It’s looking a lot like winter. Going to have to pull out the warm things:

Tasks

• Bills – done
• Laundry
• Clean House
• Ignite paperwork
• Put together a Gannt chart and a tasking table for the proposal (spreadsheet in assets), then send to Greg, Carlos, and Thorsten

Tasks

• Write thread – done
• Write conclusion – done
• Bank account – done
• Some chores? – vacuumed upstairs

Had a wild discussion with ChatPDF about this book: From the Rule of Law to the Law of Rule: Dismantling the Rule of Law in Hungary, 2010-2024

Need to write up a blog post about BlueSky vs Twitter, and the difference between the affordances of autocracies and egalitarianism.

• The similarity between “Early Twitter” and BlueSky.
• Something about Hierarchies (From out chimp/human ancestor – Alpha Males, etc) and Egalitarian communities (Paleolithic groups of early humans in marginal environments). The “Rule of Law” vs. “The Law of the Ruler”. Each of these structures work, and most humans can “code switch” between them. But each have their own specific rules for dealing with internal threats
  • Egalitarianism: Expulsion vs. Gossip/Criticism, Ridicule, Intervention, Shunning, Execution by Relative
  • Authoritarianism: Surveillance, Propaganda, Bribery, Threats, Prison/Exile, Execution
• The neutral nature of the timeline feed vs a recommender
• The “Nuclear Block” as a form of shunning, vs. being kicked off the platform.
• The ability to include hyperlinks
• No advertising, which I simply do not understand. The only advertising I see is items self-flagged as #Ad. I mean I would happily support an ad-free BlySky in the same way I support my friendly neighborhood Mastodon server (shoutout to fediscience.org/)
• Deliberate virality being a form of dominance display (“look at me!”) as something that is easier to do in an autocratic technology, where a “king” can pull the strings.
• The relative newness of BlueSky. Early adopters tend to be on the explore end of the explore-exploit spectrum. This type of person does not organize into a hierarchy well. As technologies mature, they tend to be taken over by those in power and the affordances become aligned with autocracy.

SBIRs

• 9:00 USNA meeting
• More demo development. Talk to Aaron about a model that can predict the next step(s) of a trajectory. Probably too slow to train at the tradeshow, but a really neat thing to A/B with.

Buckle In for the Hyperreal Presidency

• What I call the Hyperreal Presidency explores what is possible if a politician shamelessly adopts the opposite approach to where problems have to be solved in reality? What if a leader skips the gains and just does the communication? I don’t claim this is the right lens to use on this issue, but one that must be considered.
• This really does fit in with the idea of a runaway social reality.

Tim is coming over today, and also, the water heater is out.

SBIRs

• Meet with Aaron at 9:00 to discuss how to coordinate
• 1:00 Trade show UI meeting with John
• More demo development

Tasks

• Verify water is shut off
• Ignite paperwork
• Kaiser
• Groceries – done
• Jim Donnies – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint Demos – done
• 3:00 Sprint planning – done
• 3:00 Tradeshow tagup – done

GPT Agents

• Proposal conclusions and full read through

The Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure

• Sparse autoencoders have recently produced dictionaries of high-dimensional vectors corresponding to the universe of concepts represented by large language models. We find that this concept universe has interesting structure at three levels: 1) The “atomic” small-scale structure contains “crystals” whose faces are parallelograms or trapezoids, generalizing well-known examples such as (man-woman-king-queen). We find that the quality of such parallelograms and associated function vectors improves greatly when projecting out global distractor directions such as word length, which is efficiently done with linear discriminant analysis. 2) The “brain” intermediate-scale structure has significant spatial modularity; for example, math and code features form a “lobe” akin to functional lobes seen in neural fMRI images. We quantify the spatial locality of these lobes with multiple metrics and find that clusters of co-occurring features, at coarse enough scale, also cluster together spatially far more than one would expect if feature geometry were random. 3) The “galaxy” scale large-scale structure of the feature point cloud is not isotropic, but instead has a power law of eigenvalues with steepest slope in middle layers. We also quantify how the clustering entropy depends on the layer.

2024 Post-Election Survey: The Reasons for Voting for Trump and Harris

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• Dishes – done
• Bills – done
• Clean house – done
• Fill out Ignite paperwork

November is going by too fast

Do paperwork for Emelia – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• No USNA meeting
• 4:30 Book club – cancelled until after T-Day
• Need to add a ‘dd‘ cumulative distance column to the matrix. Calculated at the end. Maybe even iterate over the matrix to produce the new element and stack that. Done!

# figure out the distance between rows
matt = mat.T
diff = np.diff(matt, axis=0)
hypot = np.linalg.norm(diff, axis=1)
hypot = np.append(hypot, [0.0])
mat = np.stack([xx, yy, zz, hypot])

GPT-Agents

• 2:45 Meeting. Interesting discussion. This idea that you can identify information by the behavior of people interacting with it textually is way more unintuitive than I think it is.

Gender Bias, Feedback, and Productivity (from Marita Freimane)

• I explore how gender biased feedback affects the productivity of workers in an online labor market. Using a design change on YouTube where the platform removed public displays of how often a video has been disliked, I show that — while dislike counts were public — female content creators received significantly more negative feedback on comparable content than male content creators. This gender gap in negative feedback is eliminated after the design change. Using detailed video- and channel- level data and a fuzzy difference-in-differences identification strategy, I show that the removal of excess negative feedback significantly and persistently increased the productivity of female content creators and consumer demand for their content. Relative to men, women produce 8.4 percent more videos after the platform design change. The increase in productivity coincides with an even larger increase of 15.5 percent in demand for content produced by women. Investigating mechanisms, I show that the reduction in negative feedback is primarily driven by changes in the upper tail of the distribution of dislikes and is consistent with the platform’s objective of reducing harassment through ‘dislike attacks’. Finally, I show that there are limited spillover effects on toxicity in other feedback channels and provide evidence from a placebo-test to confirm that productivity effects are indeed driven by the reduction in dislikes.
• The inverse of this can also be done to attack those who are doing constructive work and amplify those who are being destructive.

12:00 IEEE seminar

Work on area 3 of the proposal

SBIRS

• Should mostly be demo development – good progress

• Got sucked into meetings the rest of the day

Need to respond to this: The metaphors of artificial intelligence, with my metaphor of LLMs as a substrate and the prompt as nascent life. Note that work with agents is trying to add a membrane between prompts. Done! See, waiting for meetings can be productive XD

Continue on Trustworthy Information. I wonder if I need an LOE? In the introduction, note that this area of research builds on the knowledge gained in the previous, in particular, the last phase. Note that the results here will also feed back into the UI such that manipulation trajectories (where you are, where it began, where it likely ends) will be incorporated during the work on this area.

Also, for the TACJ piece, diverse information that leads away from the current trajectory could be applied. This could really be helpful, since the users would be able to incorporate information that has similar positions and alignment to where they are now.

4:00 Ignite meeting

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 10:30 USAICOE (proposal?) meeting

From viewers to voters: Tracing Fox News’ impact on American democracy

• This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the effect of Fox News Channel (FNC) on the mass public’s political preferences and voting behavior in the United States from 2000 to 2020. We show that FNC has shifted the ideology and partisan identity of Americans rightward. This shift has helped Republican candidates in elections across levels of U.S. government over the past decade. Our estimates suggests that an increase of 0.05 rating points in Fox News viewership, induced by exogenous changes in channel placement, has increased Republican vote shares by at least 0.5 percentage points in recent presidential, Senate, House, and gubernatorial elections. Our findings have broad implications for political behavior, elections, and the political process in the United States.

Tasks

• Scan and send off docs to Emilia – done
• More on Trustworthy Information – finished the first pas on research area 1
• Sent dates and times to Ignite

SBIRs

• 11:00 SBIR review – looks like we’ll try to connect wit the TPoC and see if there is any interest. If so, them more proposal writing!
• 1:30 GRL/VRL review – tweaks. Sent out a new version for more comments
• 3:00 Tradeshow demo planning – everything is coming along fine except for the core software development, which is writing proposals instead.
• Made the Phase IIE Overleaf

Drywall today!

Chores

• Draft letter to Carlos – done and sent
• Clean house – done
• Lunch with Greg – done
• Groceries – done
• Bills – done
• 4:00 meeting with Alden -done
• Draw up work bench – done

SBIRs

• Huntsville meeting yesterday, which went very well. Need to write up some notes for Clay – done
• Need to do expenses – done. Got a response saying that it had to be on the corporate card, which I don’t have. No more corporate travel I guess. Sent a note to Clay and Orest
• Some BD stuff to do for a CoA SBIR
• 3:00 Capabilities brief – done. Mostly a chat for the full presentation next week
• Worked more on the LM proposal

Yesterday was lovely! And it looks like the New Normal of warm fall is continuing. Next week is dry and high’s in the 60’s.

SBIRs

• Shared Overleaf template for Steve
• 9:00 standup
• Share template with Steve
• 3:00 Tradeshow status
• Print docs for Huntsville, and leave after meeting

GPT Agents

• Work on proposal and email to Carlos

Today is going to be crazy nice, particularly for November!

So I’m going to ride Skyline Drive

Need to start the writeup for Carlos today

Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding

• One of the most common explanations of the ongoing wave of global democratic backsliding is that democracies are failing to deliver adequate socioeconomic goods to their citizens, leading voters to forsake democracy and embrace antidemocratic politicians who undermine democracy once elected. Yet a close look at twelve important cases of recent backsliding casts doubt on this thesis, finding that while it has some explanatory power in some cases, it has little in others, and even where it applies, it requires nuanced interpretation. Backsliding is less a result of democracies failing to deliver than of democracies failing to constrain the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders. Policymakers and aid providers seeking to limit backsliding should tailor their diplomatic and aid interventions accordingly.