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C. Henry

@henryhenryhenry.com

14K followers 3.4K following 55 posts

political scientist @ University of Zürich platforms, political violence, social media, computing research & writing: henryhenryhenry.com sometimes land of enchantment, sometimes land of Helvetia

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Reposted by C. Henry

Avishay BSG (Ben-Sasson-Gordis) @avishaybsg.bsky.social · 1h

🧵 I'm excited to share that my article "Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of Civilian Control of the Military" has been accepted @thejop.bsky.social.

It answers the question "how ought militaries act when civilian leaders turn on democratic institutions?"

1/
#CivMilSky #PolTheory

Reposted by C. Henry

Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 3d

We're so relieved to see Germany reaffirm its opposition to the dangerous Chat Control proposal--the one that would mandate mass scanning of communications. Germany's long been a solid champion of privacy, and the news that it was considering backing mass surveillance was alarming. 1/

Reposted by C. Henry

Jay Ulfelder @jayulfelder.bsky.social · 3h

As someone whose professional interests have overlapped heavily with Przeworski's, I felt (and concurred with) this bit: "The brutal fact that we find it so difficult to predict what will happen under our current circumstances is evidence that we do not have theories we can rely on."

How Democracies Fall Apart - Dissent Magazine

An interview with Adam Przeworski.

www.dissentmagazine.org

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 15h

i am still aghast at how many respectable academics prostrated themselves for Silver, who is, by every metric, a total clown and always has been

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 15h

area Stata man doesn't understand computer

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 15h

AI has lost the dunce vote. It’s over

Nate Silver
@NateSilver538 • 5h
•.°
I'm just one person, and my programming needs are somewhat unusual (building various kinds of statistical forecasting models). But I'm just not seeing the consistent productivity gains from LLMs that I would have expected if you'd asked me 6 months ago.

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 16h

i'm telling you, freedom of the press hasn't so much been destroyed in the US as voluntarily surrendered

Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · 19h

Should the New York Times be sold to Pennysaver and its editors sent to work in Amazon warehouses? It depends on who you ask.

Reposted by C. Henry

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 23h

Does AI improve or undercut academic scholarship?

A new study finds that academics who use AI increased both the quantity & quality of their academic scholarship and it appears to reduces inequality (helping junior and non-english speaking scholars the most).
arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02408

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 20h

fantastic opener, i'll cite you if i can ever sneak this paper past a reviewer

Reposted by C. Henry

lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 20h

there's something here

A normal-versus-normal matchup is what politics used to be — persuasion, messaging, negotiation, compromise. Behaving this way will lose against someone donning body armor while calling you an antifa domestic terrorist MS-13 gang member. And the guy in the body armor will always lose to the guy in the inflatable frog suit.

3x3 grid charting how aura farming, shitposting, and acting normal interact

Aura Farming Shitposting Acting Normal
Aura Farming Stronger aura farmer wins Shitposter wins Aura farmer wins
Shitposting Shitposter wins Society loses Acting normal wins
Acting Normal Aura farmer wins Acting normal wins We live in a society

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

yes, I think that's a charitable read. I don't know the authors, but I could imagine them as serious people building scientific AI tools and getting frustrated because many of their users have no idea how to effectively collaborate

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

all politics is content creation now.

relatedly, thanks to fantastic descriptive work from the Digitally Accountable Public Representation database (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), I'm finally able to start work on my VIBES-NOMINATE ideology scale

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

sure! basically the story goes like this: someone builds a software tool that has near universal negative externalities. the builders, unaware of their own social incentives, realize there are poor outcomes. they decide Something Must Be Done, and slowly discover the reality of coordination problems

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

i'm virtually certain a model wrote this and not a human: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06580

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

i read a paper today from Huggingface that wondered why AI wasn't producing more scientific discoveries and concluded with "what if science is a social enterprise," my soul left my body

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 21h

socially cancerous tools like Sora 2 give certain kinds of tech people the opportunity to declare "trust is a social problem" and sweatily reconstruct a thousand years of social science from first principles

Reposted by C. Henry

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Jul 29

I split AI into 3 non-mutually exclusive types (see Table 1 above): displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. More later possibly, but see Tables 2 to 4 (attached or here: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960) for the worked through examples. 2/n

table 2 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 3 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 4 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 1d

peak social media already happened and now we're just trapped in a series of overlapping comment sections!

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 1d

the best way to spot AI generated video is to stop scrolling through an infinite feed of barely sentient garbage made by content farms and recover your trusted social network from the wreckage of the parasocial sprawl

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 1d

moved into a co-op, which is exactly 1/3 it’s cool having people around and 2/3s why are all these goddamn people around all the time

Reposted by C. Henry

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 1d

This is both fascinating & frightening. There is a demand for images that show and confirm what people already know and believe to be true, and AI slop meets that demand—with visual content that emblematically visualizes what the headlines report. One could call it synthetic hypervisualization
1/

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 1d

That TikTok account has a few fake videos of reporters getting detained. They make these videos because it’s a big story in the news. Real reporters are getting arrested. And so people are making AI videos to get engagement on TikTok.

dontbeonline • 1d ago
Journalist gets detained while doing her job #ForYou, #viral, #foryoupage, #tikto... more
• Contains: Bad Boys (The...

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 1d

should task a group of models in a loop to generate infinite emergent behavior prompts.

C. Henry @henryhenryhenry.com · 1d

every day I read another paper on "misalignment" or "emergent behavior" in LLMs and, yes, if you smash enough coins into the slot machine it will eventually pay out. this stuff is just p-hacking for arxiv jockeys.

Reposted by C. Henry

Matthew Sheffield @matthew.flux.community · 1d

It's basically impossible to earn a living as an independent commentator on the left.

By contrast, Fox and its imitators *constantly* elevate new voices and encourage people to get involved.

They pool their resources. They recycle their dollars and keep them in-network. They crowdfund like crazy.

Reposted by C. Henry

Matthew Sheffield @matthew.flux.community · 1d

Charlie Kirk was a terrible person, but his prowess at organizing was astonishing.

Democrats, progressive and moderate, are using tactics from the 1970s.

Republicans spend hundreds of millions on networking, jobs, and outreach every year. Democrats waste their money on obsolete stuff.

flux.community @flux.community · 1d

Charlie Kirk was a religious extremist and an advocate for mass censorship of academics he hated.

But as a political organizer and creator of opportunities for his comrades, there's much that can be learned from what he did. @matthewboedy.bsky.social discusses on the latest Theory of Change

What Charlie Kirk knew

The slain co-founder of Turning Point was a masterful political organizer—and a religious extremist

plus.flux.community

Reposted by C. Henry

Flaming Hydra @flaminghydra.com · 2d

TODAY: @littlewow.online on MAGA gossip blogger Houseinhabit. “In the new tradition of other disgraced figures … who swerved to the right, she’s found open arms (and wallets) when no one else would have her.” flaminghydra.com/clout-chasin...

Clout Chasing Will Be the Death of Us All

The New Yorker’s Clare Malone recently published a long profile of Jessica Reed Kraus, the QAnon-adjacent mommy blogger who played an instrumental role in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s successful bid to be...

flaminghydra.com