Rob de Vries

Found this guy in the garden yesterday. Looked crazily like a hummingbird. Apparently it's a hummingbird hawk moth

it managed to keep track of a lot of the underlying data much better than I expected.

ChatGPT - Game simulation results A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges

I've spent far too much time making up a game to simulate inequality for my 2nd year sociology students. Lacking anyone stupid enough to test it with me, I got chatgpt to simulate it and it managed remarkable well:

chatgpt.com/share/68dd39...

Would be interesting to see what this looks like with prestige/social status as a dimension. Lots of 'low PMC' (e.g. journalists, creative professionals) are actually the most prestigious jobs in society - and well within most people's conception of the 'PMC'

British students lack ‘drive’ of their American peers, says Business Secretary | LBC The Business Secretary has defended comments he made at a meeting with investors where he said British students lack the ‘drive’ and ‘vigour’ of their American peers.

Business Secretary Peter Kyle: "Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge...I want people to go to university to start businesses in our country"

Welp, goodbye Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, we had an OK run...

www.lbc.co.uk/article/brit...

This also just seems like a statistical fluke? 2025 isn't even over yet. It's weird to publish an article about a "trend" that applies to 6 months out of the last three decades.

Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.

Facts in the article:
1. RW extremists have been responsible for vastly more (and more lethal) political violence in the US since the 1980s.
2. In 2025, there have been 5 LW attacks & 1 RW
3. You can't infer a trend because violence fluctuates so much.

Headline
www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

He was actually talking about watching E4 vs. Channel 4, but I think it works

Relevant to joining social media, it also contains my version of an old Stewart Lee joke: "The internet is a flood of sewage that comes unbidden into your home. Social media is like you constructed a sluice to let it in"

Yes, peer review sucks. But attention-economy hellscapes would be worse Obliging everyone to undertake post-publication review would aid discoverability in a world without traditional journals, says Robert de Vries

Just been reminded that I wrote this on THES quite a while ago: www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/yes-pee...

Nobody read it, but now I'm on social media finally I can see if anyone is interested...

How "Free Speech Culture" Is Killing Free Speech: Part One Blurring The Lines Between Official Censorship And Individual Criticism Built The Intellectual Foundation For Trump's Assault On Free Expression

"“Free speech culture” tells people they should shut up about the things that make them passionate so other people feel more comfortable disagreeing with them" www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

Do people think it's higher status to get lots of engagement on your post about something that's already popular VS. to post about something obscure but get less engagement. Also do people seek external validation of the popularity of the target before making a status judgement?

Could presumably test this by experimentally varying two variables about video/post: 1) popularity of target (e.g. musician, restaurant etc.), 2) engagement with post.

Interesting argument from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social on Search Engine podcast: Gen Z are having a 'coolness' crisis because: 1) finding something obscure but good is 'cool', 2) popularity metrics are now how people know things are good. Hence no-one will like your video/post or think you are cool

The right persuades people that trans women are a threat to 'real women' so we have to 'meet the public where they are'. There is no belief that the Left could possibly persuade the public of anything.

The big problem with the current Labour party is that they seem to have accepted that they have no way to set the agenda. The right persuades people that small boats and refugee hotels are an existential threat to the nation so we have to 'meet the public where they are'.

There's probably something to do here with a chart of '% of time spent criticising your own (nominal) side's radicals', but I couldn't figure out how to make it work

(note that this is a cartoon to illustrate an idea - not a chart based on actual data)

my attempt to visualise @michaelhobbes.bsky.social point about why US Democrats struggle with messaging