Cognitive anthropology / cultural evolution / digital media / cultural analytics. Associate professor sociology @UniTrento - more info in the pinned tweet.
Trento, Italy
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Website: acerbialberto.com
"Cultural evolution in the digital age" (OUP): bit.ly/2McstmR
"Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R" (Routledge): bit.ly/3MQBjT4
Substack (free - in italiano): bit.ly/3lDERMq
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"From multicellularity to cultural evolution, major transitions in life on Earth have been highly social. The next intelligence explosion will be no different."
institute.deepmind.com/essay…
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Thinking about writing an ERC grant on the ideas in the "cultural ecology of social media". Seems promising/original, and with policy implications - of course I am not biased ;-)
But: does it make sense nowadays write a grant application in this area that is *not* about AI?
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Alberto Acerbi retweeted
Every new technology gets called a threat to reason and society. Alberto Acerbi's Technopanic asks: how much of today's digital doom-mongering actually holds up? Spoiler — less than you'd think. acerbialberto.com
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In the past years I often repeated that social learning is overestimated in humans. Now this Science paper claims that "Social learning was five times more frequent than individual learning" in 7,000 observations of wild orangoutangs.
But ->
science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Didn't read Dennett.
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
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Da domani sarò a Torino al XXXI Convegno della Società di Filosofia del Linguaggio dove parteciperò ad una tavola rotonda sul tema: “Allucinazioni: questioni aperte e prospettive a confronto”: mi dicono che la disinformazione c’entra - speriamo! filosofiadellinguaggio.it/ev…
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"I found a field already sinking into a quagmire of epistemological conflict [... ] and drifting in a direction that would make it increasingly difficult to develop theories capable of addressing social and economic problems"
vanderbilt.edu/principles/st…
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"This paper reconceptualizes fashion as a deep-time system of bodily communication rather than a byproduct of modern consumer societies"
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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Alberto Acerbi retweeted
With Claude I did a systematic literature review of misinformation prevalence, exposure, and concentration.
There is a companion website that allows you to play with the data and signal me if an estimate is wrong or missing: altay-research.github.io/mis…
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If you want to know more about "Tehcnopanic", here I am in the Brasilian podcast The Black Box: piped.video/watch?v=AcmLOnNl…
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Reminder: kindle version is only 3,00GBP / 3,50EU / 4,00$ mybook.to/technopanic
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Il 2 ottobre a Lugano!
Siamo davvero troppo creduloni online?
I dati sulla disinformazione raccontano una realtà più complessa di quella suggerita dal tecnopanico.
Il 2/10 @acerbialberto al #Mobius2026.
16:00 · USI Lugano
f.mtr.cool/2kqzwpo6s0
#Disinformazione
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New paper out with @ElianaFattorini. @MassiBucchi, and Enzo Loner:
“Weapon and poison? Framing disinformation in European Commission speeches, 2016–2024”
We analyse how disinformation is framed in 238 speeches by European Commission in the last 10 years.
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The framing matters because they shape policies: platform regulation, detection and takedown, and media-literacy “vaccines”. While these measures may be useful...
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we argue for a broader approach that also considers institutional accountability, media pluralism, and citizens’ participation and trust.
Free link: tandfonline.com/eprint/HF5RT…
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