Simon Walo

🔈Job Alert!
Swedish Excellence Center in Computational Social Science (SWECSS) is hiring postdoctoral researchers. Positions are available at IAS and the Department of Computer Science (IDA).

⌛Deadline: 31 October
IAS: liu.se/en/work-at-l...
IDA: liu.se/en/work-at-l...

#academicsky #css

🚨 Are you looking for a PhD in #NLProc dealing with #LLMs?
🎉 Good news: I am hiring! 🎉
The position is part of the “Contested Climate Futures" project. 🌱🌍 You will focus on developing next-generation AI methods🤖 to analyze climate-related concepts in content—including texts, images, and videos.

We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

🔈Job Alert! IAS is looking for a postdoctoral researcher as part of the Swedish Excellence Center in Computational Social Science -SWECSS.

⌛Deadline: September 30th
Apply 👉 liu.se/en/work-at-l...

#academicsky #css

It’s worse than “Gaza is being starved and destroyed and no one cares.” It’s that hundreds of millions *do* care and are powerless to stop it. We need a world where that can never happen, where the masses actually have political power.

WeTransfer TOS says they can use all your uploaded content for genAI

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

Integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence into Social Science Research: Measurement, Prompting, and Simulation - Thomas Davidson, Daniel Karell, 2025 Generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers new capabilities for analyzing data, creating synthetic media, and simulating realistic social interactions. This...

Attn: the special issue of SMR on Generative AI in Sociology is now online. The whole issue is fire, but the introduction by @thomasdavidson.bsky.social and Danny Karell is a must read, covering prompting, measurement, and simulations. It's a road map for soc sci research in the genAI era. +

For reference: Richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity www.oxfam.org/en/press-rel....

I believe that we can, mainly for two reasons: 1) There are many economic activities that increase GDP and emissions without doing anything useful (e.g. bitcoin mining). 2) Consumption of the richest 5% globally can still be reduced without harming Western median income earners (think yachts etc.).

The real question therefore is: Can we give up certain economic activities to reduce emissions without decreasing the living standards of Western median income earners?

The goal of degrowth is not to fix (or decrease) global GDP while achieving a Western median income for everyone. The goal of degrowth is to reduce emissions while focusing on living standards instead of GDP. This may reduce GDP but not in the same way as a recession.

Interesting argument but I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what people usually mean by "degrowth".

Bullsh*t Jobs: Mythos oder Realität? Voice of HR · Episode

Ich hatte kürzlich die spannende Gelegenheit, im Podcast «Voice of HR» über meine Forschung zu #BullshitJobs zu sprechen. Falls euch interessiert, ob Jobs tatsächlich sinnlos sind oder bloss so erscheinen, hört gerne rein! Ich freue mich über jeden Gedanken und Austausch dazu.
spoti.fi/3Eq3Mzv

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Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we expl...

Excited to announce this new article, a comprehensive review of recent research on post-growth — the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Published in the Lancet Planetary Health with a brilliant team of authors. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Academia really is a roller coaster: My first PhD paper was rejected 11 times before being published, the second one 7 times. I was very close to quitting my PhD back then. Now, I won an award for these very two papers. What a ride! 🙃
#silverlining #phdlife #PhDSky #AcademicSky

Bullshit-Jobs: Ein Soziologe erklärt, warum Menschen ihre Arbeit sinnlos vorkommt Gibt es Berufe, die objektiv sinnlos sind? Und warum leiden auch Menschen in produktiven Tätigkeiten unter einem Gefühl der Sinnlosigkeit? Ein Soziologe der Uni Zürich gibt Antworten.

Spannendes Interview in der @nzz.ch mit Soziologe @simonwalo.bsky.social von der Uni Zürich über Bullshit-Jobs, Arbeitsbedingungen und Sinnhaftigkeit von Arbeit.

👉 «Leute werden befördert und müssen sich ihre Aufgaben erst einmal zusammensuchen»: www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/b...