Michael Cohen

Unless/until humans are made entirely irrelevant (and who knows, Sam Altman and Bill Gates have both recently suggested that we will be — and they seem less evil than the average tech billionaire!), we still need to understand how our brains process things that other brains create...

Yes! Such an important point to highlight. While I acknowledge that it is important to study AI, I’m already utterly sick of how it seems to be the ONLY thing anybody wants to study right now.

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has weaponized administrative subpoenas to attack free speech, according to privacy and civil rights groups.

This is absolutely insane: DHS claims the right to subpoena your emails and to send investigators to your house. In this case, because a retiree sent the mildest possible criticism to a prosecutor. No judges involved.
www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

May be of particular interest to: @johnjost.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @sicsspenn.bsky.social @chrisbail.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social

Big picture, to me, this says that people who voted for Trump were likely looking for a candidate like him before he came along. Further, this sort of method could maybe have been used in the 2016 presidential campaign to model shifts towards Trump that hadn't happened yet. (4/4)

We then related those scores with vote share for Trump, controlling for prior Republican vote share. We found that Trump's vote share (but not Romney's 2012 vote share0 was predicted by linguistic signatures consistent with traits including low empathy, low agreeableness, and unfairness. (3/4)

To give a bit more detail: We estimated personality, empathy, and moral foundations by county using aggregated geolocated data from Twitter (originally posted in 2009-2015) & lexica that gave each word a score on various traits. This analysis was all done in the aggregate, not in individuals. (2/4)

Excited to share a new preprint on psychological characteristics among voters that predict support for Donald Trump: specifically, low empathy, low agreeableness, and complaints about unfairness. (1/4)
osf.io/preprints/ps...

He keeps referring to Greenland as Iceland.
His dementia is on full display. Just look at him slumped over the podium . Time for people to get up and leave the clown show.

Simon Rosenberg on Trump’s no good, very bad year "It’s grotesque. He’s become a grotesque figure."

"There comes a point where we have to start questioning whether or not he’s actually aware of what’s happening around him & the harm he’s doing. It’s similar to historical figures like Nero or Caligula. Their madness took over & they started doing wildly destructive things. Trump is in that place."

I've noticed that ICE agents keep yelling "18 USC § 111" at people filming them. I'd like to see the memo they all got on that talking point, and I'd like to know who sent it. Filming ICE or alerting your neighbors to their presence doesn't violate § 111.

But what if Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade was an “official act”?

I especially appreciate Sander’s help navigating a difficult final set of revisions, after he signed off, to balance the journal’s desire for political neutrality with my desire to accurately describe the asymmetries between left and right on these issues, especially in the United States. (5/5)

I also want to give a shout out to @profsanderlinden.bsky.social , who was very helpful as the reviewing editor for the special issue. (4/5)

Thus, when social media algorithms are tuned to prioritize content based on engagement, polarizing and false content is likely to be prioritized. Further, once we are exposed to misleading narratives, it is difficult to fully correct these narratives later. (3/5)

Specifically, we discuss how the neural reward system motivates social media engagement (likes & shares). Other work shows that moral outrage activates the neural reward system, while content that evokes moral outrage (including misinformation) also tends to spread more quickly on social media.(2/5)

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

In a new review paper that I led (with Jean Decety), we explain how research in psychology and neuroscience supports the need for more regulation of social media algorithms to protect against threats to democracy. The EU Digital Services Act is a good model for this type of regulation. (1/5)

Everyone Wants to Know What Gen Z Republicans Think. We Asked Them. Twenty GOP Zoomers on Trump, Hitler, dating, racism, politics, the economy, and more

This is a grim read. I don't know how we construct even a semi-functional party system when the rising generation of Republican leaders are going to be even more Nazi than the current batch. www.city-journal.org/article/manh...

11/20: Coast Guard classifies swastikas as "potentially divisive" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

11/21: Guard leader's new policy calls them "[d]ivisive or hate symbols" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Today: Back to "potentially divisive" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Wow, didn’t realize that. And now they’re closer to making it a reality. Ugh… 😩

When can we escape this hell that we’re in??

This, in combination with the new national security strategy that seems to characterize efforts to counter disinformation and manipulative content coming from Europe as counter to America's national security, has me freaked out that they are on the verge of criminalizing this research broadly...

so now if you worked in content moderation you are visa-blackballed like you'd be if you're friends were all al qaeda

Interestingly, the evidence as to whether misinformation in video form is more impactful (including deepfakes) seems to be less clear than one would expect. (See dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...) But it definitely deserves further study!

Trump’s anti-climate agenda could result in 1.3m more deaths globally, analysis finds Fallout from increased emissions linked to president’s ‘America First’ policies expected to most affect those in poor, hot countries

The Republican Party is a death cult. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The pro-Nick Fuentes Administration destroying people and institutions on the basis of “fighting antisemitism” has me losing my damn mind.

The Nazi-sympathizers pretending to be protectors of American Jews has to be one of the most profound mindfucks in an era rife with them.

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. "
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Nice piece, and consistent with our findings that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online www.science.org/doi/full/10....

This is the facility that I and many others have been protesting. We’ve been hit, thrown, gassed, and shot with pepper bullets but none of that holds a candle to what is being done to people *in* the actual facility.

Read this thread. Don’t look away. Keep your eyes and the pressure on Broadview.