Beth Popp Berman

It autorenews at $1.5T annually and the only way to stop it is to call a phone number where no one answers.

Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social Simulation Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions?...

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following.

It still became a polarization machine.

Then we tried six interventions to fix social media.

The results were… not what we expected.

arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

Sincerely delighted to discover, 45 minutes into this nearly-wordless three-hour documentary about French monks who take vows of silence, that among the reasons they *can* talk is "to make sure the monastery cats know when it's mealtime by making little kitty-calling noises at them."

Don't fuck with my crop yield numbers

Less terrible when you ignore what's going on! But that's probably not great either

I can't believe the BLS is the thing that got me back on here.

Just for the record, Wiatrowski is a longtime BLS employee, a dedicated public servant, someone who has been acting commissioner before, and someone I would have total confidence in during a normal transfer of power. The scary part is who they replace *him* with.

I ❤️ Wingspan

Make America Great Again...with completely imaginary data

On the plus side, unexpected posts about Wendy Espeland showing up on the TL.

You knew that, of course. But this is particularly up my alley.

Hellooooo!!! I have been taking a little break from social media! But I am here to tell you that the president firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is probably Not Great.

Ooh, thanks -- hadn't seen this.

Columbia was also a major innovator in interfering with academic freedom in the name of loyalty during the first modern crackdown of WWI

okay last thing before I actually log off today:

if you use the internet, you should have to do a land acknowledgement to the Department of Defense so you don't accidentally think you're using consumer technology

Seven Days At The Bin Store | Defector This spring, a new business opened on the main drag of my West Philadelphia neighborhood, provoking both excitement and trepidation. “I saw it just the other day and feared it,” one friend texted. “Li...

Fantastic piece on where we are in global capitalism that answers some questions I've had about a local store. Gift link.

defector.com/seven-days-a...

This is the best analysis I've read in quite a while.

TIL

It also, like you said, doesn't really map onto existing political axes, making it harder/more complicated to talk about.

That's interesting -- I didn't actually know state boards were only established in that stretch.

Lot of similarity between this argument and "talking about racism causes racism."

(okay it's five days later but it's bait)
yep, Charles Hitch went from running PPBS at DOD to running UC
what's this from?

this is not meant as a hot take or a unique insight but it's remarkable how a lot of scientific discourse is about methods, data, and findings, whereas what really does most of the heavy lifting happens to be the assumptions

Using Storytelling to Investigate Scientific Questions Fiction can be an important tool to explore complex science and technology questions. Arula Ratnakar discusses how storytelling can help both experts and nonexperts think about complex issues.

great to see @arula-ratnakar.bsky.social featured on this @issuesinst.bsky.social podcast!

Not snark, just had second thoughts about posting. Weird moment right now.

Congratulations!!! It's still an accomplishment to celebrate, even if it's not the security it once was.

People encounter this with their IoT devices and DRMed media, but this is a general property of cloudification: power, and therefore decisions that affect you directly, are in someone else's hands. Government and military systems are impacted in the same way.

Why tolerate this?

Thanks. It's hard to keep track of everything going on but I'm glad it is at least still searchable one way.

Does this mean they are removing information about completed grants from the searchable NSF database?