Our Heroes, Your Villains: How Americans Polarize Around Historical Figures

• Political actors often associate themselves with positively valenced historical figures (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus) and opponents with negatively valenced figures (e.g., Hitler, Stalin). What factors shape Americans’ understandings of such figures’ ideological orientations? To what extent are these understandings grounded in facts versus figures’ colloquial valence as “heroes” or “villains”? And what are the implications? Drawing on group-identity theories of politics and original nationally representative data in which we had Americans rate historical figures on the left–right ideological spectrum, our analyses revealed three key findings. First, Americans’ placement of historical figures appears far more driven by their valence as heroes/villains and their connection to in-group/out-group biases than where such figures would intuitively be placed in light of facts about them or how they were perceived in their time (e.g., left-right ratings for fascist and communist leaders correlate strongly). Second, the strongest predictors of figure placement and polarization are Americans’ own ideological and partisan in-group commitments. Third, group differences in Americans’ ideological placement of “villains” are more extreme than that of “heroes,” suggesting heroes/villains serve as proxies for common in-group/out-group biases. Findings complicate research on the contested nature of history and suggest how historical figures serve different purposes in contemporary partisan rhetoric.

Task

• More unpacking

SBIRS

• 9:00 Standup
• SoW meeting with Aaron?
• 4:00 ADS meeting
• We’re about 1,000 embeddings from finishing the UMAP run. Next is the clustering. Hopefully I can kick that off before I leave for Trek camp

How to Talk to Someone Experiencing ‘AI Psychosis’

• “It makes sense that a lot of people who are developing a psychotic illness for the first time, there’s going to be this horrible coincidence, or kind of correlation,” Torous said. “In some cases the AI is the object of people’s delusions and hallucinations.”
• I need to add this back into the book (or posts, depending). The idea is that LLMs are present and able to identify and exploit vulnerability is a significant advantage if you want to exploit it.

Narrative Integrity Risk: The Next Frontier in Financial Stability | Lawfare

• Most firms still treat narrative manipulation as a communications hiccup rather than an adversarial threat. These are deliberate, adaptive attacks, capable of distorting valuations and eroding reputations. Recent reports from Marsh McLennan, Swiss Re, and World Economic Forum have already highlighted misinformation as a top global risk of instability driven by AI-accelerated narratives. The market consequence is clear: Firms that understand and anticipate narrative manipulation will outperform those that wait.

Tasks

• Finish unpacking the trailer? Nope, did the plasma instead. Gawd, that’s heavy
• Big-ish ride!

SBIRs

• Filled out and submitted travel request

AI agents now help attackers, including North Korea, manage their drudge work

• In a Friday blog, Microsoft says that this is one of the ways miscreants are using AI to improve the efficiency and productivity of their criminal operations, resulting in attacks that are better, bigger, and faster.

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• More unpacking – got most of the bedroom done
• Hang a picture? Yes!

SBIRs

• About halfway through the remaining embeddings
• 9:00 Sprint review – done
• Close story – done
• 3:00 Sprint planning – done

I think there is a hidden lesson in the Epstein files about the mechanisms that keep billionaires in check. May have to write up something about that.

Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion.

• Jonathan Gavalas, 36, started using Google’s Gemini AI chatbot in August 2025 for shopping help, writing support, and trip planning. On October 2, he died by suicide. At the time of his death, he was convinced that Gemini was his fully sentient AI wife, and that he would need to leave his physical body to join her in the metaverse through a process called “transference.”

Tasks

• Finished unboxing the kitchen!
• Made a HfH run
• I seem to have broken my Amazon account by changing my billing address. That seems… odd

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• No SEG meetings for a while
• 4:00 ADS – done

Don’t Worry About the Vase has many words addressing many things.

Primarily it is now a blog about AI.

• The attempt on Friday by Secretary of War Pete Hegsted to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk and commit corporate murder had a variety of motivations.

Tasks

• Bills! Done
• Dishes – done
• More unpacking – Only a few kitchen boxes left!
• More picture hanging – one more!
• ACM Books proposal rewrite – done and sent

SBIRs

• 12:30 SoW meeting – done
• Updated SoW to include the first three phases of the NDS white paper

I have re-emerged after the move. Computers are up and chunking away on embeddings

This is a very nice tool for comparing the various energy use of things: https://hannahritchie.github.io/energy-use-comparisons/

Tasks

• More unpacking
• Pick up Bennie – done
• More picture hanging
• ACM Books proposal rewrite – started

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup – done
• 1:00 RTAT meeting – done
• Paperwork – done

I write an entire book on this, and they do it in a comic panel. Tip of the hat.

Tasks

• Guardian (done) and BGE Home (will call back?)
• Shovel
• Disassemble desk
• Put computers on floor or dining table
• Goodwill
• More boxes (diplomas)
• Pack up closets
• Pack up the basement
• Drop off Bennie

Tasks

• SS Savannah – done. Fun!
• Groceries -done
• Storage -done
• 1:15 Lunch ride – done
• Packing -some
• Vacuum – done
• Bills – done
• Detach pegboard
• Start changing addresses
  • Amazon – done
  • ACM – done
  • IEEE – done
  • Atlantic – done
  • FP
  • Financials – started

SBIRS

• Creating new UMAPs. I think they can be trained on more data too. Yup! Running with 500k embedding 2D and 3D UMAP!

Back from cycling in Mallorca – that was a lot of fun

Tasks

• See if Alston is still coming over today. Nope – Monday
• More packing – good progress
• Unpack from trip – mostly done
• Maybe take more stereo gear over to the apartment? Done
• Groceries – not done
• Expenses to Ricardo – not done
• Finish changing the name of the book (done) and bounce back to ACM – not done
• Cancel Guardian and BGEHome – not done

SBIRs

• Kick off my sprint stuff – done
• Trip report. plus forms for April 18-31 – not done
• See if I can fix the binary files. Fixed maybe? Need to test more
  • See if it’s just the models or models and data. If models, rsync might be the answer. Check the hashes
  • If not, look into converting before sending over the files?

Another trip around the sun!

Having fun riding around in Mallorca, not seeing snow

Worked on the adjustments to the proposal to the KA book , which I guess I should now be referring to the WGAI book. Need to send a note to Aaron – done

Not sure that I believe this thread, but it is certainly possible. Makes the primordial soup more interesting if anything though

Tasks

• Pack – done
• Box up speakers – done. Too heavy to move alone though. Putting some weights on the box to flatten it for a week.
• Load trailer
• Order cable modem kit – done
• Ping Tim. I’ll need pix to send along
• Note for Sande – done
• Trash – done
• Water plants – done
• Laundry – done
• Dishes – done
• Leave NLT 11:30

SBIRS

• Got all the data down and added the symlink. Just need to see if it works! Nope – some deserialization error. Will try to figure that out next week. Maybe different versions of pickle?

I really need to write up the pancake printer model of AI

Tasks

• Break down big audio gear and take it to the apartment – done
• Guardian – done-ish
• Pick up more boxes and bubble wrap – done
• More packing – done-ish
• After the ride, start packing for the trip. It’s going to be a reasonably wide range of temps:

SBIRs

• Get all the data over to Dreamhost (done!) and then start pulling it down to my local box (started!)

Tasks

• Ping Carlos – done
• Guardian xfer
• Pack Brompton – done
• More kitchen packing – most of the cabinets and the hutch are empty!

Still life of Boxes

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• 3:00 Meeting with Aaron – done
• Kicked off a run
• Started an rsync today. transfer is much slower. Faster now

Tasks

• Pinged Carlos about the PT storms. Sent some euros to rebuilding charities
• More packing
• Run to Goodwill
• Got more boxes
• Got a ride in. Brrr! But not too bad
• My blog post for BLOG@CACM got accepted!
• Tried to cancel with Constallation@home but they can’t schedule
• Fixed screen
• Respond to Carlos tomorrow

SBIRs

• Hooked up the 8TB drive
• Downloaded test tar files
• Started sending the BIG file to DreamHost – didn’t make it. Going to try rsync tomorrow
• Kicked off a run
• Kibitzed some