Phil Feldman, PhD

Our election research team put out an article today explaining how the prediction markets (e.g. Kalshi, Polymarket) — and social media posts featuring visualizations from those platforms — may feed election rumors & conspiracy theories around the U.S. midterms: uwcip.substack.com/p/what-to-kn...

Something like this is going to be on the tombstone of the internet.

EXUVIA - RIME

I'm ridiculously thrilled to announce that I have a new book out! If you've ever wondered what AI in the hands of bad people can do, this is for you. It's half stories that describe how AI could manipulate us without our awareness, and half research that backs up the stories.

I've mentioned before I've updated my contracts to make sure everything in the production of my books is done by humans and not "AI"; if you're wondering what such a thing looks like, here's a clause covering that from a recent contract.

In terms of my Verification, Deliberation, Accountability framework, the role of verification has collapsed into the public sphere, who not only are ill equipped for the role, but not even aware what's happened.

My concern with this is we'll end up recreating the failed supply-side approach to disinformation while ignoring the far more significant demand side. First is recognising the relationship between institutions, publics, and counterpublics have changed significantly.

Clever stuff! I wonder how narrative-based embedding might align across languages, cultures, and models

you should come to this, you know. will I attend? yes. will I participate? ALSO YES. what will I read? look I don't have to answer that yet

The nightmare of how LLMs will be used to attack researchers. I can see this also being used to attack academics in general for not agreeing with the tech overlords.

So, Banksy bought a used yacht, repaired it and retrofitted it to serve as a rescue boat to save migrants in the central Mediterranean. The whole project cost the artist $860,000. Since 2020, the boat has saved more than 3,800 people. londondaily.com/banksy-funds...

Contemporary artificial intelligence is to cognition as artificial sweeteners are to good nutrition: full of misleading hype, distracting, and when misunderstood and misused, dangerous to one's well-being.

So cool. I've been working on mapping narrative trajectories through the latent spaces of LLMs for years. It's wonderful to see this approach

I have an urge to make a BlueSky bot that generates AI doomer op-eds in the form of “I used to work at {company}; we should {heed, ignore} warnings that AI will {kill, enslave, marry} us all.”

Portugal decriminalized all drugs 25 years ago, and succeeded in reducing addiction, overdoses and HIV transmission. But the success wasn’t just from decriminalization: Portugal also built an integrated national system of healthcare, treatment and social services built around that policy.

Whenever I hear about agentic systems going rogue, I keep on thinking of this: It's in their nature

the best sweater ever

As it becomes clear that language models—like humans—love passing notes to each other on message boards, I’m starting to think the thing we need to worry about is not the “alignment” of an isolated model but, like, the fluid dynamics of a language slurry.

I’m selling my 1996 Subaru Sambar Dias Classic. Manual, 4WD. Right-hand drive. Top speed of… about 55. Everyone you meet will love you. In Los Angeles. $10K or best offer.

The Hoff Crab is neither a crab nor is it David Hasselhoff. It is a Yeti Crab, which is neither a Yeti nor a Crab but a sub-group of Squat Lobsters, which are not lobsters, they're Anomurans, like Mole Crabs, which are neither moles, nor crabs.

good morning, you want to adopt this kitten and her sister

This is such a good piece by Renee and Kate; and it kind of extrapolates the (always rightfully contested) gatekeeping question of media into the AI age. AI gatekeeping is already here. And more subtle and less transparent than ever. Why would we give that power to AI labs uncontested?

Evidence for Zone 1: MRI study found that in endurance athletes, heart size tracked longer hours in Zone 1–2, not briefer, high-intensity work. And cardiac volume is tightly linked to VO₂max. hiitscience.com/does-zone-1-...

It's pretty simple. Your electricity bills will go up as the Trump administration takes away electricity supply in order to give a payday to one of Trump's cronies.   Once again, the American people lose, Trump's buddies win. Sums up this administration's policy.

Schrodinger’s language models LLMs randomly choose between possible words, and certain choices can lead to wildly different results Goodfire’s latest work shows that those decisions largely end in roughly the same result. arxiv.org/abs/2608.19611

You guys. YOU. GUYS. Somehow I didn't know that Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris had covered Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," I feel like I have been wasting my life until this moment

As I said four months ago, a great irony of this new machine age is that it seems set to rehabilitate the value of the traditional Liberal Arts education, e.g. a broad exposure to the natural sciences AND the arts, the social sciences AND the humanities. www.noemamag.com/why-a-libera...

Send this to a young adult who looks at their phone while walking on campus.

New from me. I'm fascinated by the intersections of religion, politics, & "knowledge gaps." Here I look at Holocaust knowledge. Beyond education, vulnerability & political sorting play a role. Seculars & Jews are the most knowledgeable, but also those who are sorted. academic.oup.com/socrel/advan...

Absolutely worth the read. I agree that we need to reimagine what we as a people need to thrive. I'm pretty sure that frictionless, global instantionious communication, infinite, unacountable money and intelligent-enough machines are not helping

Best use of image generators I've seen. This could actually be art

"The only appropriate time and place to ride a bike is a time beyond time and a place beyond place, where the space-time continuum is bent so strangely you are both everywhere and nowhere, eternal and nonexistent."

When Chris Colocousis first met a woman named Eliza on Facebook, he wasn't sure she was real. What started as an online romance turned out to be an investment scam. Learn more in "Inside the Scam," a collaboration with @apnews.com: https://to.pbs.org/4xaZBhJ

more places should have artists-in-residence. like there should be a residency where you live on a particular train for a month. there should be an oil rig residency, an arctic research station residency. maybe a residency at a zoo

I cover scams, and had never heard of this until I started getting emails from "major publishers" who wanted to work with me. I'm lucky to not need the help at the moment, but lots of writers do. Please share this with them. And subscribe if you can, it's a big help. www.patreon.com/posts/166944...

Heh. #vaccines #autism #autisticmeme

Nice second sentence. arxiv.org/abs/2608.113...

Check it out! Lea is live and open to the public 🥳 Lea is an experiment to build better social media by researchers and for researchers, where we own our own data and can build our own feeds, events, and communities. This is still very much a proof-of-concept; we welcome ideas + collaborators!

Just finished reviewing a paper that was full of AI slop. People, and I can't stress this enough, I'd rather read the author's struggle with articulating their point in English than paragraphs of wandering, repetitive text that says nothing. Ugh.

Best use of Strava? Mollie the hamster runs almost 10 km every night.

FWIW, as a very heavy PDF user (OK I just checked and I have 16 PDFs open as I write this, which is normal) on a Mac, I have found PDF Expert to be a totally adequate replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro, for at least what I use it for and care about. Their ed discount is significant, too.

how it started / how it's going