Paul Smaldino
Paradigmatically promiscuous scientist. Ankylosaur enthusiast. Modeler of cultural evolution and related topics. Anti-fascist. Professor at UC Merced and the Santa Fe Institute.
Web: smaldino.com/wp/
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoNew sci-hub just dropped.
- Definitely seems plausible for some, seems unlikely to be the dominant narrative for most. Strategic ambiguity allows for multiple reasons under the same banner.
- Another is extreme parochialism -- some people want a country where people like them are in charge, and are willing (and excited) to violently dominate or remove those in their way. Govt corruption and incompetence is a price they're willing to pay.
- That's why pluralistic appeals to the public good and human decency aren't working -- the dominant narrative too many have bought in the US is that there are two sides that are incompatible, and therefore one must triumph over the other.
- Meanwhile the corruption is just absolutely staggering. They are literally looting government coffers. www.bbc.com/news/article...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoI had the most wholesome moment today---I requested @psmaldino.bsky.social's book from the library, and when I picked it up today, someone had left me a little note inside, saying that they'd love to meet to talk about it. Yay :)
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoICE kidnapped 5 people from my community this morning. I don’t live in Minneapolis. I live in LA County. They’re still here and their still brutalizing.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoIf you fancy nerdy social science, & evolutionary approaches to psychology & behavior irk, anger, or excite you, check out this podcast. Hosts David Pinsof & @dpietra.bsky.social are two of the sharpest thinkers in ev psych, & their guest this week @psmaldino.bsky.social is a rising star 🧪 #BioAnth
- This week, we talk to @psmaldino.bsky.social about selection, the covert signalling of social identities, and how to think about models, science, and what it is we're all doing with our lives. youtu.be/0h9qAhwixJ4 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-gkf6w...
- I had a really nice time on the @epthepod.bsky.social podcast. Here you can listen to me blathering about evolutionary social science and some of the things I work on.
- This week, we talk to @psmaldino.bsky.social about selection, the covert signalling of social identities, and how to think about models, science, and what it is we're all doing with our lives. youtu.be/0h9qAhwixJ4 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-gkf6w...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThis week, we talk to @psmaldino.bsky.social about selection, the covert signalling of social identities, and how to think about models, science, and what it is we're all doing with our lives. youtu.be/0h9qAhwixJ4 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-gkf6w...
- “Bella Ciao”, translated and recorded by Tom Waits and Marc Ribot in 2018. m.youtube.com/watch?v=50Gv...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoSayre: "My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones in Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. What I've seen here is what I've seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people."
- I got into an argument with someone back around 2020 when I said the “thin blue line” flags were fascist symbols and should be actively condemned (they argued it was just supporting local cops). Well, here we are.
- (I know, as if uncritically and unreservedly supporting cops isn’t already halfway to fascism)
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoNew paper from myself and many fantastic collaborators on the value of friction online social networks. A fun blend of principles from complexity science and social media design. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- A neat paper I worked on, begun over 2 years ago when our concerns were more myopic, was just published today. It came out an excellent set of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, led by the indefatigable Joshua Garland. The gist: sometimes inefficiency is good for you www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoOne court decision, two different headlines. Guardian on the left, NY Times on the right. Which one more directly conveys information and the stakes to the reader?
- Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.
- It's easy to see why Salvador Allende was so enamored with cybernetics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThis is exactly how we will find out.
- Reposted by Paul Smaldino“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house." Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...
- Reposted by Paul Smaldinowhat if we simply ate the president.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoNever, in a million kabillion years, when I decided to say "screw it" to mainstream philosophy and started writing about the philosophy of games, could I have imagined that this road would take me down to having the goddamn NY Times profile me and my new book. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoReminder 📢 We are advertising a postdoctoral position in #philbio or #philphysics to work on an interdisciplinary project that adopts the lens of self-organization & active matter to explore the boundary between living and nonliving systems👇 www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo... #philjobs #philsci #evosky
- Reposted by Paul Smaldinoso like.... that's just pollution then
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoPluribus is a fascinating meditation on an extreme solution to the crux of all political economy: what's the best way to facilitaton cooperation among strangers? Anyway, here's a book I was going to write collapsed to 2500 words. economistwritingeveryday.com/2026/01/12/t...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoSadly, more relevant than ever. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-...
- The source of much online outrage, distilled in a pithy figure.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoMany excellent points in this piece, including "The entire world is not legible to the Internet, and thus, the entire world is not legible to LLMs."
- little-flying-robots.ghost.io/rejecting-re... We live in an age where the Internet and LLMs are encouraging ever more people to reject reality entirely. Here's my thoughts on why this is happening, and why the Terminally Online turn amongst the powerful is so dangerous.
- I find the neo-royalism framing useful and I think @abenewman.bsky.social is probably right with this interpretation
- 1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...
- Reposted by Paul Smaldino"Musk famously goes 'all in' on every hand of Texas Hold 'Em poker... This strategy, described in glowing terms by economic elites and elite aspirants, works because Musk, due to his obscene wealth, can always buy more chips; emulating his strategy would be catastrophically foolish for most people."
- Personal risk tolerance has sweeping implications for how societies evolve. phys.org/news/2025-12...
- Wikipedia is truly one of the greatest things on the Internet. It is absolutely incredible, and must be preserved at all costs.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoOh look, a machine for false advertising designed to defeat any class treatment even without arbitration clauses!
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThe final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.
- I will (over)use em-dashes till they pry them from my cold dead hands.
- "Why agent-based modeling could happen in economics. Eventually." Good piece by @mikemakowsky.bsky.social economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/12/29/p... I'd argue that the "new era of theory" is already underway, though, led not by economists, but by comp social sci/cultural evolution folks.
- After learning of their existence from His Dark Materials, my 11 yr-old daughter asked for a Crookes Radiometer for Xmas. I now regret every moment in which I didn’t have one in the house.
- Reposted by Paul Smaldino"It would be easy for me to dismiss my ignorance as a result of my youth. I was only 16 going on 17 when the relationship in question occurred, and up until that point, the men in my life —namely my father and significant others — insisted on infantilizing me."
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoTIL that 3-6% of birds across five species have morphological sex characteristics that differ from their chromosomes. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...
- Reposted by Paul Smaldinomy modest collection of flies with WIDE heads 🙇 a hammer-headed Richardia (Ecuador), a stalk-eyed Chaetodiopsis (Mozambique), a pointy-eyed Ophthalmoptera (Colombia), and an antlered Richardia (Colombia) why though? male-male competition? sexual selection? chime-in if you know!
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoNew preprint out with @elspethready.bsky.social : "The emergence of sharing networks through indirect signaling". osf.io/preprints/so...
- Woke up this morning to 6 new review requests. It’s a Christmas miracle.
- We are very close to releasing a new code repo in Julia for all the models in Modeling Social Behavior! Stay tuned.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoIn episode 1008, I talk with Dr. Paul Smaldino about his great book, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution. #Science youtu.be/7Ue6pqGpHss
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoYou can check out the pre-print here: Moser, C., & Smaldino, P.E. (2025). Limit Cycles in Opinion Dynamic Networks with Competing Stubborn Agents. osf.io/preprints/so...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoExcited to get this paper published! 🌟 We argue that men exaggerate patriarchal beliefs in an effort to signal conformity to others, which in turn fuels misperceptions about peers - making patriarchal norms resistant to change. royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...
- Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review. Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoHow likely are you to invest in a new business? Ask your partner to marry you? Move to a new country? A new model by SFI External Professor Paul Smaldino and colleagues explains how wealth, experience, and environment shape our risk tolerance — and how those effects persist across generations.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThis is high quality data journalism and also means you can scoff at your friend's sheeple Google suggestions and use this dashboard instead
- I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoOur School of Information Sciences is running four searches, and we can hire more than four candidates. Here’s the first link, for a job that might appeal to people working in history of information, history of science, or digital humanities. +
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoNew pre-print with @psmaldino.bsky.social on an agent-based model of propaganda in online spaces. Using the voter model from physics, we simulate networks with stubborn agents (zealots) who do not change their opinions, asking about their optimal positioning for influencing the network.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoPostdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoWe are on the brink of a once in a generation transformation in world politics. @erikvoeten.bsky.social @segoddard.bsky.social and I talk neo-royalism as one future. Give a list: goodauthority.org/news/the-new... Check out the article it is based on here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Reposted by Paul Smaldino1/This week has seen a blitz of what looks like corruption sandals: Saudi development deals for US military tech, Pakistani payments to Trump insiders for tariff relief, Swiss gold bars for a trade deal. Far from a payoff, this is a reordering of internat'l system. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mxthh...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoI cosign every single word of this anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...
- Using AI to amplify societal biases, exhibit 2490439840398
- Reposted by Paul Smaldino[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoCome and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoTHEN YOU PURCHASE THEM AND DO NOT USE THE PROPERTY OF OTHERS
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoCongratulations to Dr @mariapykala.bsky.social for successfully defending her PhD thesis yesterday. Two big themes. 1) Social learning as a two-step process with psychological biases shaping both network formation and social learning given a network. 2) Cumulative cultural evolution in an AI world.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoCongratulations to Andoni Sergiou for defending his PhD thesis today! And special thanks to @psmaldino.bsky.social and @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social for examining his thesis
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThis is…outstanding. If I may, I urge us to read it carefully, and appreciate the details, the shape, the picture it paints.
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoThinking this level of inequality is unsustainable isn’t radical, thinking it isn’t is
- Reposted by Paul Smaldinowhy has no-one written a book on the evolution of cooperation titled "Decent with Modification"? #evolution #culturalevolution
- Reposted by Paul SmaldinoFour (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil... Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy. Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs
