Had a great ride yesterday

Had to stop here to do a meeting though

When Politics Trumps Truth: Political Concordance Versus Veracity as a Determinant of Believing, Sharing, and Recalling the News

• Resistance to truth and susceptibility to falsehood threaten democracies around the globe. The present research assesses the magnitude, manifestations, and predictors of these phenomena, while addressing methodological concerns in past research. We conducted a preregistered study with a split-sample design (discovery sample N = 630, validation sample N = 1,100) of U.S. Census-matched online adults. Proponents and opponents of 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump were presented with fake and real political headlines ahead of the election. The political concordance of the headlines determined participants’ belief in and intention to share news more than the truth of the headlines. This “concordance-over-truth” bias persisted across education levels, analytic reasoning ability, and partisan groups, with some evidence of a stronger effect among Trump supporters. Resistance to true news was stronger than susceptibility to fake news. The most robust predictors of the bias were participants’ belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption. Interestingly, participants stronger in analytic reasoning, measured with the Cognitive Reflection Task, were more accurate in discerning real from fake headlines when accurate conclusions aligned with their ideology. Finally, participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story. Discussion explores why the concordance-over-truth bias observed in our study is more pronounced than previous research suggests, and examines its causes, consequences, and potential remedies.

SBIRs

• Not really sure what to do today. I’m mostly waiting on other people. I think I’ll work on the KA book while waiting

GPT Agents

• Rework the introduction
  • Integrate Brave New World
  • Describe Zeitgeist attack as a thing that has been going on for years now and has gotten quite sphisticated
  • Set up the rest of the book as scenarios that describe strategies, tactics, and their effects in this new domain.

Found an old-school madlib-style generated science paper, delivered to me by Google Scholar, no less.

Carriers American Release Howsams Charges Leader Designed Soviet Treasury Schools Mondays Average Junior Thursday Spring

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• Also, GPTzero says its human:

• Running it through Gemini (prompt: “Read the following abstract and say whether it was written by a human or automatically generated:”) gives a good, well justified result:

• Not really sure what to do with this. Maybe we now need multi-layered detection? Or maybe we are just trying to detect slop now?

Going to go and ride my age today, since that is how I understand the rules.

SBIRs

• 11:30 SimAccel meeting from the road
• 3:00 Tradeshow demo
• 4:00 Steve’s last day.

Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research

• “The Pentagon’s decision to scrap its social science research portfolio … is short-sighted and harmful to U.S. national security,” says Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Many of the canceled projects focused on how new technologies such as artificial intelligence are shaping modern battlefields, Lyall notes. “How do you know what’s ‘impactful’ if you don’t do the research? How do you anticipate countermeasures and consequences of their use?” he asks. “I’m worried that without this portfolio, we lose a critical source of impartial evidence about national security, leaving the Pentagon more susceptible to companies selling ‘revolutionary’ but unproven technologies.”

This is just the start

• ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil for his role in pro-Palestine protests, signaling the beginning of a surveillance nightmare.

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint Demos
• 3:00 Sprint Planning
• 4:00 P2E!

GPT Agents

• KA Epilogue
• P33 – think about money simulator. People would have a distribution of “interests,” and each interest should have a probability of being selected. Some will be “geographic,” based on position on the number line or maybe 2D space (multiple spaces? higher dimensions?), others will be arbitrary. Arbitrary can change and be attracted/repelled by other fixed and arbitrary values. Then we can play around with clustering, transactions, and mixing in of hierarchical organizations.

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

• The NewsGuard audit tested 10 of the leading AI chatbots — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity’s answer engine. NewsGuard tested the chatbots with a sampling of 15 false narratives that have been advanced by a network of 150 pro-Kremlin Pravda websites from April 2022 to February 2025.
• NewsGuard’s findings confirm a February 2025 report by the U.S. nonprofit the American Sunlight Project (ASP), which warned that the Pravda network was likely designed to manipulate AI models rather than to generate human traffic. The nonprofit termed the tactic for affecting the large-language models as “LLM [large-language model] grooming.”
• “The long-term risks – political, social, and technological – associated with potential LLM grooming within this network are high,” the ASP concluded. “The larger a set of pro-Russia narratives is, the more likely it is to be integrated into an LLM.”

How the Terrorgram Collective’s Neo-Nazi Influencers Groomed a Teen to Kill

• Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.”
• Add this to the KA/V1 analysis.

Add this too: AI ‘wingmen’ bots to write profiles and flirt on dating apps

• Match Group, the technology company with the world’s largest portfolio of dating platforms, including Tinder and Hinge, has announced it is increasing investment in AI, with new products due this month. AI bots will be used to help users choose which photographs will be most popular, write messages to people and provide “effective coaching for struggling users”.

Quite the cover

French University to Fund American Scientists Who Fear Trump Censorship

• ’Aix-Marseille University’s program, called ‘safe place for science,’ offers American scientists funding to continue their research in France. A little more info here: “safe place for science”.

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• Slides for Monday – done
• 12:50 USNA – done
• 4:30 Book club – cancelled

GPT Agents

• KA – work on hardening chapter – finished. Started sketching out epilogue

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

• One of the craziest bits about covering the systematic dismantling of democracy is this: the people doing the dismantling frequently tell you exactly what they’re going to do. They’re almost proud of it. They just wrap it in language that makes it sound like the opposite. (Remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter to protect free speech? And then banned journalists and sued researchers for calling out his nonsense? Same playbook.)
• Good reporters can parse that. Bad reporters fail at it time and time again.

This is wild, and supports the NNM concept: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk9385

• “Our use of a naturalistic social colony allowed us to discover that the classical hippocampal cognitive map of space also integrates rich social information, forming a sociospatial cognitive map. We found neurons that encoded social interaction events, identities and sex of other individuals, dominance hierarchy, and social affiliation, along with the position and direction of both self and others. These findings combine the historically disparate views on hippocampal function, which suggested that the hippocampus is important for encoding memory, social identity, or spatial maps. Here, we have shown that all of these factors are represented together in the same neural network.”

Tasks

• Put Friday ride in calendar – done
• Call Guardian – done
• Send David a pdf of my slides?

SBIRs

• I think my part is done on the demo until we need to start generating data for sensitivity tests

GPT Agents

• More KA
  • V5 Analysis
  • A Brave New World (does this go to the beginning?) Finished, but not sure where it should go.
  • Hardening the Human Operating System
• P33 maybe?
• 3:00 Alden meeting

Via The New York Times

Something nice on the internet today! https://udm14.com/

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 3:00 Tradeshow
•  Make a sim “script runner” that advances everything at the right times. Going to start with 2 paths (which winds up being 4), so I can keep track of what is happening. Maybe send the result to excel?

GPT Agents

• More KA
  • V5 Analysis
  • A Brave New World (does this go to the beginning?)
  • Epilogue
• P33 maybe?

This seems dire:

Digital Sovereignty

• Digital sovereignty is a real problem that matters to real people and real businesses in the real world, it can be explained in concrete terms, and we can devise pragmatic strategies to improve it

SBIRs

• 9:30 Data loader discussion – done. Going with binary files for now
• 11:00 RTAT demo. Went well? A lot of the people who were going to come were sick.
• Going to make a sim “script runner” that advances everything at the right times. Going to start with 2 paths (which winds up being 4), so I can keep track of what is happening. Maybe send the result to excel?