Me, once a post gets >100 RTs

Jim Wampler announced this morning that we lost Tim Kask, who passed in his sleep on the 30th. Tim was the creator of The Dragon, which set the foundation for what an industry-focused magazine should be. He was an icon and one of the few early founders of TSR still with us.

External reviewer letter for Charles Xavier open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

How awful. This is outright health disinformation, lying to the American people. Not only is there massive evidence showing no link between vaccines & autism, there’s not even a plausible mechanism based on what we’ve learned about the genetics of autism, some environmental exposures in pregnancy

Student thesis advising

In my view, the primary determinant of whether something should be cited is whether it is relevant and true, not who authored it. Plus, how can authors know what the attributes of other authors are, anyway? The below policy does not, in my view, enhance the credibility of the scientific enterprise.

When I see a news story about someone who embezzled a bunch of money, half my anger is that they blew it on douchey luxury brands rather than putting it in an index fund.

I thought, "Really? 58% seems like a high acceptance rate for POQ." Then I realized Google's AI was substituting the acceptance rate for Public Library Quarterly (a Taylor & Francis journal) in response to my query about Public Opinion Quarterly (an Oxford journal).

"It would be nice to have high speed rail" does not logically imply "California is capable of building high speed rail within a reasonable multiple of its budget or that actually goes from LA to SF rather than between a few podunk towns in the San Joaquin Valley"

After all these reports of authors adding language instructions for LLM reviews in their papers I wanted to check this myself and I downloaded the .tex source from one of these papers. Here is an example. (I will not share the identity of the paper)

I keep seeing a Waymo with hideous corporate Memphis vinyl wrap and it has me all retvrn to the tradition of LIDAR artificial intelligence robot taxis having just plain white paint jobs

"It’s probably not a complete coincidence that the people who think you get airplanes by doing a dance for the god who invented airplanes didn't have airplanes." open.substack.com/pub/thepsmit...

We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had NIH. We had indirects. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, churned out regressions and made low six figures. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to say "Latinx."

I'm giving the 2025 Baron de Lancey Lecture at Cambridge: 'Repugnant transactions and taboo trades'. Come in person or by zoom! It's free but you need to register www.law.cam.ac.uk/press/events...

"Even if you think this was a move in the right moral direction, it was dangerous behavior. By presenting their expertise as part of a political fight, academics were not only squandering their credibility. They were asking to be treated like adversaries." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

I feel like the main reason rationalist Helter Skelter hasn't gotten more press is it's simply confusing. Zizian ideology makes hiding out in a hole in the desert while the race war you started plays out sound like an episode of Law and Order.

this is correct. and i kept saying this over and over over that this irrational reaction was going happen from about 2015 onward when normal liberal researchers turned a blind eye to radical activists becoming the face of their institutions and underming its credibility sometimes lemmings drown

You forget how quality of life-improving modern password managers are until you try to log in to Manuscript Central and their system of giving each journal a URL directory, not a URL hostname, sends you into password reset hell.

It's like a lame duck president gave sovereign citizen advice for tax season

Of course. But not much that changes the basic (Hayek 1945) intuition that neither you, nor I nor the government of CA has any idea who has a spare bedroom that she might decide to rent if the price is right. But certainly many want to hear they must interfere with adjustment.

The elasticity is always higher than we think. People will come up with all sorts of solutions if the price is right--we do not know which ones. If you fix it, they will stay out. These first order adjustments are enormous by comparison with the kind of mechanisms in the paper.

"Often, advocates of strong-handed moderation don't seem to know what hit them; ironically, that bewilderment arises from their own entrapment in a filter bubble." open.substack.com/pub/joshbarr...

Good joke from Kieran but the replies mostly assume Burgess is too dumb/privileged/partisan/whatever to recognize a bunch of angles he does in fact address in his smart and temperate talk. He has posted the full text + slides if you're interested. open.substack.com/pub/guidedci...

NYU Abu Dhabi has a search for a professor (any rank) of computational social science May be of interest to you/your students. Please share and repost! apply.interfolio.com/160603

Have you seen this data analysis procedure before? Fit a multilevel / random effects model to experimental, within-subjects data. Then extract the resulting intercepts and slopes and use basic t-tests (or similar) to compare these between conditions. Is there some justification for this?

"Abundance of caution" is an idiom used by leaders of organizations that means "this action is irrational on a technical basis but it is rational for us to take it so as to avoid griping from the substantial constituency of our organization with anxiety disorders"

on (2): most credible paper i know of (and an exemplar for how to do synthetic-control on large-scale data) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Virginia Postrel (from 2019) on the best approaches to control and contain California wildfires

Two things that are true: 1. Anthropogenic climate change is real 2. California's fire problem has more to do with forest management, including things like environmentalists suing to stop controlled burns, than it does with climate change

If I go to Snopes or Politifact to verify something, that's "more speech," but the problem comes when fact checkers are used to guide content moderation (often under political pressure to do so). The entire misinformation industrial complex was an artillery spotter model of censorship.

Thread on purposes served by academia and like institutions.

How much effort I would devote to evaluating other people's work

DC 16 WIS or develop a gambling addiction icv2.com/articles/new...

I’d be so good at being a central planner. can of beets? $0.02. television set? $14.73. candles? $111,000. laptop? $98.95. there would be shortages and gluts from Moscow to Minsk and I’d sleep like a baby.

Want to add a few questions to the General Social Survey? The 2026 module competition is open now! gss.norc.org/content/dam/...

Bad data visualization hall of fame

"Canons, Colleges, and Consecrations" with @mayrl.bsky.social is inching along. Behold: automated collection, parsing, and matching of acknowledgments from seven ASA sections, covering award-winning publications (and a few comparators) spanning 1979-present! Fine-tuning still, but looks face-valid!

Stop presenter on their first slide.

I guess Nosferatu was well done on like a technical level but would have enjoyed it more if anything in my recent experience as an American let me empathize with what it's like to live amidst plague and hysteria.

People always compare California and Texas, but I think California and Florida is the salient comparison. Florida is a bizarro-world California that imports—rather than exports—working- and middle-class people.

A huge part of why nothing works open.substack.com/pub/adamunik...

Starting up #Hexcrawl25 TTRPG worldbuilding project in 2025! #Dungeon23 vibes but hexier 😎 Build a campaign setting from the ground up with ur own art and words (and maybe some markers and dice)! Read about it here: maatlockstavern.com/hexcrawl25 or just check out this handy schematic.