This paper is important to read.

The tone of the introduction is a bit preachy and the findings as stated are underwhelming and beyond obvious [1].

But when reading this type of papers -- and academic literature in general -- don't consider the application and research questions that were chosen by an academic and/or young graduate student with minimal resources. Look at the actual innovation. In this case, the methods. Then ask what else you can do with the increment of innovation.

It is now possible to methodologically analyze rhetorical patterns in open source communications on a shoestring budget. Because producers are also consumers, you can begin to understand at a very granular level which sequences of words elicit the desired effect in subsets of a population, and how. Work like this used to be laborious, expensive, and required a huge amount of socio-cultural training/expertise/judgement. By comparison, all of the technical work described in the paper has a relatively low barrier to entry.

Also: the obvious next step is to treat this as an optimization problem instead of a categorization problem.

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[1] "othering intensifies during crises" is framed as a finding in this paper, but that's like using nukes to fish for trout. It's a fact we already know and have known for thousands of years. Therefore, the fact that the method reached this conclusion is best understood as validating a proposed method for automating intelligence collection and analysis in the context of open source war propaganda.

My (cynic) take: using LLMs to police speech, down to the minutest nuance.

There are bad things that we humans say and do. But let's stop using AIs to do our police work. Nothing good lies down that path.

It’s kind of bizarre that I went into this article searching for evidence that Russia is worse (whatever that means) then was dissapointed when I didn’t find it.

Very cool research topic, doing language analytics on telegram channels is a pretty interesting case study for modern war propaganda.

That being said, I think the theoretical framework presented here is flawed. Many political scholars would say that the definition of politics is the process of defining ingroups and outgroups. Fundamental to understanding political group dynamics is analyzing power, which a major component is the capacity for violence. This research provides a "Model of Othering" which, when properly understood, is really just synonym for political rhetoric. There are a lot of subtle moral presuppositions being made throughout this research that doesn't seem appropriate for a serious scholarly analysis.

This might also be getting a bit too far off topic, but it also strikes me as fairly tone def to be publishing research comparing Russian war rhetoric to Nazi Germany when politicians from both of America's own political parties are currently calling Iran a "terrorist country".

I’d like to point something out. When we look back at the racism of Americans against the Japanese during WW2, that racism was in the context of barbaric and horrific Japanese atrocities, particularly in China, but throughout the area of their conquest.

Japanese soldiers murdered civilians and raped women. They took “comfort women”. They murdered POWs. They didn’t observe the rules of warfare. They (by mistaken timing) attacked the U.S. before declaring war in what was perceived as a “sneak attack”.

The scale of the war crimes perpetrated by Japanese soldiers no doubt fed the desire to other them - to portray them in the most disgustingly racist ways.

I think it’s important to remember that context.

Unfortunately, the racism continued for a long time after the war.

Can't wait for a similar paper on Othering in American politics.

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