Opening up the echo chamber: Perspective taking in social science education

The Echo Chamber: Strategic Voting and Homophily in Social Networks

We propose a model where voters are embedded in a social network. Each voter observes the ballots of her neighbors in the network, from which she infers the likely outcome of the election. Each voter may then revise her vote strategically, to maximize her expected utility. Our work focuses on plurality voting, where strategic voting is a major concern. We show that in practice, strategization i...

Opening Up Education Opening Up Education The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge

Phase transition of social learning collectives and the echo chamber.

We study a simple model for social learning agents in a restless multiarmed bandit. There are N agents, and the bandit has M good arms that change to bad with the probability q_{c}/N. If the agents do not know a good arm, they look for it by a random search (with the success probability q_{I}) or copy the information of other agents' good arms (with the success probability q_{O}) with probabili...

The Bayesian Echo Chamber: Modeling Social Influence via Linguistic Accommodation

We present the Bayesian Echo Chamber, a new Bayesian generative model for social interaction data. By modeling the evolution of people’s language usage over time, this model discovers latent influence relationships between them. Unlike previous work on inferring influence, which has primarily focused on simple temporal dynamics evidenced via turn-taking behavior, our model captures more nuanced...

Open The Echo Chamber

So, climate change and conflict is back in the media, seemingly with the strength of science behind it. I’ve been a rather direct, harsh critic of some work on this connection before, at least in part because I am deeply concerned that work on this subject (which remains preliminary) might disproportionately influence policy decisions in unproductive or even problematic directions (i.e. by cont...