Some news: we're committing $175m to @GiveWell in 2026, growing our >$1B committed to date. Based on GiveWell’s estimates, we think this funding has saved >100,000 lives so far. 🧵 coefficientgiving.org/research/al...

My latest: Contrary to popular perception, American antisemitism is not primarily a partisan problem—it is a generational one. "The research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic." Gift link:

I can’t get past this. The (imperfect) analogy in my head comes from living in Rio: you’re always in a state of soft alert, which becomes a permanent background noise to life, bc you know that, even if low probability, very bad things could happen at any moment, and you must know how to respond.

I promise if you’re not Jewish and don’t know any Jews quite well you really do not understand the level of justified paranoia baked into most public Jewish gatherings: Security at swimming lessons at the JCC, off duty police outside a bar mitzvah as a favour, etc. It shocked me.

Synagogues were safe until they weren’t. JCC were safe until they weren’t. Public beaches, public parks…risk is something I think about every single time I take my family to school, pray, exist as Jews

Again, even though the Japanese government leading up to 1945 committed terrible atrocities, none of us think that Japanese internment was caused by the Japanese government. It was caused by American racism.

2 weeks ago, 4 blocks from my synagogue local police had a shootout with a man holed up in his house with an AK47. It took multiple armored vehicles to breach the house and I could hear the shooting and concussion grenades. The man had a nazi flag and other material in his house.

The chabad rabbi killed at Bondi Beach

Antisemitism has obviously been getting worse for years. People in my social group tend to downplay it in various ways and those with power like the mayor of my city have mostly ignored it.

It’s Boulevardier season!

New paper! @william-dinneen.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social Yiqing Xu and I use GPT to code 91k articles from 174 polisci journals (2003–2023)and track research designs, transparency practices, and citations. How has the credibility revolution reshaped the discipline? doi.org/10.31235/osf... 🧵

Yeah bsky.app/profile/ryan...

preparing some slightly deranged slides for last class

A student recently asked me for academic job market advice and I pulled up a slideshow from a few years ago. I don't think I've shared it, but it might be broadly useful. I think the advice almost entirely holds up. First part is about my time on the job market 1/3

So then the researchers divided the academics into two groups, the Eagles and the Rattlers <sorry> Twitter and Bluesky, and then

Some people are unaware but the ideal wok is made of steel and costs about $15 at your local Chinese grocery store. Every time you use it grows in power.

Adding a pinch of sugar to food should be way more common in western home cooking

At the Ag Fair & @Uofg has a presence. I was talking to the DNA barcoding people & found out that Steve Newmaster has been effectively banned from teaching & research but still gets his salary. If we can’t fire people for research fraud, what are we doing? www.science.org/content/arti...

Help me think of an engaging physical way to demonstrate the problem of selection on statistical significance. My best idea right now is to take a Galton board and drill holes in the bottom so some of the balls with |z| < 2 fall out.

Like 500 social scientists just got a Nature publication today. This will eventually be a DID for someone.

Say I wanted ~9k USD to buy out the teaching time of a prof (a brilliant coauthor of mine) so he can work on creating a validated ground truth dataset for a challenging data extraction and labelling task that current public LLMs (e.g. GPT5) have not yet saturated. Who do I pitch?

Snacking cakes by Yossy Arefi is the most dangerous cookbook. It’s entirely 1 bowl cakes that you can make in under 1 hour, like this chocolate sesame one. Perfect for when you need to eat cake at 9pm on a Sunday.

Such a happy example of people practicing evidence-backed living: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/w...

Quarto friends! I need your help: We are implementing a new QMD parser in Quarto. It will be super nice. But it's a big change, and we want to minimize the impact. 1. Can you share a link to your Quarto project at github.com/quarto-dev/q... 2. repost this and let your Quarto friends know too?

I think this is kind of neat and I don't think anyone else has noticed it (I've looked and I can't find anyone who has) osf.io/preprints/so... Maybe I should back off "justification" language, but it's at least a remarkable coincidence. I still think someone else *must* have noticed it...

Great news on @malengo.org: With a new large investment from The Shapiro Foundation (theshapirofoundation.org), we'll be able to bring several hundred vocational training and university students from Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda to Europe over the coming years! More here: malengo.org/malengo-secu...

I'll be in SF (well, Mountain View) February 16ish to 22ish. Who should I meet? What should I be doing? My time is booked Feb 20-22, but I'll have time before. Relatedly, anyone want me to talk on statistical power or using LLMs to code ~all political science articles?

No Kings (Canadians that miss Queen Elizabeth)

A very much non-exhaustive list of talks that I enjoyed at MAER-Net. 1. Nikolay Kudrin's JMP on detecting and measuring p-hacking (in a way more disciplined way!). We're moving past "I dunno looks good in simulation." I need to spend time with this paper. drive.google.com/file/d/1UmuE...

I love that Gelman’s lecture is no slides and chalk

All the cool kids are saying deconvolution these days

I thought this was quite a nice (and appropriately pessimistic) discussion of our paper on power in political science. All that I would add is that we found a small minority of research topics with high power! podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/i...

I can’t believe I’m now considering having 2 protein shakes some days. wtf

Apparently she said she was thankful for kaya toast but the teachers didn’t know what that was so they just wrote toast. Singapore wins again.

I love doing row row row your boat with my toddler but her form is just terrible

Not surprising! Camel, eye of a needle, etc

Canadian students are so polite they say thank you when they turn in their tests.

Love this place

I'm giving a midterm exam right now and while this mode of assessment is LLM-resistant, it's really not great. I feel bad that this cohort of students is going to face a lot a more stressful tests.

Toronto people: don't forget to get your mooncakes streetsoftoronto.com/food/celebra...

If anyone has advice on submitting to APSR via the Registered Report track, I'd appreciate a DM. docs.google.com/document/u/0...

If you don’t yet exercise, strongly consider starting regular indoor rowing. It’s not fun, but: 1. It’s a full body workout, muscle and cardio 2. It can be done in about 20 min/day 3. It’s not so hard to fit a C2 erg in many homes 4. It’s low impact and your chance of injury is low

It’s nice to see the CEO is at least aware of and seemingly opposed to the culture problems on here. Gives me hope.

My kid just asked me what number is the most likely to come up if he rolls two dice and I’ve never been more ready for something in my life.

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