Can anyone tell me what “social science foo” is? Some kind of workshop? Anyone have experience? DM or reply 🙏

Shana tova 🍎 🍯

I’m really excited about this project. We’re carefully using and validating LLMs to code many features of academic articles. We’re going to scan basically all of political science, and at APSA we’re going to show preliminary results in 6 top journals.

Come see our work on using LLMs to track political science research methods at APSA at 4pm today! We find the latest LLMs beat graduate student RAs at extracting information from academic papers

Is Your Model Hot or Not? Come find out at the Reliable Political Science panel with open science/metascience papers by @jjvincent.bsky.social @ryancbriggs.net @jjhfahey.bsky.social and others. @yusakuhoriuchi.bsky.social and I are discussing. Saturday 4 pm East Meeting Rm. #17 #apsa2025

LLMs aren't bad at categorizing things, you're bad at describing your categories

As late as 1986 infants in the US underwent surgery without anesthetic bc doctors thought they couldn't feel pain. They received only muscle relaxants (to stop them from moving). The past is a strange & horrifying place, & future people will probably feel similarly. www.newsweek.com/when-doctors...

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)

The pretty draft is now online. Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.... Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

Darkly funny how a strong emphasis on unbiasedness via the credibility revolution plausibly ended up making the published literature more biased.

Wild how economists and political scientists worry so much about unbiased tests **in their papers** and yet basically ignore how their journals filter on significance. Given our noisy tests, the latter creates huge bias away from zero.

Eggnog is just a kind of flip, which is a nice thing to realize because then you can riff on it very easily. This is an “Estonian eggnog,” where I added Vana Tallin to the base. 👌

Hearing your toddler joyfully attempt to say spaghetti is a top 5 human experience. How is the TFR not higher?!

Going to EA events is weird

This is wild. Kudos to Sophie for her tenacity.

okay team! what software/programs are we using for research lab management? Trello? Basecamp? Asana? Looking to manage multiple projects w/ many RAs and lots of ongoing tasks better than my tiny brain can do on its own

Tried the wild blackberry simple syrup in blackberry metropolitans (split base brandy and benedictine, orange bitters). It has such a beautiful colour

Making Japanese curry for the first time and I had no idea you could make and then store a roux. Amazing.

If the average power of a test in a discipline is ~20% and 1% of published results are nulls, then there is almost no plausible way to work out the math so you don’t see absolutely *enormous* amounts of selection on significance. Sig results are always over like 100x favoured

Oh hey I crossed 3 million metres rowed

I get why it works like this, but no inline code in your quarto YAML makes me sad

It's very human to only double check that a process is working when you get a weird result. It's also very bad practice, because sometimes your "right" result is due to a bad process and you will be misled. Social scientists (economists) do this kind of asymmetric checking. arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20069

Okay that’s enough tradwife content for a while

Putting the wild blackberry + thyme syrup to good use (gin)

2 year old is now running around in a hand sewn dress + crown. We could run the table on these tradwives

I could do such good tradwife content

In a few months I'll be sending out a survey to about 3000 development studies profs around the world. If anyone is interested in chatting about possibly tacking on a question (maybe a prediction about an empirical result you're working on), I'd be happy to talk. DM me.

The Rational Reminder podcast did an interview with the CEO of GiveWell and it was predictably nerdy and interesting and level-headed. rationalreminder.ca/podcast/372

The best doughnuts in the world come from a farmers market in Combermere, Ontario. This might seem surprising, but this is only one town over from where Beavertails were invented and the area has a deep Polish fried dough heritage.

Just got asked to review what looks like a really nice paper on statistical power in some common research designs. It's careful and very clear. It will take time, but the discipline is going to improve on this point.

Too on-the-nose, universe. Too on-the-nose.

😯 I recently came across a sobering paper on here: among 16,649 hypothesis tests reported in political science, the median test has only about 10% power to detect the consensus effect size reported in the literature. Fewer than one in ten tests reach the conventional 80% power threshold.

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

The 2 year old just looked outside and exclaimed “my rock is growing so fast!” and then the 9 year old whispered to me “I swap it out for a larger rock when she isn’t looking.”

Toronto people: it’s blueberry bun season at Harbord bakery!

I find that I don’t retain content from podcasts so well, but I do retain language and concepts. This is probably because the content changes but the language and concepts often stay the same. For example, from Money Stuff I learned more of the vocabulary of finance.

There have been a number of recent articles on statistical power in quantitative political science. This is something that I think deserves more attention and discussion. A short thread of the articles I have read. 🧵

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on. Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts. 1/

Nice to see a null in the ASR

What is even going on here? (complimentary)

httr2 1.2.0 out now: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/07... #rstats

My kids have been in Singapore too long. Now when they tattle on each other they say the other kid should be fined.

I should be stir frying romain lettuce more

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

Singapore day 1 observations: * I was in and around joo chiat, where we’re doing a home exchange * Prior to coming here, people told me traffic will be crazy and drivers would be aggressive, but they’re not. Maybe helpful context is that I lived in Cairo before so my tolerance here is pretty high.

Modern LLMs while travelling feels almost as useful as the jump to smartphones and apps from none. Just wild how useful it is to have a kinda mediocre guide for ~everything.

An American friend recently gave me this Trader Joes bag, and I forgotten about the regular low-level violence that America commits against the French language

Today went very sideways and was just a very bad day and the 9 yo silently went to the kitchen and made us all chocolate chip cookies omg

Anyone want a size 12-18 month OP shirt? If multiple people do, preference given to 🔸 or EAs I know on here or local people in Toronto, probably in that order.

If you’re in Ontario, I cannot speak highly enough about the honey and honeycomb from this place graemefoers.com