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aaronclauset.bsky.social
Aaron Clauset
@aaronclauset.bsky.social
6.1K followers 120 following 1.1K posts
NO KINGS. NO FASCISTS. FUND SCIENCE.

Professor of Computer Science @ BioFrontiers Institute at University of Colorado, Boulder and External Faculty @ Santa Fe Institute

orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3529-8746
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
sifill.bsky.social
Perfect. There is no belief system here.
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 18h
amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders
Matt Walsh tweeted last year: "We've spent the last 25 years bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to countries around the globe while our own country has been systematically invaded and now our largest cities are run by foreigners and communists. If you want to know why I'm so avowedly non-interventionist, this is why." Then he tweeted today: ""This is a war for oil!!!!!" First of all, the "war" lasted like 90 minutes. Second, going to war to secure vital resources for your own people is totally legitimate. Why should we allow some third world communist shithole to control trillions of dollars worth of oil?" Laura Loomer tweeted last year: "I’m America First, I don’t support “Regime Change”. I went on @Bannons_WarRoom to talk about Chinese aggression in Venezuela and why we need to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization." Then she tweeted yesterday: "Maduro has arrived at the DEA office in Manhattan. He was transported in an armored motorcade after being transported in a blindfold via helicopter & then by plane to New York after his compound in Caracas was raided by US Special Forces. Proud to be an American today! USA 🇺🇸" Catturd tweeted last year: "Name one U.S. inspired regime change that hasn’t ended in absolute disaster." Then he tweeted yesterday: "Venezuela is now more free than New York City." Will Chamberlain tweeted last year: "The Republican Party is no longer the party of regime change and endless wars If you want to be its standard-bearer that is a non-negotiable position" Then he tweeted yesterday: "I can think of few better uses of my tax dollars than black-bagging the head of a foreign narco-trafficking organization that enriches itself by addicting and poisoning my fellow Americans"
January 5, 2026 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
sfiscience.bsky.social
Applications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty.

Apply by Feb 4, 2026
www.santafe.edu/gwcss
January 1, 2026 at 5:01 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
The end of 2025 is finally here! That makes it time for my annual "Year in Review" post 📈, which is to remind myself that yes, I did get some things done this year. Here's to closing out 2025 and hoping that 2026 is a year of restoration aaronclauset.github.io/blog/2025_YiR
Screenshot of the top of my 2025 Year in Review post, with a look back at 2025, by the numbers
December 29, 2025 at 2:02 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
This is utterly delightful! Strong recommend. It's also catnip for my long-running fascination with the sizes of complex things. ("How large should whales be?" is among my favorite papers I've written: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... )
December 23, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
paulisci.bsky.social
The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees

🧵
December 22, 2025 at 11:48 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
These results are mind-blowing, and the whole thread is just fascinating. So many profound insights about evolution and life throughout, and big questions. Why are mutation rates like this? How much of the origin and diversification of life was ultimately about getting to this particular state?
mollyprz.bsky.social Molly Przeworski @mollyprz.bsky.social · 14d
In fact, they appear to be eerily similar. The per generation mutation rate seems to lay between 10-9 and 10-8 per bp in all animal taxa surveyed to date–despite vast differences in environments, life histories, and three orders of magnitude variation in the generation time: 4/n
December 22, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
ic2s2.bsky.social
2026 abstract submissions are open!

✔️ Submission deadline: March 3rd, 2026
✔️ Acceptance Notification: April 14th, 2026

View the guidelines here:
lnkd.in/eJEXvd8u
December 15, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
jakehofman.bsky.social
We're hiring interns in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC!

If you're interested in designing AI‑based systems and understanding their impact at both individual and societal scales, apply here by Jan 9, 2026: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers
Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...
apply.careers.microsoft.com
December 15, 2025 at 4:33 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Out now in @natphys.nature.com "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", with @weihuali.bsky.social and H Zheng, we show how election into prestigious academic societies has markedly different effects on the research prominence of women and men physicists /1
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Screenshot of the top of the paper "The undervaluing of elite women in physics", Abstract: "Elite women in physics wait longer than men for recognition. Once elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, however, their prominence surges — evidence that their work was undervalued all along." Body: "Physics has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, both in the range of phenomena it studies and its demographic composition. For example, the share of publishing women physicists worldwide has more than doubled — from 4.5% in 1970 to 9.2% in 2020 — and continues to increase. Yet parity remains distant, raising the question: to what degree has the physics community progressed toward the meritocratic ideal of recognizing scientists purely on the basis of their contributions? We address this question in two ways. First, we compare broad trends in the productivity and prominence of men and women physi- cists worldwide over the past 50 years. Second, we examine the careers of elite physicists, asking whether the high honour of being elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) impacts the careers of men and women in physics differently. Our analysis leverages a recently developed Bayesian network model1 to estimate individual measures of scientific productivity and prominence from large-scale bibliographic data. We apply this model to a global physics collaboration network constructed from first- and last-author pairs in 9.1 million physics journal articles (omitting single-author papers) published between 1950 and 2023 and recorded in the OpenAlex bibliographic database. Within this global network, we focus on 93,456 established physicists with at least 30 years between their first and most recent publication and with at least 10 first- or last-author publications..."
December 12, 2025 at 3:25 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Slides from my American Inst. of Math @caltech.edu #MetaMath workshop talk on "Prestige, representation, and the spread of scientific ideas" earlier this week aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...
Screenshot of a slide from the talk: "little in academia makes sense except in the light of prestige", • understanding epistemic and social inequalities requires understanding how prestige drives and maintains them • untangling the effects of social biases can make science better & more meritocratic talk outline: • prestige shapes who joins the scientific workforce • prestige shapes which scientific ideas spread • prestige shapes who persists as a scientist, and what they study Screenshot of a summary slide of the talk, titled "who hires whose graduates as faculty?" • prestige is a structural variable in the scientific workforce • placement power quantifies reputation via outcomes (not inputs, as in USNRW) • reveals core-periphery structure of academia • faculty flow from core -> periphery ("the colonies") • modest fraction stays inside core ("homeland") • small fraction flows "upstream" • these hierarchies extremely stable over time • prestige -> faculty production -> hierarchy Screenshot of a summary slide from the talk, titled "what shapes the spread of ideas?" • prestige is a structural variable in the spread of knowledge • scientists carry ideas from PhD to faculty institution • prestige (placement power) drives epistemic inequalities • simulations suggests exponential dependence of "impact" on increased prestige • your position in the network shapes how far your ideas spread • prestige hierarchies do have benefits — rapid synchronization of knowledge, culture • prestige -> faculty production -> influence Screenshot of a results slide from the talk, titled "subfield mediates gender & prestige" • faculty hiring typically at the subfield level — hire in "AI" or in "Numerical Computing" etc. • does representation vary across subfield? does subfield vary with prestige? • results from Laberge et al. (2022), showing that in Computer Science: -- gender varies by CS subfield -- older CS subfields are less diverse -- little racial variation across subfield -- but, strong racial variation by career stage -- Whites overrepresented at PhD, but proportional at faculty -- Black, Hispanic, underrepresented at PhD, but proportional at faculty and that less gender diverse CS subfields = more heavily represented in prestigious CS departments, ie, subfield and prestige mediate gender representation in CS
December 11, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
sfiscience.bsky.social
Applications are open for SFI’s 2026 summer education programs, offering research and training in complexity science in Santa Fe, NM:

– Undergraduate Complexity Research
– Complex Systems Summer School
– Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science

Info: www.santafe.edu/engage/learn...
December 5, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
danlarremore.bsky.social
@cevianlabs.io CVParsa takes a stack of faculty candidate dossiers and generates a summary spreadsheet with candidate basics, current positions, publication info, research keywords, and research interests.

Send me a note and I'll send a code you can use on 5 CVs of your choice to see how it works!
December 4, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
danlarremore.bsky.social
After sitting on faculty hiring committees where profs & staff spend *days* of wasted time processing 100+ candidate dossiers into a 10K-foot view spreadsheet of candidates, @aaronclauset.bsky.social and I built the thing we always wanted: a computational pipeline to get the job done in 5 minutes...
December 4, 2025 at 8:22 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Super excited to announce a new venture, with @danlarremore.bsky.social : Cevian Labs cevianlabs.io provides advanced tools to accelerate faculty work in academia. Our first product CVParsa helps faculty search committees process huge piles of CVs, so they can spend more time evaluating candidates
Screenshot of the cevianlabs.io website. Banner says "Accelerating Academic Hiring", followed by The Cevian Advantage, Cevian Labs provides advanced tools to faculty and administrators to make better decisions, faster. Founded by faculty who spent years wishing for a way to automate the tedious parts of faculty hiring (summarizing CVs, tracking publications, synthesizing candidate information) and finally just built the solution we always needed. Our secure platform automates manual error-prone processes to deliver...
December 4, 2025 at 8:27 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
The anxious feeling of pushing code to production is so very similar to the feeling of pushing ‘submit’ for sending a manuscript to a journal 🫣 Even after 20 years as an academic
December 2, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
meredithshiner.com
Columbia and Northwestern are the academic homes to the most prestigious journalism schools in the country and they are the two universities that caved to the Trump administration’s extortion demands that are directly connected to the First Amendment. Just gonna sit with that for a while.
November 29, 2025 at 4:29 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
academicresistance.bsky.social
Faculty senates are under attack from new legislation that sidelines faculty voices and undermines academic freedom. The latest AAUP report defends independent, representative governance as essential to higher ed’s integrity. @aaup.org academeblog.org/2025/11/18/i...
In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates
BY AFSHAN JAFAR We have recently seen accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah…
academeblog.org
November 21, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
paulgp.com
Update your syllabus and stay on the frontier - it will increase your students’ wages. Epic work by my colleagues @barbarabiasi.com and @profsongma.bsky.social #linkoftheday

www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/...
November 15, 2025 at 12:44 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
jugander.bsky.social
📣 Postdocs at Yale FDS! 📣 Tremendous freedom to work on data science problems with faculty across campus, multi-year, great salary. Deadline 12/15. Spread the word! Application: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31114 More about Yale FDS: fds.yale.edu
Yale University, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science
Job #AJO31114, Postdoc in Foundations of Data Science, Institute for the Foundations of Data Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, US
academicjobsonline.org
November 18, 2025 at 3:54 AM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Video for my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" on 4 Nov, with a lovely audience (see thread below for slides) #scienceofscience
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPXl...
November 13, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
brendannyhan.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Nov 11
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
cohodes.bsky.social
📣 New NBER Working Paper out today 📣

"The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct"
Sarah Cohodes & Katherine Leu
Screenshot of working paper: The Consequences of Faculty Sexual Misconduct
November 10, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
danlarremore.bsky.social
For folks doing academic faculty hiring — 

What kind of platform does your university require you to use? Interfolio? Avature? Something else?

Are you able to batch-download the dossier PDFs, or do you pay for someone to hand-download them all?
November 5, 2025 at 11:13 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Slides from my @mit.edu IDSS Distinguished Speaker seminar "Networks untangle gender differences in productivity and prominence among scientists" this week

I argue that collaboration networks act like unequally distributed (and gendered) social capital

aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...
Slide title: "network effects in scientific labor" networks mediate most scientific activities: 1. scientific training, hiring, collaboration, teaching, attention, peer review, etc. 2. networks act like a form of unequally distributed social capital a productive collaborator --> increases your productivity a prominent collaborator --> increases your prominence How much does who you work with impact your productivity and prominence? Slide title: "model checking". Shows the results of applying our probabilistic generative from Li et al. Nature Communications (2022) for estimating individual productivity and prominence parameters from observed collaboration network data. This "nets out" the network, and estimates individual levels of activity. Left figure is joint distribution of productivity lambda and prominence theta, showing productivity is tightly concentrated around 0.42 papers/year, while prominence has a long tail, with most mid-career scientists (we studied 200,000 from 6 STEM fields) have very low prominence. Right figure shows pairwise correlation matrix of measures like number of papers, number of citations, lambda, theta, having a high-lambda coauthor, and having a high-theta coauthor. Strong correlation between your own number of papers and having a high-lambda (very productive) coauthor, etc. Good sanity checks for the model. Slide title "gender vs. productivity & prominence" Notes decades of past work showing a "productivity gap" between men and women, in which men publish more papers and receive more citations over time. But, after "netting out" their collaboration networks, we find no gender difference at all between individual productivity and individual prominence, implying that it's difference in who men and women work with (the size and composition of their collaboration networks) that drives the observed gap in productivity, not differences at the individual level. Slide title "how important is who you work with?" This is a wrap-up slide from the end of the talk: networks act like unequally distributed social capital in science they mediate our scientific attention, evaluation, and collaboration differences in collaboration networks can explain gendered differences in productivity & prominence early-career productivity & prominence what else? can we intervene in these networks to mitigate inequalities? funds for new collaborations, eg, after parenthood? early-career fellowships to work with elite senior coauthors?
November 6, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
khrisnin.bsky.social
I love how Rep. Joe Neguse reframed this question.
October 31, 2025 at 8:19 AM