Paul Smaldino @psmaldino@social.cleverlibre.org

Sociologists: Apply to work with me at McGill Sociology!

We are hiring TWO tenure-track lines this year, one in social demography and one in qualitative methods. I can't say enough good things about the department, and Montreal is an unbeatable place to live.

Demography: https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Careers/job/Leacock-Building/Assistant-Professor_JR0000028940

Qualitative: https://mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/McGill_Careers/job/Leacock-Building/Assistant-Professor---Department-of-Sociology_JR0000043118

#sociology #sociologie #socjobs #academicjobs @sociology

Fantastic explainer on LLMss from Timothy B. Lee (@timlee) and Sean Trott.
https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

Highly recommend it if you want something that doesn't assume much technical expertise, but goes well beyond "LLMs just predict the next word".

It seems like Mastodon could use some more whimsy. To remedy that, here's a new song from my band. It's called Muffins, and it's about muffins. https://open.spotify.com/album/1GRP3NhWYd3joYgwRsjqEw?si=0QdWmjBVQYajdX5WVhIwtA

☢️ a couple music-related posts

second one: "muffins," the first single from the new album by the small dinosaurs — the brainchild of @psmaldino

https://smalldinosaurs.bandcamp.com/album/muffins

https://songwhip.com/thesmalldinosaurs/muffins

what it is: absurdist indie rock. think: jonathan richman, early talking heads, etc. i think of it as children's music for adults

this song is literally about muffins

my involvement: produced / engineered / mixed / mastered

the whole record is 🏆

how good is this single artwork?

Rate Limit Exceeded would be a great album title. Alas, I’m not in a band anymore.

First chapter of Paul Smaldino's @psmaldino new book available for preview at https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691224145/modeling-social-behavior#preview

Majority of nation's spike in requests to ban books from libraries came from just 11 individuals.

Democracy, amirite?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/23/lgbtq-book-ban-challengers/

Hey look, you can now view (and download) the ToC and Chapter 1 from my forthcoming modeling book. This chapter provides something of a philosophical grounding before we get into the more technical weeds in the subsequent chapters.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691224145/modeling-social-behavior#preview

It is quite the thing to present whatever this is as a privacy feature.

Social Media personality Caryn Marjorie launched CarynAI, a GPT-4 powered chatbot version of herself that her fans can pay $1/minute to talk to

On the one hand: she’s on track to earn $5M this year

On the other hand: she’s had to flee her home and hire security because some fans are upset about the chatbot

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/13/caryn-ai-technology-gpt-4/

Job! I'm hiring a 2-yr postdoc at
UCM for Fall 2023 to model the cultural evolution of complex social identities and associated signaling strategies, in collaboration w
Adrian Bell. More info here. Please reach out with any questions! https://aprecruit.ucmerced.edu/JPF01569

Finally, a solution to the unfairness of authorship ordering in scientific papers! 😂

"Every Author as First Author"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01393

2. Specifically (this is my gloss, emphasizing areas of agreement, but I think it is basically accurate), we don't have experts who understand both (1) AI and (2) complex social systems, and we need both to understand the consequences. That is right!