Aaron Clauset
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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
whysharksmatter.bsky.social
What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled - Eos | Five ways dismantling NCAR will cost the American people, and two ways to save it.
What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled - Eos
Five ways dismantling NCAR will cost the American people, and two ways to save it.
eos.org
January 28, 2026 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
beccadownes.bsky.social
Peer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.
raphaelwimmer.bsky.social Raphael Wimmer @raphaelwimmer.bsky.social · 3d
OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free.
Writing a paper has never been easier.
Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier.
It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct.

prism.openai.com
Screenshot of Prism - I asked it to create a methods, participants, results, and discussion seconds. It did so within 54 seconds...
January 28, 2026 at 6:10 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
andylevy.net
nine years old
“I am Puerto Rican,” she says. “I send my kids with their passports to school. I’m having conversations with them about safety: Am I safe at school? A week ago we had an incident where there was a school bus with the STOP sign open and kids were getting on the bus and it was surrounded by ICE agents. And this is 7:20 in the morning and — just — you get that fight-or-flight response.” At first her 9-year-old was carrying her passport in her backpack; now it’s in her back pocket. “I have to prepare them for it if they get stopped,” she says. “I said, Do not engage. This is not the time to be cussing at anyone. But she said, Mom, if I create enough noise, my friends can get away.”
January 23, 2026 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
volcannick.bsky.social
The spineless administrators who bent over backwards to comply with these illegal rules should never be allowed to run any institution of higher learning ever again.

For my part, I certainly won’t forget who the Deans and Provosts were at institutions I care about!
January 23, 2026 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
annpettifor.bsky.social
Gabriel Zucman on the shocking concentration of extreme wealth in the United States….
gzucman.substack.com?r=nle0&utm_c...
January 19, 2026 at 9:40 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
cevianlabs.io
Are you a PI running a search to hire a postdoc?

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cevianlabs.io/cvparsa/
Cevian Labs - CVParsa
Parse academic CVs instantly with CVParsa
cevianlabs.io
January 19, 2026 at 4:47 PM
aaronclauset.bsky.social
As an editor of a scientific journal, this essay feels very familiar: it’s about how AI coding tools are making it harder to maintain quality in open source software. The solution cannot be to just use AI agents to evaluate too, right? What historical parallels can we learn from?
mitsuhiko.at Armin Ronacher @mitsuhiko.at · 13d
Weekend thoughts on Gas Town, Beads, slop AI browsers, and AI-generated PRs flooding overwhelmed maintainers. I don't think we're ready for our new powers we're wielding. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/ag...
Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
lucumr.pocoo.org
January 18, 2026 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
ic2s2.bsky.social
Conference update: IC2S2 Virtual Day. While Vermont is an incredibly kind and welcoming state, national policies and federal actions have a real impact on conference access, particularly for people from countries who cannot enter the US due to federally enacted travel bans. 1/6
January 14, 2026 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
andrew.heiss.phd
Perennial reminder of this excellent paper about how secret police forces are swamped with underachievers

“We don’t want clever people. We want mediocrities.”

(Ungated summary here ajps.org/2019/10/08/w...)
Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina Adam Scharpf Christian Gläßel Abstract: Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975-83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown.
January 14, 2026 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
walterolson.bsky.social
Five years ago.
Front pages of American newspapers after Jan. 6, 2021, with headlines like "Capitol Chaos," "Assault on Democracy," "Pro-Trump mob storms Capitol."
January 6, 2026 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Aaron Clauset
sifill.bsky.social
Perfect. There is no belief system here.
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 26d
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 · Dec 22
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