Election Study, and the Nationscape, I show that younger and older cohorts diverged after the event, but this differentiation was driven exclusively by young Democrats and Independents. The end result was not a unified generation, but one internally divided along party lines. This finding qualifies theories of generational politics, emphasizing that formative experiences may intensify existing political divisions within cohorts.

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby
My, my, my, my generation
— The Who, “My Generation” (1965)

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2w ago

"The problem is that we have made the human conversation the expensive option and the machine conversation free, and we are surprised at what researchers, responding rationally, then choose." So many good points in this article (beautifully written btw) wonkhe.com/blogs/the-wa...

The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

Daniel Hook argues that frictionless technologies are teaching us to prefer our own company – and that research leaders should be worried Daniel Hook argues that frictionless technologies are teaching us to prefer our own company – and that research leaders should be worried

wonkhe.com

Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 3w ago

Need a historical illustration? Search 1.49 million images from British Library books and Britannica (1500s–1920s). Find similar images, download full-resolution images or transparent PNG cutouts, and explore the sources. huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Mason Youngblood @masonyoungblood.bsky.social · 3w ago

New tutorial preprint about simulation-based inference! Shows how to fit a cultural evo model to baby name data using approx Bayesian computation, random forests, and deep learning. Wrote for @eslr.bsky.social but wanted to share with others in @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social! :) osf.io/preprints/so...

OSF

osf.io

Alexey Koshevoy @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 3w ago

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 3w ago

"AI" is everywhere nowadays, but 30 years ago similar hype was about everything "computer". I stumbled at this Italian dictionary from 1986 proudly stating on its cover that words in it were sorted by a computer 😁

For the first time, 20,000 Italian words computer-organized into semantic groups and fields of reference.

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 3w ago

Really happy to be a part of this new paper investigating evolutionary forces behind word popularity. It relies on unique & rich data of Ukrainian language 🇺🇦 The project was led by @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social, who used an innovative extension of ABC and did an impressive job overall. Check it out!

Alexey Koshevoy@alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social · 3w ago

You can read our paper here: doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 3w ago

Is there an ecology of languages? Can physics help to understand their universal properties? Yes. As species, they rise and fall, become extinct, evolve & compete. Here's our paper @royalsocietypublishing.org @brigan.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/1004.4528 royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Dezső Németh @nemeth.bsky.social · 4w ago

Why are younger children so good at learning new skills? One reason may be that they are better at a fundamental cognitive mechanism: statistical learning. We followed the same children from age 7 to 14 and found that this learning gradually decreases as they grow older. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Longitudinal evidence for decreasing statistical learning abilities across childhood - Nature Communications

Through statistical learning, people extract patterns from the environment to predict future events. In a longitudinal study, the authors show that statistical learning declines with age and that high...

doi.org

Many Minds podcast @manymindspod.bsky.social · 4w ago

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation with @damianblasi.bsky.social about linguistic diversity and what it can tell us. Linguistic diversity is a precious part of our species' heritage. It also offers a wellspring of clues about history, culture, and the human mind. Listen: disi.org/the-natural-...

Dan Larremore @danlarremore.bsky.social · last mo.

🎉 New paper (and data) on editorial & peer review at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. With a wonderful team! @samzhang.bsky.social, @nicklaberge.bsky.social, Quinten and @aaronclauset.bsky.social. 1/ www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Screenshot of the title page:

Elite general science journals shape scientific discourse, public policy, and scientific careers. However, expectations of confidentiality in most editorial proceedings has limited efforts to understand and improve the review process. Here, we describe and release deidentified data on 110,303 manuscript submissions over 5 years at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. Analyzing evaluation dynamics across the initial editorial review and subsequent peer review stages, we find strong selective effects associated with higher institutional prestige, larger team size, and certain topics and countries. Corresponding authors who are men exhibit a small but significant advantage at Science, while authors based in China have a significant disadvantage. These associations are generally stronger in editorial review than in peer review, even as final editorial decisions correlate strongly with reviewer advice. These patterns highlight the complexity of multistage evaluations at elite journals and the importance of open data to better understand them.

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If you would like to teach theoretical modeling skills to your psychology or cognitive science students, or would like to learn these skills yourself, check out our open online textbook: computationalcognitivescience.github.io/lovelace/

Book cover: orange/yellow background and generated tree in front. Artwork by Danielle Navarro

Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · last mo.

New preprint with @carigol.bsky.social and @jstubbersfield.bsky.social on AI/cultural evolution. Three LLMs models (Mistral 7B, Qwen2.5 7B, GPT-3.5) select and mutate short health-advice statements over 100 steps of transmission-chain.

Figure9:Correlation between measured cosine diversity and estimate of frequency-dependent bias(J) and content-dependent bias

Alexandre "Blublu" Bluet @blubludoesscience.bsky.social · last mo.

New preprint! We investigate the role of language in the transmission of mental models in cultural evolution. Using a transmission chain design with over 2000 participants, we show that only language allows for the transmission and refinement of mental models. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Arev P. Sümer @arevsumer.bsky.social · last mo.

Our new study with @benmpeter.bsky.social is now on biorxiv! Here we present a new computational tool which makes it possible to conduct population genetic analyses from very contaminated and very low quality archaic human genomes. (1/7)

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A Method to Analyze Low-Quality Archaic Human Genomes and its Application to the Teshik-Tash 1 Neandertal https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.10.743885v1

Will Tattersdill @tattersdill.bsky.social · 2mo ago

So here we go then: the result of many years thinking about how dinosaurs make science and the imagination work together. It's written for both literary critics and scientists and my dearest hope is that it will help foster an academy where we talk to each other more

Photo of a copy of 'The Social Dinosaur', out now from Bloomsbury omg

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

As I expected, unfortunately... Quantitative historical research must face its data-quality problems (which repeat over and over again)

vincentholst.bsky.social@vincentholst.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.

Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 2mo ago

This pattern often noticed for cars seems to hold also for furniture... from: europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/how-col...

Bar chart titled 'Furniture lost its colour: Recently purchased IKEA sofas are more likely to be grey than older ones.' It shows the most common sofa colours per year in IKEA catalogues from 1960 to 2021 as a sequence of coloured vertical stripes. Three callouts highlight the trend: green and blue dominate the 1960s; patterned sofas (stripes, dots, checks) take over in the 1990s, shown as dense black-and-tan patterned bars; and 2011 has the most neutral colours ever. Moving left to right, the bars shift from saturated greens, blues and reds in the 1960s-80s, through heavily patterned dark tones in the 1990s, to blacks and whites in the early 2000s, ending in solid grey and taupe shades through the 2010s to 2021. Source: IKEA catalogues 1960-2021, manual count. Credit: The European Correspondent, Toon Vos.

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time, having revelations. Revelation #1: In 1890s, travel from London to Amsterdam took only half a day. Because trains! #2 (more shocking): It was possible to send telegrams on and off a train! Not much different from modern-day travel or texting!

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

What an amazing map! Sadly, right now I'm in the Desert of this is Never Gonna be Over 😅

RedPen/BlackPen@redpenblackpen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Tag yourself with your current location!

A map in the style of Tolkein titled 'The Map of Manuscript Earth'. This is something I'm calling 'artography' - and it lists lots of geographic locations on the way to submitting a (scientific) manuscript.

Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Very excited to share this preprint from me, @emmatempleton.bsky.social, @lindseytepfer.bsky.social & @thaliawheatley.bsky.social! "Friends and strangers engage in distinct regimes of body motion synchrony during conversation" osf.io/preprints/ps...

Forms of body motion synchrony. A) Motion quantity synchrony – synchrony in the amount of motion (orange) people engage in over time. This form of synchrony is agnostic to the direction of this movement, may be positive or negative, occurs at varying time lags, and is not specific to matched body parts across members of the dyad. B) Pseudo-synchrony – motion quantity synchrony between people who are not actually interacting. That is, members of different conversations engaging in similar amounts of motion at similar points in the conversation relative to its initiation. And C) directional synchrony – people moving the same body parts in the same direction (or along the same axis in the opposite direction) at the same time (or at some specific time lag).

Mechanisms of synchrony. A) Turn-taking, which causes increases in motion around the time of speaker role exchanges, as participants gesture to hand over or take over the floor. B) Conservation of motion in which one participant moves less when the other moves more, holding the total motion quantity relatively constant over time (note that the total amount of motion across the dyad is similar in the two panels, because one person reduces their motion to balance out the increase in the other’s motion). C) Entrainment, in which mutual following of the same conversational script leads to synchronized movement among people who are not directly interacting (i.e. pseudo-synchrony). Greeting gestures such as the handshakes depicted are one acute manifestation of this entrainment. D) Station-keeping, which maintains proxemic distance and eye level between members of the dyad. This mechanism accounts for directional synchrony, particularly between strangers who feel uncomfortable within each other’s personal space.

Motion quantity synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Friends displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 2.5 s) and B) this effect generalized across the majority of body part pairs (each line represents one pair). For example, one series of points might represent the synchrony between the amount of motion in one participant’s left hand and the other’s right foot. C) Strangers displayed significant positive synchrony in total motion quantity at short time lags (< 1 s) and significant negative total motion quantity synchrony at longer time lags (2.5 – 16.6 s). D) Again, this effect generalized to most body part pairs.

Directional synchrony among friends and strangers. A) Among friends, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in only two body parts (nose and eye) and only in the vertical axis. B) Among strangers, we observed statistically significant directional synchrony in a large number of body parts in the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes.

Angela Andersen @angelaandersen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Kudos to @science.org for this self-analysis of the peer review process. These kind of data are never shared and don't have to be. Wildly refreshing to see it out in the open. Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Analyses of deidentified data reveal complex interactions that quantify success at elite general science journals.

science.org

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...

Postdoc and PhD positions at MPIAE in Frankfurt

Prof. Gillian Brown @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Gladstone et al (2026): "biographies of female scientists disproportionately emphasized effort even after adjusting for the obstacles they faced, consistent with stereotypes attributing women’s success to hard work over talent." 🧪 #psychscisky

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences@pnas.org · 2mo ago

One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is ”Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/oTon50ZuLj3 For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/TsjY50ZuLj2.

Dot plots for mindset messages about ability and interest. Diamonds with error bars mark marginal means.

Oleg Sobchuk 🇺🇦@sobchuk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...