«Sam•Forsythe»

Pairwise overlap percentages between reliability categories. Each row shows the percentage of users who shared content (i.e. at least one tweet) in that row who also share content (i.e. at least one tweet) in the category in the column. Note that percentages do not add up to 100% because users can share multiple types of content.

Surprisingly, we find that users who share unreliable URLs are more likely to share science. Moreover, this is particularly concentrated in more untrustworthy domains classified as fake/hoax or conspiracy theory. (3/10)

Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." www.cia.gov/resources/cs...

Just arrived in Kraków for the 2025 'EISA European Workshops in International Studies Conference'. Any friends fancy some pierogi? #EWIS2025

CIA has published a lessons-learned review into the tradecraft behind the intel assessment that Russia "aspired" to help Trump win in 2016. The review highlights "multiple procedural anomalies" in that assessment.
cia.gov/static/a336f...

Do you think Trump’s insistence that it be called the “12 Day War” is because someone briefed him on the Six-Day War and he wants ‘his’ war to be bigger?

When War Becomes a Tech Product: How Silicon Valley Logics are Reshaping Military AI - Untold AI-driven weapons born from venture capital logics treat war as a beta test and failure as progress.

Another short piece from me (apologies) on the pitfalls of military tech and VC logics and their fraught relationship to the realities of war. In this piece, I bring back Norbert Wiener to illustrate that technological progress should have ethical limits. untoldmag.org/when-war-bec...

The World According to Military Targeting A revealing account of the prevalence—and alarming ubiquity—of military targeting, and how it has become a self-propelling worldview driven by dominance, v

I’m halfway into this amazing work by Erik Rechborn-Kjennerud that just dropped. I assume it will quickly become a go-to book in the genre. If you are interested in how and with what consequences militaries wage war, do yourself a favor and grab a copy.

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm.

Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

excellent thread on our present political economy from my pal the Wolf

AI as symbolic prosthesis Where LLMs might take us next

@thelastinstance.bsky.social weighing in on LLMs as symbolic prostheses: codepoetics.substack.com/p/ai-as-symb...

i also like following the reconstruction of the author's own on-line reasoning. it presents their whole inquiry, and not just deductions from the results

it's strange to read a scientific or scholarly paper and not find a single question mark. i can understand wanting to avoid a rhetorical style, but isn't addressing doubt the point of any inquiry?

All eyes on Serbia today. Time for the EU to end its cynical & anti-democratic cooperation with Vučić—a man who was Milošević’s actual propaganda minister.

No deal with Vučić & Rio Tinto for lithium (DE); no sale of fighter jets (FR); no cooperation with repressive Serbian intelligence.
#pumpaj

Standing with #belgrade - at least live on TV.
The estimated number of 800,000 participants has just been announced on N1 - that was compared in percentage terms to 4,000,000 people taking part in a demonstration in Germany.
#pumpaj

Extraordinary scenes in Serbia’s capital Belgrade right now.

Around 500,000 people are on the streets in what may be the biggest protest in Serbian history. All demanding the resignation of President Vučić & his government.

What began as a student protest is now a full democratic uprising.
🇷🇸

US Halts Defensive Cyber Activities Against Russia: A Digital ‘Withdrawal’ from Europe - PRIF BLOG In a major shift in U.S. cybersecurity policy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt all planning against Russia, including offensive cyber operations. This policy chan...

A digital ‘withdrawal’ from Europe? The U.S. halted all cyber operations – marking a stark shift from the previous administration’s cybersecurity strategy. On #PRIFblog, @cyberpeace1.bsky.social takes a close look at the consequences and why this policy shift matters. blog.prif.org/2025/03/13/u...

the only thing that can stop a Bad State with a weaponized security apparatus is a Good State with a weaponized security apparatus

sending thoughts and prayers to my CIA #FOIA request. this was already the expected completion date even before the current regime

There's a view that I call (for lack of a better expression) 'psychologism about the manifest image,' which expects most philosophical-sounding questions about entities outside of math and physics to be best addressed by discussing quirks or pathologies of human cognition

psychologism almost always a cover for nominalism imo (letting ppl avoid having to admit they reject generals by focusing on widely distributed particulars)

Over several years of phd work on deception in international relations, my own feelings about the geopolitical significance of disinformation, lying, manipulation etc, have swung from "very important!" to "mostly trivial..." to "no one knows [shrug]?" and, most recently, "Falsehood is Our Episteme".

I worry about a world (we haven't seen it yet) in which the node deletion is targeted according to network centrality etc, rather than random, making tariff-type measures far closer to the kinds of weaponized interdependence that @abenewman.bsky.social and I have described in our research.

Error and attack tolerance of complex networks Many complex systems, such as communication networks, display a surprising degree of robustness: while key components regularly malfunction, local failures rarely lead to the loss of the global inform...

See e.g. arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat... for a sense of how much more quickly things could get bad if governments start using some of the supply chain data that they have been gathering for offensive purposes.

can’t wait to have deepseek reviewer 2 the paper chatgpt wrote for me

a close friend was told over and over by specialists that his undiagnosed epilepsy was burnout, psychosis, or simply imaginary. the greatest resilience how has shown through it all has been the tenacity to push through the hubris of experts who have no sense of their own limits

archive.ph/fp0cH

if i was Peter Thiel and wanted to endear myself to regime sceptics by demonstrating that i was not a deranged and racist pseud but rather an erudite and discerning leader, i would probably not publish an OpEd that reads like you prompted a Straussian LLM to mimic Nick Land but that’s just me

A syllabus for the new global politics Clashing information orders and what they mean

Here's my Clashing Information Orders syllabus in case there is anything worth cannibalizing from it www.programmablemutter.com/p/a-syllabus...

Morphogenesis of Symbolic Forms: Meaning in Music, Art, Religion, and Language This book presents a morphogenetic perspective on human culture and focuses on visual communication, music, religion, and language

Wolfgang Wildgen's last book:

RIP Wolfgang Wildgen: cognitive linguist and semiotician, sociolinguist, and theorist of evolutionary linguistics.
His work beinging together Peircean semiotics with René Thom's catastrophe theory challenged me to push my learning into fields i never imagined.

Below a list of his publications: