Michael Scharkow

This year, I am living in a simulation - literally. 🌀

@mscharkow.bsky.social, and I are currently conducting a #simulation study on how users interact with algorithms in short-video environments such as #TikTok. I’ve had two incredible opportunities to share our progress so far.

Our Digital News Report 2025 is out!

📊48 markets
🌏Almost 100K respondents
📰Key headline: Audiences lean into video news and influencers, raising misinformation concerns and new dilemmas for publishers

📱Explore now buff.ly/xLP67Tg
🧵Findings in thread #DNR25

Do Large Language Models Solve the Problems of Agent-Based Modeling? A Critical Review of Generative Social Simulations Recent advancements in AI have reinvigorated Agent-Based Models (ABMs), as the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the emergence of ``generative ABMs'' as a novel approach to simula...

Large Language Model-based social simulation has emerged as an exciting new research method.

But do LLMs actually resolve the problems that have historically limited use of Agent-Based Models? What do they bring?

We review the literature to find out!

with Maik Laaroij
arxiv.org/abs/2504.03274

Interesting. Do the funders provide reasons for this requirement, ie are they science-related or legal? In many ethics/IRB (equivalent) discussions I've had in the past, it seemed that collecting less demographic information seemed to be preferable in general for privacy/data protection reasons.

What happens if you have NA in your demographics? Do papers get rejected if the reported mean age is based on 73% of the sample? I get the warmup argument, but why not warm up with motivating items? If however, your experiment's primary outcome is age or gender, put that item in ASAP ;-)

This is also what I learned and continue to teach. Sociodemographics rarely a predictor (or outcome!) of interest, at least in my courses...

I am a big fan of www.soscisurvey.de The basics are free anyway but university licenses of various types including for own servers exist as well, I think psychology at UZH even has one.
Plus, I've had very good experiences with support as well.

Good and timely stuff! I wonder how we can navigate the (very real) tradeoff between quality and reproducibility. Will reviewer #2 accept a drop of .2 in accuracy between gpt/gemini vs. local models if you make this decision transparent? What if results change? Just add another robustness check?

LimeWire Wrapped 1. sistem_of_a_dowm_Zelda_song.flac 2. Nirvana - Glycerine.flv 3. track_8_(1)_(1)c.mp3 4. weird_al_Bert_and_Big_Bird_smoking_weed_FUNNY(parody).wav 5. jay-z_the-blueprint_FULL ALBUM_REAL.mp3.exe

finally finished downloading my limewire wrapped after 20 years

If you think of time as a sampling dimension (which we often do in many other contexts), it's not even a metaphorical population, but an occasion-specific sample. Which is also argued in the above literature regarding country-year data.

Not to be confused with Schöpfungshöhenselbstzweifel!

I sense a strong nudge to never reject anything 🤗

Wiener weniger unfreundlich Das Image der Wiener Bevölkerung, besonders unfreundlich zu sein, hat sich leicht verbessert. Im vergangenen Jahr noch auf dem letzten Platz von 53 internationalen Städten, liegt Wien in Sachen Freund...

Laut Studie ist Wien nicht mehr die unfreundlichste Stadt, sondern Berlin und München sind besser als wir. Es bringt nichts, irgendeinen Sündenbock zu suchen. Wir alle müssen jetzt reflektieren, wo wir im vergangenen Jahr Fehler gemacht haben könnten.

🚨New preprint 🚨

**A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media**

🧵

We develop a computational reward learning model of real-world social media data, which infers the separate goal-directed and habitual cognitive processes driving posting...

People know who she was running against. They know exactly who he is. Most people, it turns out, just prefer him. That is what they like.

Hamilton from the top rope.
inthesetimes.com/article/trum...

this apparently heartfelt post from an openai cofounder takes some surprising turns

New article, co-authored with Elena Broda, just out: "Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news: lessons from an interdisciplinary, systematic literature review". And it is open access, just waiting to be downloaded :). @polcomm.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Why not keep the current funcs and switch between hidden and research API based on an argument or an API key being present in the background? Or use hidden API as a fallback when both can be used for the same task? I use traktok (thanks!) for teaching and hope for non-breaking changes ;-)

Predoc, actually.

Dringende Hörempfehlung: Wunderbar kurzweiliges Interview mit @tanjev.bsky.social (aka „Professor Larifari“ ♥️) über seinen Weg in die Wissenschaft.