iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This video was quite hard to make... It’s about an almost unknown problem in the social sciences with pretty heavy implications. I hope it can bring more attention to this problem! youtu.be/J3UIaYyd-Lw

youtu.be

The biggest problem in the social sciences

YouTube video by Social Complexity / Computational Social Science

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The nice thing about experiments is that people can surprise you. The annoying thing is that they will surprise you.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

From 2000 to 2020, responses across political issues increasingly lined up along a left–right divide. Democrats and Republicans became less likely to share the same positions, forming more coherent belief systems.

100

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

1/ People who feel optimistic about AI tend to agree with one another. But people who worry about AI? Not so much. A belief-network analysis of six questions about AI and technology reveals a striking asymmetry. 🧵

164

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Let's be real, the evil AI that will destroy humanity will be the AI of a printer looking for magenta (for a black-and-white document).

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

How should we represent a belief system? As a position on a scale? A collection of survey answers? A set of statements? A network? In our chapter, we introduce Belief Network Theory: a measurement framework for studying how beliefs are held, expressed, perceived, and connected to social identities

140

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Today at 15:15 CET I'll be speaking at the Social Simulation Fest about Science Communication and Narratisation! 🎤 It's an online event, so you can still join by registering here: 👇 socsimfest.eu/registration/

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Opinion dynamics models do _not_ need to be an abstraction of reality. You can also build them to reproduce measured human behaviour in experiments. www.jasss.org/25/4/4.html

jasss.org

Deriving an Opinion Dynamics Model from Experimental Data

by Dino Carpentras, Paul J. Maher, Caoimhe O'Reilly and Michael Quayle

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

It took me a while, but we finally have the second episode of the Computational Social Science podcast! This time, we talk about collective intelligence 🧐 You can find it on YouTube... youtu.be/547ZQAa_koE ...or on your favourite platform www.buzzsprout.com/2226458/epis...

youtu.be

What makes a group intelligent or stupid?

YouTube video by Social Complexity / Computational Social Science

110

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Just found out that the paper where Galton introduced correlation has fewer than 1,000 citations. It makes sense that people don’t cite it every time, but that still feels surprisingly low! royalsocietypublishing.org/rspl/article...

royalsocietypublishing.org

I. Co-relations and their measurement, chiefly from anthropometric data

Abstract. “Co-relation or correlation of structure” is a phrase much used in biology, and not least in that branch of it which refers to heredity, and the

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Year 3 of asking ChatGPT to write a joke about ABMs. Main finding: Instead of producing better jokes, it’s just becoming aware that they’re simply not funny.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Do we really need representatives in a democracy? Our paper shows how systems based on collective intelligence could be used by citizens to identify and find solutions to their problems even at a national scale! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

researchgate.net

(PDF) The Wisdom of the Democratic Crowd: Allowing Collective Intelligence at Massive Scale

PDF | The increasing distrust in democracies has pushed many to explore new ways that can better integrate citizens into the decision-making process to... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

140

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

So, somebody wrote a comment on one of my articles. Their core message is rather sound (indeed it's the same as what we wrote in our article). The problem is that they make so many mistakes I don't really know what to make of this... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

100

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Today we have the first public event of the Special Interest Group on Strongly Empirical Modelling, with a talk from Bruce Edmonds titled: Towards inferring clusters of “cognitive models” from survey data. See you at 2pm CET! ethz.zoom.us/j/66230792870

ethz.zoom.us

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

Why do people prefer using statistical tests that nobody ever heard of instead of just bootstrapping? (I'm really asking, it's not a complaint or sarcastic or anything) Wouldn't bootstrapping also make results more understandable?

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Another figure from a (now retracted) scientific publication. I'm not an expert, but I feel proportions may be a little off... www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/...

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Yes, this is a real image from a scientific publication 😅 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Some years ago I applied ResIN to a Harry Potter dataset. The more two people are similar (in terms of how they relate to other characters), the tighter their connection. As you can see, the HP world is heavily polarized. But now my question is: why did I do something like that??

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Apparently, ignoring all those predatory journals made me very popular with girls! (btw, all these emails are from a single day)

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

To cite this meme: Photoshop et al. (2025)

022

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

How can we develop a better understanding of Complex Attitude-Identity Systems (CAIS)? Here👇we introduce a theory of Belief Networks to explain how to accurately measure them. This will help us understand how beliefs connect, evolve and shape identity. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Today, both Samuel Moor-Smith and I will give a presentation at the Social Simulation Conference. If you are interested in the validation of ABMs, their classes of equivalence and how psychometrics plays an important role, join us!

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

I am finally back from holid... what happened here? Did I sleep for 50 years?

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Looking wise while totally lost — a timeless academic tradition.

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

How well do *opinion dynamics* models perform on empirical data? Results are here and... let's say they are not the best... I think we really need to focus more effort on improving models' realism and testing procedures. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Should I discuss anything else in the Conclusion section?

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Tired of AI images that look like Studio Ghibli's? Me neither, but here's Dragon Ball style, for no specific reason.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Not sure what kind of black magic Adrian Lüders used to write this article, but we're in the New York Times... again! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | When Novels Mattered

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

A viral post claimed that, in our study, we showed that Democrats are close-minded. Here are my thoughts and explanations of what the article is really showing. youtu.be/lgumeckzhWM

youtu.be

Researcher explains the truth behind the viral study

YouTube video by Social Complexity / Computational Social Science

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

I'll be at the ISA Forum of Sociology in Rabat this week. If you're around, let’s connect!

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Yes, every opinion dynamics model is actually a class of equivalent models. This can be used both (1) to verify equivalence between models and (2) to improve the testing of the model against empirical data. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

researchgate.net

(PDF) Every opinion dynamics model is a class of equivalent models

PDF | While more and more opinion dynamics models have been developed along the years, many researchers have wondered on the possibility of finding some... | Find, read and cite all the research you n...

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

If you have nothing better to do today at 8 pm CET, join me for a live session on some of the most common questions I receive. www.youtube.com/live/NpOKfdn...

youtube.com

How do I get into Computational Social Science? And what is it, really? [Q&A]

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I ordered this new ABM from IKEA. Quite interesting 🤔

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

You can listen to the Computational Social Science podcast on all of your favourite platforms. (Spotify, Apple podcasts, Overcast, ...) www.buzzsprout.com/2226458/epis...

buzzsprout.com

Ep 1 - Are complex systems really more than the sum of their parts? - Computational Social Science / Social Complexity

People often claim that

020

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

The sentence "complex systems are more than the sum of their parts" is very inspiring but also very confusing; at least, it was like this for me when I started studying them.

130

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Being in ABM means initially wanting to work with social scientists, and then spending 90% of meeting time explaining why adding 20,000 more parameters won't improve the model.

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

For those wondering: yes, the YouTube channel and Podcast are coming back soon. Unfortunately, academic life leaves little time to do anything else, so I had to suspend them for some time, but now we are back! And thank you very much for your support! 🙏

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Apparently, one of our studies went viral thanks to this image, which oversimplifies the findings (image not by us, by the way). I think this is the problem with science communication: people really like simplicity, but science is based on nuances and complexity.

120

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

A quick excerpt of today's session.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

🚨 Join us tomorrow at 13:30 CET for a discussion on incrementality in social simulations 🛠️ Why don’t social simulation models evolve incrementally like in other fields? Should they? Can they? Bring your ideas, experiences & questions—everyone's voice matters! www.socsimfest.eu/programme-20...

socsimfest.eu

– Tuesday 20 May 2025 | Social Simulation FesT

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Dear Funding Agencies, below is my proposal for your consideration. Please let me know if any parts remain too complex.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

We often suppose that things like intelligence and opinions not only exist, but can be measured in a “correct” way. So our goal is to reduce the error as much as possible to get closer and closer to such “correct” measurement. [1/7]

132

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Ah, yes, "Avengers infinity job hunt", my favourite movie!

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Working with an agent-based model? Start with a vision—but stay flexible! As your model evolves, check what it’s actually revealing. Your original plan might not hold up, but new and unexpected insights could open better paths forward. #Modeling #AgentBasedModel #ResearchTips

130

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Academics of the internet, can you please explain how you can make a family if you don’t know where in the galaxy you will be in 2 years? I can’t find any answers in the literature. Also, here’s ChatGPT's interpretation of this post.

000

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

"if it is an interval level, for a score of 3, one should be able to answer the question: '3 what?' " asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Likert scales: how to (ab)use them

Click on the article title to read more.

010

Dino Carpentras @justanormaldino.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Are we mistaking analogies for empirical truths? In this article, we discuss the tendency to overestimate a model's applicability based on its analogical appeal rather than empirical validation. rofasss.org/2024/05/06/d...

rofasss.org

Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

For discussion about social simulation research

000