Thomas Davidson

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂

Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!

Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!

Sky News does a great job here of showing that right wing voices get outsized amplification on X. The why of it is complicated (we have upcoming work on this). But the fact if it is undeniable. The platform is also full of clickbaity bullshit. Not unrelated.

Happy to announce the UTM Sociology Speaker Series for 2025-2026 @utm-research.bsky.social @uoftsociology.bsky.social

🇫🇷 We are hiring 🇫🇷

Assistant or Associate Professor Position in Computational Sociology @crestsociology.bsky.social @ipparis.bsky.social

Details here (please RT)
www.shorturl.at/E57le

There is one week left to apply to join us at Rutgers! We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Sociology as part of a cluster of new hires in data science and AI.

Applications are due next Wednesday, 10/15.

Should WOAH start a mentorship programme? 🤔

As the workshop grows, reviewer expectations are rising.
We don’t want contributors from adjacent communities penalised by *CL norms.

Senior PhDs and beyond could be mentors.

Share your thoughts:

👉 forms.gle/safif3rU2rs5...

Carolina Sociology is hiring!

• Tenure-track in computational sociology or advanced quantitative methods
• Open rank in population health.

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Come work with us @crestsociology.bsky.social

We are looking for a post-doc with a background in social sciences, interested in NLP and in media & journalism studies.

Details here: www.css.cnrs.fr/post-doctora...

Screenshot of an email that reads: Call to Join Editorial Board - ASS Dear Dr. Thomas Davidson, I hope this message finds you well. We are pleased to invite you to consider joining the Editorial Board of Archives of Social Science (ASS). As a specialist in the field, your expertise and insights would be invaluable in shaping the journal's scientific rigor and global reach. ASS is an open-access platform dedicated to publishing high-quality research across all domains of social science, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, economics, education, communication studies, social work etc. We strive to foster collaboration and visibility among professionals worldwide.

Big professional news!

📊The Sociology Department at Stony Brook University invites applications for *two* tenure-track Assistant Professor positions to begin in Fall 2026. [They] seek scholars who specialize in issues of global inequality and justice, broadly construed.

apply.interfolio.com/172669

Preparing my CSS class for next week and learned that Spotify put limits on its API that prevent most interesting queries developer.spotify.com/blog/2024-11...

This was my main go-to after the Twitter API shut down and now I have to find a new application. Does anyone have any other API reccs?

Preparing my CSS class for next week and learned that Spotify put limits on its API that prevent most interesting queries developer.spotify.com/blog/2024-11...

This was my main go-to after the Twitter API shut down and now I have to find a new application. Does anyone have any other API reccs?

Interested to read this more closely. One issue I worry about using LLMs for text analysis is the slippage between annotation and classification, particularly for zero-shot learning (is it annotation or classification?). Certainly appears to underscore the critical need for validation.

we're hiring assistant professor in computational social science, applications close 26/10/2025

We're hiring an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science ❗

📚 jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Apply before 26 October and join an internationally outstanding group of social science methodologists 🌎

Call for two or more open-rank academic positions in Sociology

Come join me in wonderful Copenhagen! 🇩🇰

My department is looking to fill at least two positions - any specialization and any level! The University of Copenhagen aims to be the best place for the best ideas. What’s yours?

Apply by Nov 15.

Ha thanks, Rohan. It’s a short one but it scratches the surface of what we can do with LRMs. And I haven’t seen any evaluations like this in the CS literature. Let me know if you have any feedback

Substantively, the results show how reasoning effort and traces could help tasks like content moderation

There are, of course, caveats: LRMs do not replicate human cognition, the models have limited capabilities, and reasoning traces are not always faithful

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20262

Analysis of the reasoning traces for Gemini 2.5 shows that the model identifies second-order factors when faced with these decisions, helping to address common false positives like flagging reclaimed slurs as hate speech (Warning: offensive language in example)

On a content moderation task, humans take longer and LRMs use more tokens when offensiveness is identical or fixed.

This suggests that LRM behavior is consistent with dual process theories of cognition, as the models expend more reasoning effort when simple heuristics are insufficient

The results are consistent across three frontier LRMs: o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 4

New pre-print on large reasoning models 🤖🧠

To what extent does LRM behavior resemble human reasoning processes?

I find that LRM reasoning effort predicts human decision time on a pairwise comparison task, and both humans and LRMs require more time/effort on challenging tasks

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.

Apply by: 10 Oct

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

This is pretty much what the earlier work on debiasing word embeddings was doing. And it turns out that it doesn't work...

Cue one of the best CS paper titles aclanthology.org/N19-1061/

Contributors include: @sxz.bsky.social @ajalvero.bsky.social @eollion.bsky.social @lpargyle.bsky.social @davidbroska.bsky.social @austin-van-loon.bsky.social @bstewart.bsky.social @hwaight.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social @tinalaw.bsky.social @lauraknelson.bsky.social @oms279.bsky.social

Thanks for reading this thread. The entire special issue can be found here: journals.sagepub.com/toc/smra/54/3

If you want to talk more about AI and sociology, I'll be at ASA and will be giving a talk on some ongoing AI research in the Saturday morning session on Culture and CSS

Of course, the methodological focus means that we don’t cover other important topics like impacts of AI on society and the politics of AI. There is a lot more work to be done.

See the recent Socius special issue for more perspectives on the sociology of AI journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...

If you want to learn more about these articles, check out our editors’ introduction, where we provide an overview and discuss some central themes.

One point we emphasize is how the model ecosystem has matured & open-weight models are viable for many problems journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Stuhler, Ton, and Ollion show how LLMs enable more complex information extraction tasks that can be applied to text corpora, with an application to the study of obituaries journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

A study by Than et al. revisits an earlier SMR paper, exploring how LLMs can be used for qualitative coding tasks, providing detailed guidance on how to approach the problem journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....