This is a picture of Belief Space, as measured by the study below.
LLMs delve into online debates to create a detailed map of human beliefs
Jun 2025, phys.org
They used BERT on Debate.org and got the map seen above.
They found that "relative dissonance" significantly influences people's decision-making. When online users encounter new information or beliefs, they tend to choose or accept those that cause them less "discomfort" or are most aligned with their existing beliefs."More importantly, we show that people's belief choices are shaped not just by how close a belief is to their own, but by how much closer the belief is compared to its competing belief. When two opposing beliefs on a certain issue are equally distant, people are just as likely to choose either one. However, when one belief is clearly closer than the other, people are far more likely to choose it.""In other words, people are not only avoiding disagreement, but actively minimizing the difference in disagreement between available options."They would also like to connect their observations with the results of another project carried out at Indiana University, called BRAIN (Belief Resonance and AI Narratives).
via Indiana University: Byunghwee Lee et al, A semantic embedding space based on large language models for modelling human beliefs, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02228-z
https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02228-z [and here's the 2024 arxiv version: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.07237]
Perseus: A tool for tracking the coordination of pump-and-dump crypto coin schemes
Mar 2025, phys.org
Researchers suggest that there are fewer than 500 major players, who they describe as masterminds, working to game the system for profit. These masterminds, the researchers contend, have developed what have come to be known as pump-and-dump schemes, in which they hype a coin to get people to buy and then sell their own coins when they believe the buying has reached a saturation point, walking away with a substantial profit. (They use Telegram as their platform, and "accomplices" as their hypemen.) They found 438 masterminds, who are together responsible for about $3.2 trillion in artificial crypto coin trading.
But the way they say the last part is so cold:
In reading some of the messages sent between users on Telegram, the researchers noted that the ease with which the masterminds were able to carry out their schemes should be of concern to those attempting to make money off crypto coin investing. They also suggest that at some point, some form of regulation is going to be needed to keep the system running, because eventually, those being scammed will catch on and the whole system will collapse.
via University College London: Honglin Fu et al, Perseus: Tracing the Masterminds Behind Cryptocurrency Pump-and-Dump Schemes, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2503.01686
Overconfident conspiracy theorists: Many unaware their beliefs are on the fringe
Jun 2025, phys.org
Man that sounds harsh
"This group of people are really miscalibrated from reality"
via Cornell University: Gordon Pennycook et al, Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2025). DOI: 10.1177/01461672251338358
Octopus maps encourage conspiratorial thinking, research shows
Jun 2025, phys.org
"It's this genre of propaganda map where you try to make your opponent look like they're this big, sinister force that's everywhere and that's trying to control everything. It's up to you what that big sinister force is, but it's usually another country, another ideology, sometimes a religion, sometimes like a company or corporation, sometimes an individual person."
via Northeastern University: Eduardo Puerta et al, The Many Tendrils of the Octopus Map, Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713583
 |
This is another graph taken from the first article in this post, and it shows the polarization of beliefs about God and Abortion. For other less controversial topics, like prostitute or global warming, you can see the two clusters get closer together. |
Study finds Republicans flagged for posting misleading tweets twice as often as Democrats on Community Notes
Jun 2025, phys.org
Not like you didn't know this already but here's a handy metric - it's 2:1
"Even on Elon Musk's X, the user-based Community Notes program flags posts by Republicans as misleading much more often than posts by Democrats. This undercuts the logic offered by Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for eliminating fact-checkers on X and Meta, respectively, namely that fact-checkers are biased against Republicans."Republican users were overrepresented in misinformation sharing on health, with 81% of health-related flagged posts written by Republicans, followed by politics, 73%; science, 68%; other topics, 66%; and the economy, at 63%.(The researchers analyzed a dataset of X's Community Notes focusing specifically on "misinformed or potentially misleading" notes written in English targeting English-language tweets on X sent between January 2023 and June 2024.)
via Oxford Internet Institute: Thomas Renault et al, Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X's Community Notes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502053122
Body illusion helps unlock memories, new study finds
Oct 2025, phys.org
Enfacement illusion - allows people to experience a face they see on a computer screen as their own, as though looking in a mirror.The participants viewed a live video of their own face, digitally altered using an image filter to resemble how they might have looked as children. After the illusion, participants completed an autobiographical memory interview, recalling events from both their childhood and the past year. Participants who viewed the childlike version of their face recalled significantly more episodic childhood memories."Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories."
via Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge: Illusory ownership of one's younger face facilitates access to childhood episodic autobiographical memories, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-17963-6
Over-the-counter painkillers match or surpass opioids for dental surgery in all adults, analysis confirms
Nov 2025, phys.org
As we can see not all facts are equal when there's money on the table - the opium machine was too powerful for too long and distorted the actual science.
And this isn't even news, it's a follow-up:
That first paper, on the collective experience of more than 1,800 trial patients, found that the combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen provided better pain relief than hydrocodone with acetaminophen for the first two days after surgery and greater satisfaction over the post-operative period.The new subgroup analysis, published in JAMA Network Open, demonstrated that the results held for both male and female patients."We wanted to determine whether the pain medication's effects were consistent in males and females separately," said Janine Fredericks Younger, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine and lead author of the analysis."And what we found is that in both subgroups (males and females), the non-opioid was superior for that first day and night, and then no worse than the opioid for the rest of the post-op period."
via Rutgers School of Dental Medicine: Analgesic Differences in Males and Females After Third Molar Surgery A Subgroup Analysis of the OARS Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA Network Open (2025). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.42467
