The best analogy to responses to AI I've seen is the Ameglian Major Cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: an animal bred to want to be eaten. It succinctly summarizes my general opposition: I neither want to be eaten nor will support a system that encourages others to want to be eaten.

I don't think that we'd make great pets, actually.

Happy to see that this is now out. The R package associated with the project, IRTM, can now be found on CRAN. Or can you still download it from my github. We'll continue to update it over time. This is a brief thread about what IRTM can do. 🧵 (1/7)

From our new issue: "Measurement That Matches Theory: Theory-Driven Identification in Item Response Theory Models" by Marco Morucci, Margaret Foster, Kaitlyn Webster, So Jin Lee, and David Siegel. #APSRNewIssue www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

if you want a break from the election, we've posted a revision of our paper on pundits and ideological coalitions. bigger emphasis in this draft on the point that political ideologies aren't quite the same thing as political philosophies osf.io/xfy8r

I said this in my first-year grad research methods class, but it bears repeating. There are people who will tell you that you are not smart enough to understand something. Those people either don't understand the nature of intelligence, don't have your best interests at heart, or both. Ignore them.

Just accepted at JOP w/ Daniel Naftel @kshoub.bsky.social, @jarededgerton.bsky.social, Mallory Wagner, and Skyler Cranmer. We find that patterns of gender inequality observed in formal deliberative settings extend to informal televised political discussions. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

I’m pleased to announce to #polisky our forthcoming APSR article, “Measurement that Matches Theory.” In it, we introduce a Bayesian IRT framework that allows users to identify latent dimensions with substantive theoretical meaning. The paper is open access for now here: tinyurl.com/48ktz5jc. (1/8)🧵

In case you don't want to watch the debate, but do want to think about elections, you can head over to journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... and check out our new paper on campaign spending (#polisky). We estimate the effects of money at the levels of both the individual campaign and the whole Congress.

New paper in Nature looking at the direct *and spillover* effects of Twitter deplatforming ~70k accounts following January 6th: - less misinfo for remaining users who had followed deplatformed users to circulate - some remaining users voluntarily exited www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Since the book's on sale ($25 at press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...) it's a good time to mention to #polisky that I have an online math course at daveasiegel.com/teaching/math-course. It's got 30+ hours of video content, plus practice problems and a sample syllabus.

The Behavioral Models of Politics Conference will be held at the University of Pittsburgh: 5/24-25/24, bringing together scholars to share research about analytical models of “behavioral” concepts in politics. Deadline: 3/1! Apply here: t.ly/eYPpM Conference site:  sites.google.com/view/bmpconf...

For polisky or related fields: If you're looking for an alternative to the two week "math camp" with which many social science programs start, I put together an online, work-at-your-own-pace-over-the-summer version here: daveasiegel.com/teaching/math-course. Happy to answer questions about it.

It really is. Thank you for writing this, @economeager.bsky.social !