Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a complex systems scientist with broad interests, but a thread that
connects them all is cultural evolution, the process by which a culture accumulates
design that nobody designed. Beliefs, habits and practices vary, people learn them from
one another, some are learned more often than others, and over time the distribution in
a population shifts toward the variants that fit their environment, which is mostly
other people and what they already believe.
Online, a large share of what people learn from one another now passes through
ranking functions, which are selectors somebody wrote down, with an objective. My
questions are what those selectors are selecting for, and what they ought to select
for.
- Discourse.
- What a ranking function selects for in the quality of political discourse.
- Conflict.
- How a newsroom frames the victims of a war, since it is a selector too, with an objective of its own.
- Belief.
- How the beliefs in a population hold together, since that structure is what any new belief has to fit.
- Democracy.
- The normative question, one for democratic theory rather than for measurement.
- Research.
- Cultural evolution, online and in populations of language models.
- Freelance.
- I take on contract work: measurement design, LLM labelling at scale, recommender and ranking audits, and data engineering on large or messy sources.
- Media.
- I'm happy to hear from journalists. That might be a hand with something computational, or a comment on a story about platforms, recommendation, and online discourse.
- Students.
- I supervise masters students, and BSc students who are motivated. You don't need a project worked out first. Write to me and tell me what interests you.
- Elsewhere.
- Bluesky. GitHub.
- Write to me.
- tim.booker@uni-graz.at. Anyone can write to me, about anything.