🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Our paper is out today in PNASNews! 🎉 In a large-scale experiment on a YouTube-like platform, we find that giving people politically “slanted” video recs doesn’t shift beliefs or viewing behaviors. In other words, online filter bubbles may not be as polarizing as we think…

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

New paper from the computational culture lab, forthcoming in AJS! Building on (largely untested) sociological intuitions, we show how positions in the organizational network relate to identification with the organization, using a language model: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

⚡️Really thrilled that #textgrad is published in @nature today!⚡️ We present a general method for genAI to self-improve via our new *calculus of text*. We show how this optimizes agents🤖, molecules🧬, code🖥️, treatments💊, non-differentiable systems🤯 + more!

Mixed feelings about silicon subjects (LLM predictions of human behavior) as replacements for human subjects? Consider the mixed subjects design. 🚨Now published at Sociological Methods and Research🚨 doi.org/10.1177/004912…

Amazing opportunity to work with a world-class psychologist, cutting edge computational social scientist, and an all-around fantastic person!

Who Gets In? AI-generated essays in college admissions Join us & Austin van Loon to learn about how GAI in college admission essays may reshape demographic makeup of admitted students & transform how merit is evaluated. Wed 5/7, 10 am ET (Hybrid) RSVP: tinyurl.com/PRIISM-5-7-25

#LLMs offer cost-effective but potentially inaccurate predictions. Study says #LLM predictions be viewed as informative but imperfect, with humans serving as the gold standard in a mixed subjects design. Read: spkl.io/6016fFsQA Subscribe: spkl.io/6019fFsQh

𝐃𝐨 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐚? In a forthcoming paper in 𝐶𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, we show yes! But this synesthesia deviates significantly from the color associations of ppl, incl. colorseeing, colorblind, and painters osf.io/preprints/psya…

Blog post on mixed subjects (human & LLM) studies. Using prediction powered inference makes more sense than blindly substituting LLMs for humans, but still subect to garbage-in-garbage-out & won't resolve deeper questions about what we're trying to study statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/12/bet…

👀 “…the mixed [subjects] design… is the most reasonable approach I’ve seen in the LLMs for social science literature for integrating LLM simulations into confirmatory-style experiments…” Also provides thoughtful reflections on the limitations of the approach!

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Excited to continue learning about the latest #CSS at IC2S2! I’ll be at the Social Prediction Session, presenting the mixed subjects design on combining human and LLM data in experiments. Paper with Michael Howes and Austin van Loon. Come join us! doi.org/10.1177/004912…

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out. With my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year. Here's a thread on each of the 10 papers: