Dan Williams
@danwilliamsphil
Philosopher, University of Sussex. Tweets in personal capacity. Interested in: Philosophy, Psychology, Society. Writes at: http://www.conspicuouscognition.com/
My top ten most popular essays at 'Conspicuous Cognition' this year: 1. Why do people believe true things? conspicuouscognition.com/p/why-do-peopl…
👇New experiments in which we aimed to map the levers and scope of political persuasion with conversational AI models. It was a tremendous privilege to lead on this work alongside the brilliant @KobiHackenburg. The paper is packed with results and we'd love your comments!
Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19 LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more 🧵
“In a competitive attention economy […] outrage-generating, identity-affirming, and bias-confirming content usually outcompetes thoughtful analysis” “For these reasons and more, many people view social media as a kind of technological wrecking ball”
conspicuouscognition.com/p/the-case-aga… (2/3).
Dan Williams is always worth reading @danwilliamsphil
In a new essay I argue that the case against social media is weaker than many people think: (1/3)
Young adults in continental Western Europe don’t report as poor mental health as young adults in the Anglosphere. Some evidence for it being due to country-specific factors, and against it being due to the technological zeitgeist.
This is depressingly common. For example, reading contemporary work on misinformation in political philosophy and philosophy of language leaves one with the impression that only right-wingers create or consume misinformation.
The anti-conservative signaling in philosophy is extremely annoying. "Consider an irrational belief, such as..." and it's something about climate change. "Consider an immoral agent, such as..." and it's just a Republican.
Yes, the claim is not “we know that social media is not bad”, but “we don’t know if social media is bad”.
The problem is that popular discourse about social media is almost entirely based on vibes, anecdotes, and subjectively compelling stories. There simply isn't strong evidence for the "moral panic" in this case, as I point out at length in a recent deep dive into this issue. (1/2)
I really recommend this essay - and Dan's writing in general. Social media seems like a plausible villain behind all our ailments at the surface level, but the evidence is contradictory and warrants epistemic humility.
The problem is that popular discourse about social media is almost entirely based on vibes, anecdotes, and subjectively compelling stories. There simply isn't strong evidence for the "moral panic" in this case, as I point out at length in a recent deep dive into this issue. (1/2)
Outsource your thinking to ChatGPT and you risk cognitive atrophy. But like so many other information technologies, it can also enhance your cognition. The key is to avoid generating output for others to consume and instead seek input for your own thinking (link in next tweet)
@danwilliamsphil: "many of the problems attributed to social media can arise (and have historically arisen) in the absence of social media." asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scap…
What are the chances you are right about everything in your political positions? Since ideologies emerge primarily to sustain coalitions, they contain inconsistencies and inaccuracies. However, not anything goes. Why? Explanation with Rawls' reflective equilibrium. (link next)
What are the risks of a discourse that exaggerates the role and risk of GenAI around elections? We look at this question in more detail in another excerpt from @Sacha_Altay & my paper on GenAI and elections, this time kindly published by the @oiioxford.
New blog! ‘Consequences of a skewed discourse around generative AI and elections’. Read why @_FelixSimon_ @oiioxford and @Sacha_Altay @IPZ_ch believe claims about the impact of generative AI on elections have been overblown: bit.ly/46YTZg7 1/2
In situations where some physicians would admit involuntarily but others would not, holding patients against their will leaves them worse off. My discussion of a new paper in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports 🔗👇🏽
For decades, psychologists believed reminding people of death would make them fry themselves in tanning booths, recommend harsher punishments for prostitutes, and spend more on luxury goods. Rigorous testing revealed: nope. Dead theories have a way of refusing to stay buried.
Breaking: 17-minute article explains why America can't agree on basic facts in a format 99% of Americans won't read