It’s a pattern, to be sure. The counterexamples are Korea, Portugal, Spain, and possibly Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the Soviet Union. I think if the revolution can be largely non-violent, then the country gets off of this trajectory:

Gift link

And another ugly pattern – clout chasing at all costs:

• People are using the popular AI video generator Runway to make real videos of murder look like they came from one of the animated Minions movies and upload them to social media platforms where they gain thousands of views before the platforms can detect and remove them. This AI editing method appears to make it harder for major platforms to moderate against infamously graphic videos which previously could only be found on the darkest corners of the internet. 

Neural embedding of beliefs reveals the role of relative dissonance in human decision-making

• Beliefs serve as the foundation for human cognition and decision-making. They guide individuals in deriving meaning from their lives, shaping their behaviors, and forming social connections. Therefore, a model that encapsulates beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for quantitatively studying the influence of beliefs on our actions. Despite its importance, research on the interplay between human beliefs has often been limited to a small set of beliefs pertaining to specific issues, with a heavy reliance on surveys or experiments. Here, we propose a method for extracting nuanced relations between thousands of beliefs by leveraging large-scale user participation data from an online debate platform and mapping these beliefs to an embedding space using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM). This belief embedding space effectively encapsulates the interconnectedness of diverse beliefs as well as polarization across various social issues. We discover that the positions within this belief space predict new beliefs of individuals. Furthermore, we find that the relative distance between one’s existing beliefs and new beliefs can serve as a quantitative estimate of cognitive dissonance, allowing us to predict new beliefs. Our study highlights how modern LLMs, when combined with collective online records of human beliefs, can offer insights into the fundamental principles that govern human belief formation and decision-making processes.

• From Manlio De Domenico, Associate Professor of Applied Physics at Dept. of Physics of University of Padua Lead of CoMuNe Lab, Research Group for Multilayer Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems

SBIRs

• 12:00 AI Ethics training
• More work on the demo. I need to see how minimum distance is calculated. It looks good
• Start generating cvs files? Yes!

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Alden meeting