Notices by Ulrike Hahn (ulrikehahn@fediscience.org)

And I'm interested in the conditions under which collectives are smart, #algorithms for making them smarter, building tools for #collectiveintelligence and building online spaces that might help, not hurt, #democracy

@tchambers but it only goes out to servers in as much as there is someone there that follows me. If I have a small account it’s not unlikely that I would escape being scraped., no? certainly if awareness of this is raised…

@tchambers you can block GPTBot in robot.txt

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/7/23823046/openai-data-scrape-block-ai

I wrote something on the #BlueskyBridge and surrounding debate

https://write.as/ulrikehahn/bridging-to-bluesky-the-open-social-web-consent-and-gdpr

I had hope #LawFedi would produce such analyses but I couldn't find anything so there we are...

all comments (and corrections!) welcome!

Setting out a long-term scientific agenda for digital democracy.

I hope this paper sparks lots of discussion, new collaborations and new research

#DigitalDemocracy

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16863

@NicoleCRust @jonny my personal take is that this paper has an important point but not a solution, because the full scale of the problem is (to my mind) still not fully grasped. To explain: imagine you are trying to understand a little agent-based model you have. It’s a complex dynamical system, so you can’t just pick out a few random parameter combinations and form local theories and hope to come up with deep understanding. You need to systematically explore the parameter space 1/2

@NicoleCRust @jonny 2/2 that’s basically what the paper is saying though not in those words, and there is a sense in which that seems obviously right. The limitation I see is that I think the relevant “parameter space” for human behav. exp. is fundamentally not like the parameter space of my stylised ABM. I mostly do scenario based exp. - I can change experimental materials in infinite ways which are not ordered. We can’t chart this space in the way they envision - it’s all much much harder

@NicoleCRust @jonny ? a better way to put this: I was a bit surprised by this paper given the authors because it slightly reads ‘piecemeal dustbowel empiricism didn’t work lets do dustbowl empiricism harder’. I take the fundamental problem of psych. to be the inherent flexibility of human responding. Change the context slightly, get a different response. So there’s gazillions of little paradigms that devolved into ‘it depends’. What we haven’t learned is what a meaningful theory is given that.

@nitin @georgelakoff Nitin, isn’t the fundamental premise of the blog post that it’s the other way around? Moral certainties influence what we accept as facts? (it’s an empirical claim, not a normative statement)

@inquiline @Zeb_Larson whatever it is, the divide between academics who loved some earlier version of Twitter and want to recreate it and those who were never particularly drawn to Twitter and want something different is, I think, real.

It’s a shame many have left or are leaving, but maybe it will be easier to build something new without people trying to recreate the past. There are still many more academics who never use social media than were ever on Twitter. Let’s build with them in mind too

@inthehands @chargrille not fond of the style of this piece but interesting read

@evan sure, but sometimes ‘it depends’ more than others. For me, this was an ‘it depends’ to the point of the question being meaningless..

which is why I felt the urge to write that here, but have never written it in response to any of your other polls (which I also never had trouble answering).

so, it was intended to be a discussion opener….

I see now that it failed in that communicative intention ;-)

@evan depends on the issue at hand

@siin @Ruth_Mottram I read this in disbelief, so checked, and there it is:

“Automatic Collection of Personal Information. …..We may also automatically collect information regarding your use of our Services, such as pages that you visit before, during and after using our Services, information about the links you click, the types of content you interact with, the frequency and duration of your activities, and other information about how you use our Services.”

https://blueskyweb.xyz/support/privacy-policy

@siin @Ruth_Mottram https://blueskyweb.xyz/support/privacy-policy

and: “Do Not Track.” Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that users can set in certain web browsers. Please note that we do not respond to or honor DNT signals or similar mechanisms transmitted by web browsers.”

@vaurora

but the essay parts of the bar exam are *not* easy for computers to pass, they are not graded by computer, and they do actually reflect well what lawyers do in their job:
take descriptions of things that happened and work out which legal rules apply to them in order to seek a legal resolution