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Nathan Gabriel

@nathan-gabriel.bsky.social

41 followers 27 following 3 posts

Postdoc at UC Merced PhD from UC Irvine Logic and Philosophy of Science nathanlgabriel.github.io

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Reposted by Nathan Gabriel

Cailin O’Connor @cailinmeister.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Looks like @lastpositivist.bsky.social @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social @nathan-gabriel.bsky.social and I wrote one of the 10 best papers in philosophy last year! We actually wrote it, like, 5 years before, and forgot to submit the final version to Ergo for years. Kismet!

A screenshot of the Philosopher's Annual email that our paper "On the Stability of Racial Capitalism" is included this year

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Reposted by Nathan Gabriel

Ian Fraser @ianfraser.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Black Cambridge professor Jason Arday endured 249 times more media coverage over an *accusation* of plagiarism than did the White Cambridge professor William O'Reilly on being *found guilty* of plagiarism. And the accusation came from a “known racist propagandist”. @ibramxk.bsky.social

theemancipator.org

The Media Lynched Jason Arday

The death Friday of Jason Arday, a 41-year-old Black scholar who resigned from the University of Cambridge after waves of attacks over the last few weeks, hits close to home. His death left me so deva...

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Reposted by Nathan Gabriel

Alejandro Pérez Velilla @apvelilla.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Out now in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Thank you to all peers and colleagues who provided invaluable feedback during the process!

pnas.org

A demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning | PNAS

We develop a demographic theory of similarity-biased social learning that formalizes our understanding of when and why individuals should preferent...

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Reposted by Nathan Gabriel

Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

I really like this paper I did with @nathan-gabriel.bsky.social and @avbell.bsky.social, now out in EHS. It's an unusual paper because we tried to model the emergence of complex, multidimensional and intersectional identity structures from a signaling perspective. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The evolution of identity signals for co-ordination in diverse societies
Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modelling identity signalling and co-ordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a co-ordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to co-ordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signalling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviours that those identities function to afford.

Figure 1.
(a) Ancient Sumerian cities used throughout the paper as a motivating example. (b) Diagram of relationships between the different Mesopotamian identities along with shapes used to represent each of them throughout the paper.

Figure 11.
Proportion of simulations that resulted in (a) the intersectional structure, optimal when 𝛼 =2, or (b) either of the two mere conjunction structures, optimal when 𝛼 =0. The trio of stick figures at the top represent the optimal strategy profiles used by non-Kishus in all cases.

Acknowledgements
We thank the members of the MODSOC lab at UC Merced for helpful comments. We are grateful to the NSF for funding foundational research on social identity, inequality, and intersectionality.

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Nathan Gabriel @nathan-gabriel.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Been thinking a lot about Lynn Conway. A DARPA-funded trans woman who helped revolutionize semiconductors. Around the same time, the Soviet Union was firing computer scientists for being Jewish. I believe in onshoring some semiconductor production. I also believe we succeed by embracing diversity.

Wikipedia screenshot: The Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution, or Mead and Conway revolution, was a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design revolution starting in 1978 which resulted in a worldwide restructuring of academic materials in computer science and electrical engineering education, and was paramount for the development of industries based on the application of microelectronics.

A prominent factor in promoting this design revolution throughout industry was the DARPA-funded VLSI Project instigated by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway which spurred development of electronic design automation.

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