Alessandro Nai

For lots of reasons, I don’t like LLMs and I don’t use them, but I know there are serious people working on ways to meaningfully incorporate them into education and I don’t doubt there are ways to do that productively. It’s probably obvious that “Have the LLM tell you the answer” isn’t one of them.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.

Polymarket tweets: "BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals." Laura Loomer replies: "You know things are bad when you can't tell if this is real or a joke. Dear God. It's real. Isn't it?"

when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor

#50
The Anthropologists (Aysegül Savas, 2024)

A gem of a book, delightful and enchanting. Unfolds as a series of vignettes in the life of young couple living in a foreign city, as they look for a new home. Simple, sharp prose, beautifully written. Touching and fresh. Wonderful

#booksky 📚🖋️

Do policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ in European democracies?

My new article in @ejprjournal.bsky.social finds: Yes, sometimes, but this is not the norm.

Let's break it down. 🧵 1/10

An important, very concerning piece for everybody out there using (survey) data from online panels

Research Article titled "A Voice at the Table: How Women in Peace Processes Shape Political Representation" by Kristen Aanstoos

📢New issue of #PAG21 is out!📢

In "A Voice at the Table", @kaanstoos.bsky.social tests types of women's participation in peace processes as a new variable affecting women's legislative representation in postconflict states.

🌟Available #OpenAccess🌟

buff.ly/ELACFbc

The city really comes alive in the fall - stunning indeed

Waseda is not messing around

A quote from Savaş' The Anthropologists

Isn't this the best character description you've ever read?

(From Ayşegül Savaş' The Anthropologists)

#booksky #litfic

Abstract and results summary

🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵

Stupeflip vite Stupeflip vite Stupé-stupeflip vite Stupeflip vite Stupeflip

What perfect album came out the year you turned 16?

Hard to select one - below quite the stellar triptych

Any sane human being: two-factor authentication crushes my soul

Authenticator app: love us? Give us a good rating!

#49
Intimacies (Katie Kitamura, 2021).

After moving to The Hague for a new job at the Criminal Court the protagonist, an interpreter, faces challenges that are both very intimate and universal. Solitude, finding your place, revealing yourself to people around you if you can. Masterful

#booksky 📚🖋️

Sweet potato crème brûlée - religions have been founded on less

Strong yes to this

Get to know the team.

Dr Yuan Zeng is Associate Professor in Political Communication and Journalism at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. She is the founder and co-convenor of the Media and Civil Resistance group at the University of Leeds.

Not too shabby the view from the office tonight

#48
Hunchback (Saou Ichikawa, 2023)

Introspective peek into the life of a woman suffering from a severe congenital muscle disorder (like Ichikawa herself). She studies online, writes erotica, and muses about her body. An unflinching, explicit, and important book. Akutagawa prize 2023

#booksky 📚🖋️

This is a fantastic opportunity for a junior computational political scientist

Of course, my pleasure! Looking forward to the newsletter :)

update: I was able to, after tweaking a bit the link

(perhaps it is me, but the link seems to lead to a sign in, not a sign up page - I was unable to reach the latter.. apologies if this is a silly comment, will try again)

#47
The Innocent (Ian McEwan, 1990)

A spy-cum-political thriller that also doubles a psychological exploration into love and arrogance (and youth), set in post-war Berlin. As always with McEwan the characters are nuanced and emotions run deep under their skin. Recommended

#booksky 📚🖋️ #litfic

How Should We Study Multiple Platforms? Lessons from Deliberative Systems Theory Despite agreement that political communication research should move beyond single-platform studies, there is no existing consensus on precisely how to do so. What does it mean to study social media...

PolCom early view: Forestal on "How Should We Study Multiple Platforms? Lessons from Deliberative Systems Theory." www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Your daily dose of zen

Pizza in slices per person (vs its whole, round awesomeness) is, and remains, one of the reasons why things are so messed up in the world

actually the ALT text is wrong, this is looking north-east. But it’s ok, cardinal directions are a social construct anyway