It seems like an expression of privilege, naivete, or inhumanity to say that COVID mitigation was not worth it. Lockdowns have consequences and implementation sucked. I'm teaching that generation now. But also - more than 1 million Americans died.

Designing survey recruitment materials right now and I feel like a walking/talking "Graphic Design Is My Passion" meme...

Ahem. Political science is the *best* science. In all seriousness: Political scientists use the scientific method. And it's not like the political world is mystical/made-up. Assuming a closed physical universe, human behavior has some explanation - it's just hard to identify.* *In all senses

I just learned that Cornell Govt grad students will lead a jeopardy game, featuring faculty trivia, at the end-of-semester party. Learning this is how I also learned that Yale Poli Sci was probably unusual for having a student-written skit full-on *roasting* faculty at the department party...

Cool post! IMO the point recalls the effects-of-causes/ causes-of-effects debate. E.g., some real-world RCTs do not aim to test a scalable intervention, but instead to test a theorized causal relationship. These studies are causal, but they seem distinct from the credibility revolution idea.

This is an absolute crisis time for quantitative research on opinion and pol behavior. If online survey pools are wrecked, the big surveys like the ANES are losing NSF funding, and the quality/availability of administrative datasets is falling off... well, that's a lot of the field.

@maxkagan.bsky.social I just dug into the politicsatwork.org site and it's so cool! Political scientists have been letting sociologists dominate workplace research for far too long...

I struggle to understand people who hoard power just to refuse to ever use it.

I am pleased to fail to reject the null.

Just realized, while prepping slides for tomorrow, that at least 80% of this observational causal inference course is me pointing at a graph and going "This... is bad."

My parents recently got a kitten (very exciting!) Each of them is spelling the kitten's name a different way. The kitten has been home for 2 weeks and I am *so curious* to see whose spelling wins.

@dfroomkin.bsky.social Is your book in need of an epigraph?

This is such a weird side effect of de-stigmatizing federal benefits. We want to normalize folks using an EBT card to access CalFresh. But we kind of need folks to be policy demanders for their welfare programs.

The fact that Medicaid expansion is The No. 1 Diff-in-Diff really blinded me to how little attention Medicaid expansion actually gets.

One of my students who went home for fall break brought back local candies for me as a present. I'm staunchly opposed to clientelism but also 🥹🥹🥹

The real reason we can't shrink PhD cohorts. Gotta keep the husbands of doctors/lawyers/executives/etc. busy somehow.

I would be all about a grout robot. But to this day, my parents like to lecture about how something is lost when we don't do our own cleaning & driveway repairs (big Midwest energy!) And I think that's why AI skepticism is rare. Different people want to eliminate different kinds of labor.

I wonder if these types of labels serve as an information treatment for Americans. In general, economic voting does not depend on accurate blame attributions - just people taking out grumpiness on incumbents. But does anything change if Trump voters connect higher prices to tariffs?

Just dug up this banger of a @mattblackwell.bsky.social post to use in my instrumental variables slides. Pumped to be teaching the next generation about choosing estimands based on identification assumptions. 😂🙏

Okay, follow-up on the students' first grades of the semester. On the one hand: *So many* Calendly sign-ups. On the other hand: it feels like a huge teaching win that one of my students told me this morning that they were disappointed in their grade, but also understood it based on my comments.

I was skeptical of Vancouver APSA. But I just posted my first grades of the semester from JFK and maybe another country is the right place to be headed after giving some folks what could be their first-ever sub-A grades.

There is, unfortunately, a precedent of sorts. Trump sent in the National Guard to D.C. after Edward "Big Balls" Coristine was assaulted by some teenagers

Very, very bad stuff coming from leading right-wingers

I have yet to find a way to incorporate the bear-skinning episode into my observational causal inference course, but I have until Monday.

For my political behavior writing seminar, I assigned a "pastiche op-ed," where the students have to use current events as the hook for an opinion column... I'm making them all use the bear. I look forward to reading a lot of op-eds about hunting regulation written in the voice of Maureen Down.

John Oliver: "While get the appeal of thinking just one more concession, one more payoff might safeguard your independence or let you live to fight another day, it's worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that the thing you're supposed to be defending is gone."

I am a HUGE pre-registration booster. But IMO this is the biggest problem with pre-reg (especially pre-reg without analysis plans): It's hackable if people pre-reg anything and everything. Like I've heard people *brag* about having the foresight to pre-register a lot of hypotheses. Don't do that!

The bartender at the JAWS happy hour last MPSA tried to convince me to order Malort. And I kind of wimped out. But now I'm curious!

I refuse to give em dashes to the AI

An art historian friend is a member of the grad union at Cornell. He recently told me I'm management now. I will never recover from this. Anyhow Happy Labor Day!

My father has emailed me to ask whether my sister told me that Taylor Swift is engaged. Huge day in the life of our family.

I have a friend in Dutch politics. He keeps saying stuff like "Can't you just build a coalition from the center to resist?" or "What about lawsuits?" I respect the panic in Europe about Putin & the Baltic states. But @aphclarkson.bsky.social seems right: folks are missing the scale of the crisis.

🚨 Updated working paper! Ekin Dursun and I ask what instruments best manipulate emotions on surveys (osf.io/56h4g). We find that vignettes really work! They have large effects on emotions of interest & smaller effects on emotions *not* of interest. But as always, it's complicated.👇 (1/17)

I have received a cold-email from an undergrad wanting to apply to be my PhD student. How trippy! So much hidden curriculum stuff here about poli sci not doing the lab model and new APs not taking students... But it feels wild that I was in the potential applicant position just 6 years ago!

An academic I know once said - about a debate over political violence - that it was so obvious which side was right, no one could think otherwise. I never figured out which side he meant! Anyhow, half my feed is "Obviously Obergefell is gone" and the other half is "Obviously Obergefell is safe."

AI companies have to be complicit in these misconceptions about chatbots, right? Like the Container Store wardrobe I assembled last night came with more prominently displayed directions for use.

knowing yourself is half the battle in this world. if you are currently an academic, no, you would not have a quirky job. academia is the quirkiest job most academics can handle.

Every single class of elite societal institutions has done this. The corporations. The law firms. The universities. The banks. The television networks. The Papers of Record. The professional sports leagues. On and on. It's been a full-scale national shanda of epic proportions.

Dear Ithaca NY, I thought I was an okay runner. But I did not know your game. Just some cute path and then BOOM 15% GRADE. I have been suitably chastened. Respectfully, Amanda

Well when you put it like that... Crazy that more academics aren't going into politics!

New metaphor for the relationship between nonparametric and parametric statistics just dropped @lauretig.bsky.social

The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God. Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well. forward.com/opinion/7575...

Lastly, is @amandaweiss.bsky.social‬’s "How Much Should We Trust Modern Difference-in-Differences Estimates?" examines DID designs where treatment is applied in US states (n =50). She shows that all DID methods are underpowered in this important context. osf.io/preprints/os...

Polmeth @ Emory this past week was so great (research thread to follow) - but the real highlight of the trip may have been the horse parked on the sidewalk in downtown Atlanta.

Okay there are exceptions: Nick "I throw away perfectly good chocolate candies" Adams claims to do some of the labors of hotness for himself. But maybe that's why his career ceiling is an ambassadorship.

I definitely agree re: unique class dimension to Trumpian aesthetics. But fascist regimes have long outsourced the labor of being hot to women. Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring were no untermenschen. Eva Braun, Magda Goebbels, and Emmy Göring were the ones keeping up Aryan beauty standards.

I'm sorry, not the point - but what are female M&Ms?

New working paper! - zikai.li and I look at the problem of assessing pre-trends using one of the "new" DiD methods - fixed effects regression imputation. tl;dr - don't use the same regression you used to impute post-treatment to also impute pre-treatment. osf.io/preprints/so... (1/14)