Alexander Wuttke
LightNews LightNews
kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke
@kunkakom.bsky.social
3.9K followers 2.2K following 410 posts

Digitalization & Pol Behavior LMU_Muenchen | Democracy and Populist Attitudes | Open Science | 🚵‍♂️🐶

Videos
Political science 63%
Communication & Media Studies 7%
Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Jim Kelly, Alexander Wuttke, John L. Cotter , and 1 more

tommasopavone.bsky.social
Tommaso Pavone @tommasopavone.bsky.social · 23h
Can reflecting on past democratic backsliding episodes “inoculate” citizens into vigilant liberal democrats? Drawing on the Slovak case, @movadek.bsky.social & I will find out: our registered report is in-principle accepted @thejop.bsky.social & survey results forthcoming! See tinyurl.com/uv5wybhs

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Sandra Dullau

misik.bsky.social
Robert Misik @misik.bsky.social · 5d
Sie haben auch schon ein paar Pläne für die Zeit nach „der Machtübernahme“, nämlich: „Volksfeindliche Medien verbieten.“ Denn: „Die Zeit, in der das deutsche Volk sich erhebt wird kommen. Es ist unsere Zeit!!!“

steady.page/de/vernunft-...
„…dann stellen wir sie an die Wand.“
Ein Dokument wie ein Fiebertraum: Die „Akte AfD“ führt uns vor Augen, woran wir uns schon gewöhnt haben.
steady.page

Reposted by Linda J. Skitka, Olivier Corneille, Alexander Wuttke , and 4 more

pgmj.bsky.social
Magnus Johansson @pgmj.bsky.social · 6d
"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.”
www.tum.de/en/news-and-...
40 percent of MRI signals misinterpreted
Interpretation of numerous MRI data may be incorrect: blood flow is not a reliable indicator of brain activity.
www.tum.de

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Peter Stegmaier, Cyrus Samimi

bijanmoini.de
Bijan Moini @bijanmoini.de · 6d
Jede demokratische Partei müsse sich fragen, ob sie mit einer Partei kooperieren will, die die Demokratie abschaffen will - ob sie "mit dem Teufel ins Bett geht", sagt Voßkuhle. Die AfD wolle den "Parlamentarismus westlicher Prägung abschaffen" (…).

Erstaunlich deutliche Worte vom Ex- BVerfG-Präsi.
Ex-Verfassungsrichter Voßkuhle sieht deutsche Demokratie in Gefahr
Der frühere Präsident des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, Voßkuhle, sieht die deutsche Demokratie bedroht. Überall auf der Welt kämen totalitäre Systeme auf, sagte er dem Tagesspiegel. Deutschland sei da k...
www.tagesschau.de

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 6d
Thank you!

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 6d
This one?
Like an app not for research narrowly understood but for learning?
notewave.app
Feynman AI
Feynman AI creates notes, mind maps, quizzes, and flashcards from audio, PDFs, and more. Master any topic with Feynman AI using the Feynman technique for deeper learning. Learn smarter, not harder, le...
notewave.app

Reposted by Ingo Rohlfing, Sebastian Karcher

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 7d
The sale pitch for this AI Scientist "Kosmos" as presented in this Podcast just seems like a big HARKing exercise. Yes, just look at the data long enough and you'll find "something".

Has anybody made any experiences with AI scientists models? Recommendations?
pca.st/episode/58aa...
Where Is All the A.I.-Driven Scientific Progress?
pca.st

Reposted by Tim Bale, Alexander Wuttke, Paolo Crosetto , and 4 more

poqjournal.bsky.social
Public Opinion Quarterly - POQ @poqjournal.bsky.social · 15d
Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective?

In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported.

Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 15d
Congratulations!

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke

ianhussey.mmmdata.io
Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 15d
I’m vocally skeptical of silicon samples, yet vocally impressed by SurveyBot3000.

The difference: this does not rely on magic beans or assumed omniscience, it is trained and validated against a large corpus of highly relevant data and makes specific predictions with known accuracy and precision.
ruben.the100.ci Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 15d
Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model. Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate. Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains. Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke

ruben.the100.ci
Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 15d
We took pains to avoid overfitting. In addition to the standard training/test/holdout divide, we also ran a registered report follow up and locked down the predictions before we collected data. Accuracy was indeed a tad attenuated r=.71 -> .59.

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Cameron Brick, Ian Hussey , and 3 more

ruben.the100.ci
Ruben C. Arslan @ruben.the100.ci · 15d
Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Fig. 3. Scatter plots of the synthetic and empirical estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Showing N = 30,135 item-pair correlations, N = 257 scale reliabilities, and N = 1,568 scale-pair correlations for (top) the pretrained SBERT model and (bottom) the fine-tuned SurveyBot3000 model. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model. Fig. 4. Prediction error of the synthetic estimates, validation study (Stage 2). Our prediction model allowed the error term to vary freely according to the predictor, the synthetic estimate. The thin-plate splines show that some synthetic estimates were predictably more accurate. Fig. 5. Accuracy by domain. Accuracy differed across domains. SurveyBot3000 accuracy (colored) was always higher than SBERT accuracy (gray). Results were largely consistent whether accuracy of items was tested (left, circle) within domains or (right, cross) across domains. Fig. 1. Multistep training procedure for the SurveyBot3000, which produces synthetic estimates of interitem correlations. (a) Pretraining base model (SBERT). (b) Fine-tuning SurveyBot3000. (c) Validation. SBERT = all-mpnet-base-v2 model.

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 17d
Same.
And users start to recognize when others change their profile pictures...

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 17d
Is it just me or has bluesky started to feel like good old academic twitter recently?

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 17d
Australia bans social media for the youth.
Any plans that
@jonathanhaidt.bsky.social and his critics get together for an adversarial collaboration to pre-register success/failure criteria on a specific diff-in-diff design to exploit this natural experiment?
pca.st/episode/0155...
Australia Kicks Kids Off Social Media + Is the A.I. Water Issue Fake? + Hard Fork Wrapped
pca.st

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke

deevybee.bsky.social
Dorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 21d
i guess the expertise of the authors is limited to experience of being criticised
ianhussey.mmmdata.io Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 21d
Critique argues post-publication peer review "often focuses on minor details" and "risks damaging trust in both the research itself and the peer review process" found to contain:

- Hallucinated references
- Undisclosed COIs (EiC is author)
- 8/9 authors have retractions or related scandals
An expert criticism on post-publication peer review platforms: the case of pubpeer - DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
While traditional peer review offers advantages in academic publishing, it is often hampered by significant weaknesses, leading to frustration among many authors. Scientific discoveries after publicat...
link.springer.com

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Alexander Wuttke, Flávio Azevedo

ianhussey.mmmdata.io
Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 21d
Critique argues post-publication peer review "often focuses on minor details" and "risks damaging trust in both the research itself and the peer review process" found to contain:

- Hallucinated references
- Undisclosed COIs (EiC is author)
- 8/9 authors have retractions or related scandals
An expert criticism on post-publication peer review platforms: the case of pubpeer - DARU Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences
While traditional peer review offers advantages in academic publishing, it is often hampered by significant weaknesses, leading to frustration among many authors. Scientific discoveries after publicat...
link.springer.com

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, John Holbein, Kai Gehring , and 1 more

paulgp.com
Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 21d
I was also bored and pulled up the replication package.

The results are quite sensitive in aggregate to needing the controls. Here's the replication of Figure 3, including the case w/o controls:

Reposted by Alistair Munro, Alexander Wuttke, John Holbein , and 1 more

chanret.bsky.social
Chris Hanretty @chanret.bsky.social · 21d
Thanks to @johnholbein1.bsky.social I learned about this paper on rent control in Berlin.

Because I was marking, I immediately downloaded the replication materials.

bsky.app/profile/john...
johnholbein1.bsky.social John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 22d
Um, ok...

This paper forthcoming at the JOP provides evidence that rent control in Germany actually made tenants MASSIVELY *less* NIMBY.

This result was in the opposite direction of the authors' pre-registered expectations.

And the effect sizes are, truly, massive.

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke, Martin Kreidl, Timothy Graham , and 4 more

css-lmu.bsky.social
CSS Lab, LMU Munich @css-lmu.bsky.social · 22d
🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc!

Our group is looking for a Postdoc to join the team working on computational comm research. If you’re excited about automated content analysis, large text & social-media data, open science, this might be for you.

💡 Sounds like you or someone you know? Please share/boost!

Reposted by Richard S.J. Tol, Jörg Peters, Alexander Wuttke , and 2 more

i4replication.bsky.social
Institute for Replication @i4replication.bsky.social · 23d
We're thrilled to open registration for our 1st 2026 Replication Games. The event will be at the University of Zurich on January 19th.

Psych, public health, pol sci and econ studies will be reproduced! Register here: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...

Reposted by Alessandro Nai

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 23d
Grateful for the opportunity to contribute—by name—to what must be the most massive collaborative encyclopedia project of all time, next to Wikipedia. All credit goes to @annisch.bsky.social who did the heavy lifting for the overview article on Populist Attitudes.

osf.io/preprints/so...

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Alexander Wuttke

lorenzspreen.bsky.social
Philipp Lorenz-Spreen @lorenzspreen.bsky.social · 23d
Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why.

Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

And more below 👇

Reposted by Alexander Wuttke

ajungherr.bsky.social
Andreas Jungherr @ajungherr.bsky.social · 24d
📢 New paper out!
What do people want from AI systems? How should outputs be adjusted? And how do views differ between countries?
@adrauc.bsky.social and I explore this for @socialmedia-soc.bsky.social in Public Opinion on the Politics of AI Alignment.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 24d
Oh, I see.
you're right. Journals retracting the article is, of course, not the only and perhaps not even the most common way.
Good point

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 24d
I like this idea.

Let's include retraction in university rankings
(And perhaps successful reproductions)
ianhussey.mmmdata.io Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 24d
Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities
Achal Agrawal is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.
www.nature.com

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Alexander Wuttke

ianhussey.mmmdata.io
Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · 24d
Achal Agrawal is on Nature’s list of 10 people who shaped science in 2025. His work helped change India’s university rankings system to include a penalty for large number of retractions.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities
Achal Agrawal is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2025.
www.nature.com

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 25d
wow. So nice to hear. Congratulations and good luck!

Reposted by Gijs Schumacher, Alexander Wuttke

mrooduijn.bsky.social
Matthijs Rooduijn @mrooduijn.bsky.social · 25d
With my project IMMERSE I investigate whether immersive narrative interventions (storytelling, live theatre, video games and virtual reality) can strengthen support for liberal democracy by engaging people more deeply than conventional communication. See: www.uva.nl/en/content/n... 2/2
Nine UvA researchers receive ERC Consolidator Grants
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Consolidator Grants to nine UvA researchers. The laureates are: Thijs Bol, Jaron Harambam, Eirini Karyotaki, Patty Leijten, Dora Matzke, Matthijs Roodui...
www.uva.nl

kunkakom.bsky.social
Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 25d
Perhaps it should include a slide on the proliferation of causal designs in polisci in the recent 2 decades as documented by @carotorreblanca.bsky.social
et Al
osf.io/preprints/so...
OSF
osf.io