Cue the john williams's jurassic park theme song

Currently in FirstView: In “Measuring the Quality of Answers in Political Q&As with Large Language Models,” @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social and Jacob Morrier develop an approach for measuring the quality of answers in Q&A sessions using data from the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons.

These always strike me as strong associations and I’ve always wondered how these observed rates vary by field. Eg: effect of family background of becoming an MD/physician or JD/lawyer?

If we write papers using LLM generated data, and those papers are then used to create another version of LLMs and then new datasets for new papers, will the process converge? If not, will it be stationary?

There are social scientists at #Caltech, @caltech.edu! I think they do pretty good research...at least some of the time. www.caltech.edu/about/news/m...

This is close to stenography: “An unnamed source told me all these things [many clearly false] so am repeating them to you” How is this different than publishing a press release?

Next question: does monterey pdf word count pick this up? I dont know if I can sacrifice 1 of my 5 implications for this.

What remains of USAID? Practically nothing ("a shell") and millions will die because of Trump and Musk

Stand aside \bot here comes \swordcontradict

Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences is getting hit with a 67.6% cut, worse than other programs within NSF. Funding for archaeologists comes from the division for Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which is facing a 77.3% cut. It appears every post doc program has been 100% cut.

I am looking at NSF's budget request, in awe at the disinvestment in learning anything. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.

@caltech.edu and I both agree that international relations needs more theoretical models and fitting those models to data.

Even after 8 years, I don’t fully understand caltech’s skip day, but this is the first year with an inflatable dragon outside my office.

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)

This is a neat paper that illustrates the benefits of combining theory with new data. You will find this interesting!

I am never excited for 9am meeting, but today is dissertation defense day!

The coconut milk is bad!

First day of class for the spring quarter

This is just to say I have texted the war plans that were in the Defense Department and which you were probably saving for people with a security clearance Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

This is a fantastic paper. If you ever wondered “why would I want to use a structural approach?” this paper is a shining example.

Incredibly excited to see this paper with @ccrismancox.bsky.social at @iojournal.bsky.social. We study outbidding using new models, methods, and data from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. #polisky

Rediscovering my love of integration by parts.

Just got the dreaded email. University of Iowa is halting all NIH grant submissions. Losing a generation of scientists here will send the state backwards. What a travesty.

Penn State also pausing new NIH submissions and pausing acceptance of new awards. #academicsky

At the Deathbed, by Edvard Munch, 1895

As a UIUC grad I’m very familiar with this. This is beyond devastating. I joked about Lysenkoism taking root here awhile back but it’s not funny anymore. Science that feeds people is now under very grave threat.

We played OuiSi in my writing seminar to practice justifying creative choices and then providing feedback on the choices. This is our creation.

I might not survive this conference

Is mdpi trolling me?

PSA to job market candidates: if you didn't get a particular flyout, it may have had nothing to do with the quality of your interview. Departments have a myriad of internal constraints and goals that are unobservable to you, and the process is a lot more complex than you think.

The Ira Glass "taste gap" quote made it on my writing syllabus this semester, but I cannot remember what podcast I first heard it on. Was it This American Life?

This holiday season I’m thankful for coauthors who understand I couldn’t meet this afternoon because I had to start the dry brine this evening.

People seem to think that ABMs have been limited because they’re too simple, motivating llms, but the real problem is they’re often too complex. More often than not if you dig a little their dynamics are driven by some leading order choice in behavior or parameters.

Proof: intermediate value theorem

Caltech is hiring this year in economics! Please share with your students and anyone who may be interested. #EconSky Target Fields: applied micro, finance, and behavioral/experimental applications.caltech.edu/jobs/econ

We are hiring an IR scholar who works on Africa! apply.interfolio.com/155789

Overleaf can fail to compile a document without a bug. Sometimes refreshing makes the problem go away, but doing so means I lose the ability to "undo and redo" recent changes which are helpful to debugging code. So I have to judge: are my latex mistakes more frequent than overleaf getting stuck?

below the conventional threshold of 0.05

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Philly!

Aggregating preferences over 3 or more alternatives is hard.

I do wish my tex editor used emojis to report errors. Eg: forgetting a semicolon in your tikz figure returns a middle finger. It might be more helpful than tex just crashing.

🚨Thrilled to say we're doing a lot of hiring at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Political Science this year! The first two lines have already posted: American Politics (Asst or Assoc) and Environmental Politics (Asst, Open Field). Links below!

Political Science could save a lot of working hours collectively if we just coordinated and said the QJPS is the best journal in the discipline. Their formatting requirements before and after an acceptance are essentially 0.

I made it to tenure without downloading slack but lost the battle today. I already miss my 100-message email thread with my coauthors.

Had a couple nature posts do numbers on the other site and I don't really like that so here's the picture of a very large lions mane jelly that I wanted to share

They said it not me.

Assuming my coauthors were just as excited to read my email titled "uniqueness proof just dropped" as I was to write it.