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Ross Weistroffer

@libraryofbabble.bsky.social
1.9K followers 4.6K following 180 posts

🗳️ #DemocracyScience nerd for an incrementally better world, reporting from the intersection of info & action. Pro-🏳️‍🌈,🏳️‍⚧️, 🇺🇸, and 🇺🇳 🌎🌏🌍 🔎 Researcher @ discourselabs.org 🌇 Urbanist & governance reform advocate @ fairrepla.bsky.social 📍 San Francisco

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Reposted by Ross Weistroffer
Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 8h
Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.
Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
CAN? Yes. SHOULD? Well… Coming this Halloween: Jamie York‘s Guide to (Mostly) Ethical Witchery 🧙‍♀️
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Great, practical, budget-oriented preprint on LLM annotation approaches here! Especially appreciated confirmation that just telling an LLM to adopt a demo’s perspective (persona prompting) truly does NOT work (as expected given poor quality of synthetic survey data). 🔗: arxiv.org/abs/2603.21404
arxiv.org
Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks
Large language models are increasingly used to annotate texts, but their outputs reflect some human perspectives better than others. Existing methods for correcting LLM annotation error assume a singl...
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"tweets referencing divisive issues ... receive substantially greater engagement than tweets about the issues voters care most about" but "candidates predominantly discuss voter-relevant issues" abhinavramaswamy.com/main_(userEn...
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Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
🗣️ Can government-led citizens' assemblies strengthen democratic attitudes? ➡️ @mcduarte.bsky.social, @jmfernandes86.bsky.social & @miguelpereira.bsky.social use random selection to Lisbon's citizens' assemblies and find participation increases knowledge, efficacy and trust doi.org/10.1017/psrm...
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Can't wait to tune in to LA City Council's first round of deliberations on how to improve city government! ...unfortunately, that's because I'll be watching the not-very-accessible 8:30 AM PDT meeting from Europe at 5:30 PM. 😅 Maybe some/any meeting times for working Angelenos are in order...?
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This has been the case for not all, but still major sectors of the ideas industry in the U.S. for a while too, with...problematic results. :/
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I would love to hear them! We need more expert analyses and opinions to shape our discourse about CS and act as the foundation for future public thinking and research, and you never know what the public conversation around what you share might intellectually inspire. 😊
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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Want to play with corpora of the French 3rd Republic ? Want to join a nice team ? Want to do something else than LLM and have fun with smaller models as well ? Want to work with people in the humanities and the digital humanities ? Well, this might be for you 😄: jobs.inria.fr/public/class...
jobs.inria.fr
NLP Post-doc / Engineer for Information Mining in Historical Data (French 3rd Republic)
Offre d'emploi Inria
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Jan Schwalbach @janschwalbach.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🚨New article in Nature Scientific Data: The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures: doi.org/10.1038/s415... with @lukashetzer.eurosky.social @sopro.bsky.social @chrauh.bsky.social @miklossebok.bsky.social 1/6
doi.org
The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures
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Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
a PhD position in LLMs, annotations, language and benchmarking @ University of Tartu. please share! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It will still likely be close, given Raman’s comparative lack of name recognition and the size and strength of Bass’s backing coalition, but this polling comes as no surprise to those who know just how many sociopolitical groups and interests Bass has pissed off by enabling a broken status quo.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Over time, this “locked arms”/unity > systemic change approach has resulted in cumulatively mounting failures in executive leadership (the Palisades being just one) that have slowly but surely pissed off every possible pro-change constituency, and caused some major defections from her coalition.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Bass is an old-school 90s Dem coalition-builder, as you would expect of an experienced legislator. She focused on building coalitions with the leaders of LA’s power structure (including LAPD, NIMBYs, and Labor), and protecting them by resisting attempts by to address said citywide problems.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It’s beyond ICE/Palisdes: LA is facing serious, systemic, long-standing citywide problems that directly affect people’s daily lives (transit, infrastructure, housing, parks) and perception of government (accountability, transparency, responsiveness).
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
True data nerds love data enough to know that data doesn’t change things, people do.
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Fariba Karimi @frbkrm.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I’m excited to share our new preprint about network fairness and its ethical challenges. We spent many years thinking about this topic and shaping our arguments. /w @lespin.bsky.social @eliassi.bsky.social Ricardo Baeza-Yates , Pak Wong , Erich Prem , Meike Zehlike ,Suresh Venkatasubramanian
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
LA's Congress of Neighborhoods is a great example of how hyperlocal democracy can create incredible intra-city coalitions -- and Alex Levy's and @publicdemocracyla.bsky.social's work shows how deliberative democracy fits into and builds on those coalitions. Angelenos, attend if you can!
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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 20/09/2026
pretty interesting project by @s0hw.bsky.social and @andresmh.com building an ontology of community guideline decision points. I think this will be very relevant to high-context moderation within atmospheric groups
bonfirenetworks.org
Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire
A collaboration with Princeton explores how Governance Cards can help communities explain how they organise, make decisions, and care for their shared spaces.
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Thorsten Sterk @thorstensterk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Citizen engagement processes can be transformative. But what is their impact on policymaking, democratic systems and the broader public? This JRC report maps a range of impacts across policy, institutions and society. publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/h... #CitizensAssembly
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Amy Zhang @axz.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
We were interested in studying the Bsky custom feed ecosystem, with a focus on feed creators, as arguably the first real instantiation of the vision of middleware providers for social media services like recommendation. The idea always seemed great in theory, but how sustainable is it really?
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Nicholdav @nicholdav.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
wow can't believe Jinping will just host all China's open models on DataBRICS
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Boris @bmann.ca · 11/09/2026
Oh yeah, and @mosh.bsky.social has done some great writing about building for organizers - absolutely "Build transformative tools that empower your community like never before"
mosh.leaflet.pub
Building for Organizers
The most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.
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angela zhou @angelamczhou.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Big step for auditable AI in California: Newsom signed SB 813, creating infrastructure for credible independent AI verification. Now we need researchers involved in making that verification meaningful - and eventually mandatory.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The #Infomocracy will not be televised, but only because there isn't enough bandwidth for that.
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Citizens' Track on AI @ai.citizens-track.org · 08/09/2026
Who gets to shape the conversation about artificial intelligence? Join the Citizens' Track on AI for a co-design workshop: "Community Assembly Toolkit Co-design: Briefing & workshop" 📅 Monday, Sep 14 (15:00 UTC (16:00 BST / 9:00 Mexico City / 20:30 Delhi)) 📍 Online (Zoom) 🧵 (1/3)
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dan bateyko @dbateyko.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Local law still formally mandates racial segregation. In 2026. We built the largest dataset of local laws and used LLMs to search for discriminatory provisions across the nation. What we found should not still be on the books. hai.stanford.edu/policy/makin...
hai.stanford.edu
Making Local Law Legible: LLM-Assisted Detection of Discrimination | Stanford HAI
This brief demonstrates the potential of LLM-assisted review to accelerate legal reform.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I regret to inform you that someone is doing this again, but they're only paying $50 per 2.5 hour session. condu.it/thought/10k-...
condu.it
How we collected 10,000 hours of neuro-language data in our basement - Conduit
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The combined support from scientific experts + social consensus is the most effective at mobilizing Americans’ actions on environmental, health, and technological challenges—even in cases where powerful actors like governments and companies vocally oppose taking action. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Kavitha Rajagopalan @kxraja.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The Mayor’s office has always diverted government agency advertising to NYC local media. In 2013, CUNY J-school produced groundbreaking research that @90% of this $$ went to traditional media (like NYT) which did not serve or reach most diverse NYer, so city hall then city council 1/
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
100% -- today's politics come from a dream that goes back to the 90s that love + internet = (positive) community. How many more decades will it take to judge this empty cyberutopianism by its outcomes? Excerpts below from great 2019 essay by Fred Turner at: harpers.org/archive/2019...
By the end of the decade, when Reagan hailed the “David of the microchip,” many in Silicon Valley believed they had the tools to create the kind of person-centered democracy that the Committee had envisioned. They would achieve it through open conversation spaces like the WELL, engineered public spheres in which individuals gave voice to their experiences, gathered feedback from their peers, and changed their behavior accordingly. They shared Wiener’s faith in the power of information systems to liberate those who used them, and the Committee’s confidence that, given the chance to express themselves, individuals could create their own social order, without the need for top-down government control. If the mass-media era had brought us Hitler and Stalin, they believed, the internet would bring us back our individuality. Finally, we could do away with hierarchy, bureaucracy, and totalitarianism. Finally, we could just be ourselves, together.Today, that sense of utopian mission persists throughout Silicon Valley. A month after Trump took office, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his social vision in a Facebook post entitled “Building Global Community.” Though only a few thousand words long, the document is every bit as ambitious as Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings. Like Wiener, Zuckerberg envisions a world in which individuals, communities, and nations create an ideal social order through the constant exchange of information—that is, through staying “connected.” “Our greatest opportunities are now global—like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science,” he wrote, sounding much like a representative of the Cold War–era State Department. “In times like these,” he continued, “the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”If the communes of the 1960s teach us anything, they teach us that a community that replaces laws and institutions with a cacophony of individual voices courts bigotry and collapse. Without explicit, democratically adopted rules for distributing resources, the communes allowed unspoken cultural norms to govern their lives. Women were frequently relegated to the most traditional of gender roles; informal racial segregation was common; and charismatic leaders—almost always men—took charge. Even the most well-intentioned communes began to replicate the racial and sexual dynamics that dominated mainstream America. Lois Brand recalled that on the communes they visited, men would do “important stuff” like framing up domes, while she and the other women would put small amounts of bleach in the water to keep residents from getting sick.For all their sophistication, the algorithms that drive Facebook cannot prevent the recrudescence of the racism and sexism that plagued the communes. On the contrary, social-media platforms have helped bring them to life at a global scale. And now those systems are deeply entrenched. Social-media technologies have spawned enormous corporations that make money by mapping and mining the social world. Like the extraction industries of previous centuries, they are highly motivated to expand their territories and bend local elites to their will. Without substantial pressure, they have little incentive to serve a public beyond their shareholders. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter are coming to dominate our public sphere to the same degree that Standard Oil once dominated the petroleum industry. They too should be subject to antitrust laws. We have every right to apply the same standards to social-media companies that we have applied to other extraction industries. We cannot allow them to pollute the lands they mine, or to injure their workers, nearby residents, or those who use their products.
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Rebuild Local News @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
In the latest issue of The Press Advocate... 🏛️ CA’s supermajority passage of AB 2222 🌎 New global evidence linking a free press to community safety and economic resilience ⚖️ The legal fights over ad taxes that could reshape how states fund essential public goods 🔗: mailchi.mp/rebuildlocal...
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Maria Farrell @mariafarrell.eurosky.social · 02/09/2026
in a development that will surprise nobody this piece by @eryk.bsky.social on OpenAI's model being accessed by bad actors from (ok, "escaping") a poorly secured sandbox is excellent.
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Bastian Becker @beckerbastian.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
💡Affective polarization research so far focused on the highly polarized, but the politics of "cool citizens" are just as important for democracy. ➡️ @versteegenluca.bsky.social, @polpsychjoe.bsky.social & @lilymasonphd.bsky.social in @polbehavior.bsky.social #openaccess @scilove.bsky.social
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
That's what I suspected, appreciate the info. Thank you for all your hard work moving this forward, this issue wouldn't have come to my attention without it. 🙌
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If you have time on or before Election Day, you can be a part of the backbone of fair and accessible elections by helping to make them happen! Californians can sign up by submitting a single, simple form at: pollworker.sos.ca.gov. Eligibility criteria at the link or below.
California Poll Worker Application
County elections officials depend on reliable, dedicated teams of poll workers to make every Election Day run smoothly. Poll workers are critical to elections and for a functioning democracy. Sign up today to serve your community!

    A registered California voter
    A legal resident of the United States who would be eligible to vote except for their citizenship status
    An eligible high school student

    Sets up and closes a polling place
    Helps voters understand their rights
    Protects ballots and voting equipment

    Get involved and assist voters
    Contribute to your community
    Earn extra money (amount varies by county)
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Do you know what the final vote count/record was in the Senate? I could be wrong, but it doesn't look like that information has been put online yet. (I'm trying to find more, or just any, context for the Assembly's baffling decision-making.)
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Nothing makes a research trail grow cold faster than finding a fantastic report or study that somehow has NO YEAR and/or NO AUTHOR. 😵‍💫
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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Guys this thread is up to 64. 64 DAGs that look like record covers.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Feeling old while having a flashback to my days setting up honeypots to collect data about botnet attacks…🤖
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Claire E. Robertson, PhD @crobertson500.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Is social media truly making us more politically polarized, or does it simply over-represent our most extreme opinions? In our new preprint, @small-schulz.bsky.social and I present *punishing evidence* that social media systematically overrepresents users’ most extreme political opinions. 1/n
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
With the intersection of democracy, participation and public administration on my mind, a book on all three with a systems-oriented perspective couldn’t come at a better time. Looking forward to diving in! 😁
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
DW wearing glasses while yearning from behind a fence.jpg
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Another new paper on AI-moderated (and AI prompting within) online interviewing academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Typical Voted-No-on-SB79 ("we need to do it the right way and respect our residential neighborhoods") behavior. 😒 larchmontbuzz.com/larchmont-vi...
larchmontbuzz.com
Assemblyman Rick Zbur on SB 79 - Larchmont Buzz - Hancock Park News
We spoke to Assemblyman Rick Zbur about his position on SB 79 bill as he was preparing for the "home stretch" of the legislative session.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
To answer the question: because Bass drops out of debates that aren’t HOA-hosted while her campaign claims ‘it’s time to move past debates’, despite said debates being planned around her schedule. *Still* no apology by @mayor.lacity.gov or offer to @lwv.org to reschedule. lamag.com/news-and-pol...
May 9, 2026 letter from linked article announcing Bass dropping out of debate.
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Björn Lindström @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
When is language needed for human culture to accumulate? When observing successful behavior is not enough to recover the mental model behind it! This is an incredibly ambitious project, involving large-scale experimentation, RL and ABM modeling, and computational language analyses.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Enjoyed discussing policy as futures with @adambecker.bsky.social. Policy is the articulation of desired future states and enables them. We can all design policy.
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Drew Dimmery @ddimmery.com · 13/08/2026
AI evaluation is all the rage these days. I'm excited to be teaching a class on it this Fall; I wrote up how I'm thinking about it: ddimmery.com/posts/ai-eva...
ddimmery.com
AI Evaluations for conviviality – Drew Dimmery
A new class at Hertie on the human use of AI systems
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Sarah Gilbert @sarahagilbert.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
#CSCW2026 attendees we are organizing a workshop on public scholarship, where we'll talk the importance (and risks) of public scholarship in 2026. The application is a short form. More info on our website: sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...
sites.google.com
CSCW Public Scholarship 2026
🎶 Wake up in the morning gotta check that feed Like that study, share that blog, we gotta get up to speed Before we leave, post a vid critiquing the AI stack ‘Cause CSCW researchers, we aint holding ...
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