I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

Physics Paths

xkcd.com/3155/

8. This has been a short and honestly rather peevish thread, so if you want read more that has been written in a more equanimous tone, here's a short piece that I coauthored a few years ago, precisely about how we deal with this kind of duplicity.

So OpenAI is actively marketing ChatGPT to students during college finals season in the U.S.

We've talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to these systems, but additionally, there's been at least three…

With mechanisms like these, who needs behaviors?

My commentary on the latest by Thomas Robiglio, friends, and @lordgrilo.bsky.social

physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century."
snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-les...

New blog post 🚨

A gentle dive into the mereology of complex systems, Möbius inversion, and a new way to think about higher-order interactions—no prior knowledge needed!
abeljansma.nl/2025/01/28/m...

Niels Van Santen wrote a guide to the use of information theoretical measures in psychology/psychometrics. Any feedback is most welcome!

Simultaneous attacks to research funding and information ecosystems. I discuss on #ComplexityThoughts about the potential consequences.

👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

🎧 creators.spotify.com/pod/show/com...

Short 🧵 1/

I was interviewed by @msjpauly.bsky.social for @motherjones.com regarding that awful gamete size "sex" executive order. A bit of an explainer here of why the science is so bad, and why that's dangerous:

❄️ Only 10 days to go! ❄️

The 10th edition of the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems is almost here! We're so excited to spend a week full of inspiring science in the beautiful mountains of Lombardy. This year, it's truly a Winter Workshop—snow and all! 🌨️✨

#WWCS25

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗲𝘂𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀
If you are a statistician, teach statistics, or even just use statistics, this is a highly recommended read.
What a horror story which probably most of us know little about.
nautil.us/how-eugenics...

"Scientists need to recognize that bold presentation, dissemination, and support of scientific knowledge has become both a basic commitment and a political act." 👏👏👏

⁉️ DAG Quiz of the Day ⁉️

Find all conditional independencies between nodes implied by the following directed acyclic graph. (Hint: there is an easy way to rule out many potential dependencies.)

Let's see if we can hold two ideas simultaneously:

1. Science is of course "neither red nor blue." It's about understanding nature, not partisan agendas.
2. Science is of course "political." Politics is how we make collective decisions, including concerning science.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New feed on complexity and network science, featuring a host of amazing folks.