Gave what I thought would be objectively my most boring lecture for my students last week and they absolutely loved it. I had no idea students would be so passionate about contract theory!

Fast forward to what I thought would be my most interesting lecture this week ... and I saw heads nodding off.

New pre-print with @psmaldino.bsky.social on an agent-based model of propaganda in online spaces.

Using the voter model from physics, we simulate networks with stubborn agents (zealots) who do not change their opinions, asking about their optimal positioning for influencing the network.

Cognitive scientists and computer science PhDs talking about David Marr:

Not to resurrect overtrodden "AI art" discussions, but I think I'm closer to viewing the image on the left as AI-generated art than the image on the right.

The fact the journal editors and authors missed it feels like a tremendous statement in itself.

Are the laws of nature subjective or Platonic revealings of our world? What does it mean to know what one cannot articulate? What is the connection between scientific theory and riding a bike?

In this episode we tackle the work of Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=d1gs...

Theories of organizational structure emphasize different dimensions of managerial design, including span of control (Simon 1947), decision-making speed (Aswamenakul et al. 2025), task delegation (Moser & Smaldino 2022), and managerial monitoring (Zefferman 2023).

Congrats to Dr. Cody Moser (@culturologies.co)! Cody successfully defended his dissertation today, and is off to Morocco to start a faculty position at UM6P’s School of Collective Intelligence!

Mega congrats to Dr Cody Moser @culturologies.co who passed his thesis defense at UC Merced

Cody was one of my first students at @themusiclab.org, co-leading work on the sounds of infant-directed vocalizations in our species doi.org/10.1038/s415...

He is starting a lab in Morocco soon! Woo!

New preprint! 🚨How do groups process information? What does it mean for part of a network to "explore" and part to "exploit"? How do we move beyond phenomenological correlation in our analyses of networks to a causal theory of collective intelligence?

Here, we try to answer these questions:

In recent months, I’ve been working to quantify the history of philosophy utilizing tools developed in science of science.

Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a science of philosophy, complementing meta-philosophy, meta-science, and philosophy of science.

Check it out here:

Philosophy is one of humanity’s oldest systems of knowledge production, predating science by thousands of years. But not all eras are equal. Some are marked by debate and innovation, others by the preservation of tradition.

Here we use explore dynamics distinguishing eras of philosophy.

"By introducing a causal framework for information processing in collectives, our study delivers a more definitive explanation of collective problem-solving than those offered by structural analysis alone."

This looks like an awesome paper for the social epistemology crowd!

osf.io/preprints/so...

Preprint: The causal role of synergy in collective problem solving. Great collaboration with DISI fellows @ketikagarg.bsky.social @culturologies.co, Zara Anwarzai and Hannah Dromiack

I've mostly used Twitter as a personal index of my thoughts and opinions over the last seven years. I don't want to throw all that out.

Does anyone know a way of indexing these things, even just downloading them to do away with the account over there?

Hi everyone. I'm just now jumping on this platform and will work to follow everyone back as I figure out the interface.

I wrote up a brief essay on the connection between Marr's Levels and Aristotelian Causes, arguing Marr's levels are not dead, but that the framework's colloquial notions should be.

culturologies.substack.com/p/marrs-leve...