Apply now to our next Summer School! 🤝 We are glad to host the Toulouse Summer School in Quantitative Social Sciences from 26 May to 19 June 2026 — a great opportunity for PhD students in economics, political science, and other social sciences. Application: www.tse-fr.eu/toulouse-sum...

Semesters are too damn long

Academic tip: sometimes you have to write "Importantly," to get a sentence started and then you can go back and delete it.

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

Here is another way to put the paradox. If you ask, "If I had different genes, would my personality be different?" Then the answer is, "Probably, yes." If you ask, "If I had THESE genes, what would my personality be like?", the answer is, "We don't have any idea."

Term has started here, so I'm once again inundated with emails addressed "Sir" (used in UK secondary schools), "Mr" (same), and "heyyyyy" (??). Seems this brief blog for new students is still relevant: www.dalmaijer.org/2022/03/how-... Feel free to use, if you find yourself in the same position!

Good point. Academia's love affair with journal status, which is at the root of its reluctance to embrace open access alternatives to the for-profit journals, facilitates the spread of misinformation. Hard for truth to get its boots on when the boots are locked behind a paywall.

The number of people who will respond to "Ask me for a copy" is a tiny fraction of those who would love to click on a non-paywalled link. Don't make people ask. SocArXiv is free to share, free to read, non-profit, academy-owned at a public university. Hello! Thanks for sharing.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

@sociologicalsci.bsky.social is an awesome journal. Nothing less. #sociology

Religiosity & gender attitudes go hand-in-hand. But which influences which? New study by McElroy et al. shows earlier gender views tend to predict religious trajectories more than the reverse (except for young women). Once again: Cultural/political conflicts --> Religion doi.org/10.1177/2378...

Friends don't let friends give preregistration a bad name. Exploratory findings are fine; you just have to label them!

We're hiring in wonderful Copenhagen 🇩🇰 Two or more open rank sociology professorships (tt assistant, associate with tenure, or full prof with tenure). You'll join a leading sociology department in Europe with many core fields represented! #sociology More 👇 jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

This is a paper I really care about. I feel the core message is very important for social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular. "Quantitative Research in Political Science is Greatly Underpowered." (with A+ co-authors)

JOB ALERT FOR #SOCIOLOGIST: Come work with me. We have FOUR Assistant Professor positions in the Sociology Department at the University of Calgary. careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1672106...

Come work with us at USC! We're hiring an NSF-funded Postdoc for the Everyday Respect Project. 🤖 You'll work directly with me, Ben Graham, and Shri Narayanan, using cutting-edge AI to analyze police body-worn camera footage to improve police-community relations.

TWO new Assistant Professor positions in Sociology at USC! Seeking candidates with expertise in the following: 1) Institutions & Inequalities and 2) Socially Informed AI and/or Data Science (links to job ads below👇). Happy to talk about what it's like to work/live here! #sociology (1/3)

Our #Sociology department is looking for an #AssistantProfessor in the field of Social Inequality (with the possibility for a permanent contract). www.academictransfer.com/en/jobs/3546... @sociologytiu.bsky.social @tilburg-university.bsky.social @academic-chatter.bsky.social #academicjobs

Join "Multilevel and Mixed Models Using R" with @stephenvaisey.com on Oct. 8-10 for an intensive intro to multilevel models. Learn the (real) difference between fixed & random effects and how to combine the strengths of both into a single model using #Rstats.

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

A terrorist targeted federal workers last week. There wasn’t much reporting on it. But I’m not finished thinking about it! 🧵 An anti-vaxxer fired more than 500 gunshots into CDC Atlanta, shattering 150 “blast-proof” windows on 6 buildings. Employees were pinned down in terror.

This is an incredible data source!

Worth saying that most of my papers have been collaborations with folks from my grad program. Of course, I am extraordinarily lucky to have been surrounded by them. But this ability to foster collaboration is, above all else, the mark of a successful grad program.

Finally out from @acastroaraujo.bsky.social and @nicolasrestrepo.bsky.social

The full release of the ANES 2024 Time Series #Data is now available. More details here: electionstudies.org/anes-announc...

Stony Brook is hiring in political psychology (assistant professor). Please Share! Feel free to reach out if you have question. For more information: apply.interfolio.com/170193

research papers now too often (a) collect highly complex data, (b) engage in heavy-handed pre-processing to measure constructs, and (c) pile on multiple layers of statistical estimation. as a rule of thumb, I think a paper is much clearer when at most one of these is likely to raise eyebrows imho.

This is the world I hope we're getting: One where 1) progress is loosely sigmoid, not because there's any fixed cap, but because the initial overhang of human training data has been exploited, and 2) open models can come close to catching up, because of #1.

new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.

🧵1/ 🚨 New article out! How robust is the psychology of social class? Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries. Published in Nature Human Behaviour: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My frustration at the absurd missed connection between the compassionate great quant scientists on my inbox looking for jobs and the software teams looking for help with data cannot be put into words and it's dangerously close to making me want to do the thing I swear I won't do (work on hiring)

"My First R Package" Next week I’ll be giving a hands-on workshop on #RStats We'll start from scratch and build our very own 📦 Re-use go-to functions, boost reproducibility, and share code with colleagues. I always a blast teaching this and am excited to meet the new group! tinyurl.com/mv2hrd8n

Today, the University of Minnesota announced via a very chipper email that Google’s AI “will now be available to students, faculty, and staff.” I have thoughts! 🧵

Learn how to analyze panel data with @stephenvaisey.com. "Longitudinal Data Analysis Using #Rstats" will be taught on Aug. 5-8. We will cover mixed models, fixed-effects models, between-within models, and dynamic panel models.

Causal evidence that "the proliferation of surveys may lead to lower response rates" doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Two things can be true: -Universities can and should do more to counter groupthink and conformism, which can undermine their teaching and research missions -No one in higher education should make common cause with the authoritarian attack on academic freedom in the U.S.

As I am going over old blog posts, here is a nice blog by @bwroberts.bsky.social on qualities in graduate students that, in his opinion, lead to a successful career in academia. Still very good advice. pigee.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/a...

Version 0.5.0 of #Rstats {fwb} is out! {fwb} implements the fractional weighted bootstrap (aka Bayesian bootstrap), which involves repeatedly sampling sets of weights and computing the quantity of interest in each weighted sample. It contains drop-ins for boot::boot() and sandwich::vcovBS().

I got an exciting box in the mail today! Looks like The Effect: Second Edition is live! I've updated the website as well, so you can check out the changes and the new Partial Identification chapter (+ a new mini-chapter on finding material in the book) at theeffectbook.net

If you are a quantitative sociologist graduating soon, you should check this out!

If I had to hazard a guess, the academic market this year will be very strange because the big hit will come at the wealthiest/most elite institutions as they absorbed so much grant funding. LACs and smaller R1s might still be able to hire at expected rates. Opposite of the usual downturn pattern.

Randomly obsessed with simultaneous (uniform) inference. Feel free to ask about it. A mini thread on this follows. 🧵 Recommended reading: #statssky #econsky #episky

This July 4 I am reading this remarkable book detailing the impoverished and Orwellian language of the Nazi era, written by a German-Jewish philologist who lived through it. Unsurprising echoes to present-day USA. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2...

Yale Philosophy offers a course on “Formal Philosophical Methods” — a broad introduction to probability, logic, formal semantics, etc. Instructor Calum McNamara has now made all materials for the course (78 pages) freely available static1.squarespace.com/static/6255f...