Here is me remembering Jiaqi Ge, a former colleague and acquaintance at the University of Leeds, and some of her work that I find interesting. She tragically passed away last year. theworldinmodels.substack.com/p/jiaqi-ge-t...

Jiaqi Ge, the fleeting nature of life, and her work on country-level Agent-based Modelling

A farewell, yet the start of a deeper engagement

theworldinmodels.substack.com

What is left now other than going fully renewable, electric and making our own hydrogen?

Back from holiday with a bang 💫 Am pleased my article Artificial Utopia is now published in the journal Futures. lnkd.in/e_fnEbg3 This article conceptualises thinking about Utopian and radically socially innovative societies with the help of computational simulations.

I believe that if you are interested in modelling social change, also in relation to climate change, postgrowth economics etc. this winter school could be quite useful to you. schumpeter-centre.uni-graz.at/de/veranstal...

Why the German chancellor is wrong - the focus on increasing working time is misguided - and what to do instead open.substack.com/pub/theworld...

Why the German chancellor is wrong - the focus on increasing working time is misguided - and what to do instead

Simply working more will not address Germany's deep-rooted problems

open.substack.com

Here is a blog on the current debate around increasing work time in Germany. Instead, we must think out of the box and experiment with drastic economic and social innovation. theworldinmodels.substack.com/p/why-the-ge...

Why the German chancellor is wrong - the focus on increasing working time is misguided - and what to do instead

Simply working more will not address Germany's deep rooted problems

theworldinmodels.substack.com

Sorry to link to X, but I am so glad another (senior) person is speaking out about this, it is a different field than mine but I had the same problem with a paper that got rejected and even an ERC grant application. x.com/Michael_J_Bl...

Michael Black on X: "The use of AI in reviewing is a growing problem. Several of my ICCV papers have AI reviews -- one reviewer was so lazy that they left in the prompts! A common refrain that I hear is that people have difficulty writing in English and need to use AI to clean up their review." / X

The use of AI in reviewing is a growing problem. Several of my ICCV papers have AI reviews -- one reviewer was so lazy that they left in the prompts! A common refrain that I hear is that people have difficulty writing in English and need to use AI to clean up their review.

x.com

Very interesting new database on intergenerational mobility www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Intergenerational mobility around the world: A new database

Using individual data from over 400 household surveys, this paper compiles a global database of intergenerational mobility in education for 153 countr…

sciencedirect.com

👉AI for good? AI for agent-based models? What kind of forms could this take. Please note the deadline to our SSC special track this Friday! We are looking forward to your research. 👉Also Please spread if you can!!😀

Yannick Oswald@yloswald.bsky.social · last yr.

Exciting News 📣🫵 Wolfram Barfuss and I are organising a special track at the Social Simulation Conference 2025 in Delft. On "Artificially Intelligent Agents in Social Agent-based Models" The call is out now. ssc2025.tbm.tudelft.nl/important-da... Looking forward to exciting contributions.✍️

👉🙌 😀I am happy to share my new article (preprint) Artificial Utopia: Simulation and Intelligent Agents for a Democratised Future arxiv.org/abs/2503.07364

Artificial Utopia: Simulation and Intelligent Agents for a Democratised Future

Prevailing top-down systems in politics and economics struggle to keep pace with the pressing challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, social inequality and conflict. Bottom-up democrat...

arxiv.org

But evidence shows different already. Here is a study showing that LLM generated ideas are judged as more novel than researcher generated ideas in NLP. arxiv.org/abs/2409.04109

Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked optimism about their potential to accelerate scientific discovery, with a growing number of works proposing research agents that autono...

arxiv.org

Melanie Mitchell@melaniemitchell.bsky.social · last yr.

Nice essay! "LLMs, while they already have all of humanity's knowledge in memory, haven't generated any new knowledge by connecting previously unrelated facts...We're currently building very obedient students, not revolutionaries."

Crazy that in this whole tumult around Zelensky and Trump, the Americans, Trump and his friends, also just swept under the rug that Russia already allied with North Korea and North Korea literally has troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukrainians. But sure *Zelensky* gambles with WW3.

One scenario the EU must be prepared for now is the U.S. lifting sanctions on Russia. Key principles for the EU: - make sure to stay united - not return to dangerous dependencies - not deliberately support the Russian war economy Not changing anything might not be the right answer

I am reading and learning about models of opinion and cultural change and diffusion. Particularly with relevance to agent-based models or network models. The main classes I have identified so far are as follows. Anything I am missing?

I am reading and learning about models of opinion and cultural change and diffusion. Particularly with relevance to agent-based models or network models. The main classes I have identified so far are as follows. Anything I am missing?

Has the Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow be misintepreted by a lot of people? They actually argue themselves that hierarchical and egalitarian societies are around since complex social life emerged, not that all hunterer gatheres were egalitarian. research-portal.uu.nl/ws/portalfil...

21 % für die AfD sind 21 % zu viel.

Exciting News 📣🫵 Wolfram Barfuss and I are organising a special track at the Social Simulation Conference 2025 in Delft. On "Artificially Intelligent Agents in Social Agent-based Models" The call is out now. ssc2025.tbm.tudelft.nl/important-da... Looking forward to exciting contributions.✍️

👉Happy to have contributed a tiny bit to the writing of this new article: Understanding Pedestrian Dynamics using Machine Learning with Real-Time Urban Sensors journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Really good blog on the nature of authorships and citation pressure. I think academia should make itself honest about this and try not to constantly reproduce that system... blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Does authorship mean anything when academic papers are simply citable tokens?

The bibliometric infrastructure of citations has become an inescapable organising feature of academic life. Drawing on a range of evidence of the use and misuse of citations data, Stuart Macdonald …

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Periodic reminder that the smallest nations of Earth, including many island states, emit only a fraction of industrialized nations. Here is a comparison between the 50 least emitting nations and what super low fruit hanging policies in Germany could have saved (under the now defunct government).

Citizen assemblies (CA) are often thought to decrease polarization on sensitive issues. However there is a surprising amount of literature showing other effects. E.g. this experimental study found students became *more* ideological through a modelled CA. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Creating Better Citizens? Effects of a Model Citizens' Assembly on Student Political Attitudes and Behavior

Perceiving political engagement to be dangerously low among American citizens, many political science professors in recent years have attempted to promote engagement and “healthier” political atti...

tandfonline.com

Really sad to see 😔

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 2y ago

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

This piece by Marco Pangallo is one of my favorite recent articles. It discusses the concept of equilibrium in economics recognizing that it actually has a lot do with systemic complexity thinking but still adding a justified critique. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_ge...

Gaza genocide - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Eine unsere Studien in diesem Feld www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Luxury-focused carbon taxation improves fairness of climate policy

Equitable climate policies are required for a just and rapid energy transition. A widely discussed climate policy instrument is carbon taxes. Previous…

sciencedirect.com

Vera Huwe@verahuwe.bsky.social · 2y ago

Das kann man bepreisungsnah machen, zb frequent flyer levy oder differenzielle CO2-Preise (cc @yloswald.bsky.social ) – oder mit differenzieller Ordnungs- und Subventionspolitik (Ausbau soziale Infrastrukturen bei gleichzeitiger Verschärfung Standards oder Verbot für CO2-intensiven Luxuskonsum)

Definitely one of the biggest mistakes. Next to autocratic capitalists and capitalist autocrats controlling basically the entire economy and sending us to climate and inequality hell.

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen@lorenzspreen.eurosky.social · 2y ago

Hopefully it won't turn out to be one of humanity's biggest mistakes to have digitalization and the online world basically entirely controlled by capitalist logic and/or autocrats, but at the moment it feels a bit like that.

Thrilled to share that I have officially graduated as a Doctor in Evolutionary Biology and Social Sciences from The University of Sheffield @sheffielduni.bsky.social. Thanks to my supervisors Ellie and Anna @annakspeaking.bsky.social, my husband @yloswald.bsky.social, my parents, brother & friends.

Hard to process the devastation I’ve witnessed in the last two days. Still in a state of shock for those who have lost so much in such a short period of time. #NoWords 💔

I am generally for climate protests for obvious reasons. What the UK is doing horrible here but can someone explain these results to me? Why is that labeled as clear evidence for protests working. All I see is null results. ->

Jesse Wise 🍉@jessewise.bsky.social · 2y ago

This is a great shame, particularly given disruptive climate protests generate support for more moderate groups. shorturl.at/SJOoE