Reckless disregard for human life.

Happy to share the publication of my book based on my PhD thesis. I explore what it means to protect pension entitlements as private property based on the case-law of the ECtHR. Glad to be an published author by @hartpublishing.bsky.social

I was not expecting this book to end with science-as-a-vocation vibes.

It's kind of crazy that every PhD program spends five six years crafting a band of brothers and sisters with incredible solidarity and reciprocal honesty and then disperses them to the far ends of the earth.

AI companies are writing their own constitutions. Meanwhile, a shared vocabulary for contesting algorithmic power has been traveling across red and blue states, from legislatures to civil society. New from me in @science.org: "A Civic Grammar for AI Rights" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵

This is what decoloniality looks like.

I regret to inform that this was not Werner Herzog.

Every couple of decades the devil tries to destroy the social sciences through elaborated PSYOPs.

Nice shot of one of the best parts of my job.

I'm please to celebrate that legendry 0.3.0 has hit the streets on CRAN 🎉 Legendry is a ggplot2 extension that lets you draw more guides. Read about all the guide goodness in this minor update here: teunbrand.github.io/teunbrand_bl... #rstats #ggplot2

Today I took my car to the mechanic and I am pretty sure I witnessed the legalization of petty theft.

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

El machismo mide su peso electoral en la pelea entre Paloma Valencia y Abelardo de la Espriella dozz.es/f_wjn4

Hey Boy Hey Squirrel; (I Know) A Squirrel Called Jonny

pepperidge farms remembers when we used to make friends on these sites

A truly “good” paper typically has an intended audience. This audience is something you slowly start building in grad school. It starts with your advisor and maybe a handful of authors. You slowly add more people as you go to conferences and meet “friends and enemies.”

I go back to this passage of the the Ezra Klein interview with @tressiemcphd.bsky.social about the alignment between message, register, audience, and medium and, I’ve gotta say, folks. Some papers out there could have been tweets.

Speaking of crazy d values, this reminds me of this feature I was thinking about adding to the forest() function in metafor. #Rstats #MetaAnalysis

“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

A lot of methods sections read like the authors are hoping no one will notice what they did

The only thing that is making college obsolete is grade inflation.

👀

I still remember my mind exploding when I saw how measures of "racial resentment" predict partisanship in this country. youtu.be/18HdBQjbv58?...

This is what a video model does when it is told not to reference the training data (like literally: not prompted, but turning off the classifier free guidance). I gave it a noise seed from elsewhere and it just grinded on through. Most looked like some form of this. I like them.

New somewhat plausible explanation is that "gas station drugs explain voting behavior in the USA"

NEW: Peter K. Enns, "How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

Ever wonder what the creator of Pandoc is up to these days? This is it. cup.columbia.edu/book/word-an...

found it

I often think on Daniel Dennett’s last words on the LLM business model.

this me

If the only criterion for AI being conscious is because it praises your shit writings then all of my reviewers are phenomenologically bareen zombies

y’all’s judicial review is not representation reinforcing?? wtf

I always laugh whenever I see a coefficients reported as 0.00 (0.00)***

wtf

New paper out in Annual Review of Sociology with @arnoutvanderijt.bsky.social #W.Foley and @l-sage.bsky.social "Luck and Predictability in the Life Course" We take stock of what we know about luck and its role in shaping life-courses and inequality www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

What is the German word for the feeling of torment that comes from hearing someone who knows slightly less than you* than you talk on Ezra Klein's podcast? *or has a slightly different take

All those dudes obsessed with the Fall of Rome might be in the middle of enacting a huge self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thrilled to announce my paper with @dianamejordan.bsky.social & sky-less Trent Ollerenshaw is now published open-access at @apsrjournal.bsky.social. In a (very) large replication & extension, we show that design effects of repeated measure experiments are nonzero but typically small. Thread:

My only pitch for when I am king of ASA is having the annual conference in México City. Can't believe that even FIFA is doing this better than us.

seeing Gary Becker's name in the timeline, I simply couldn't help but remember this note from @kjhealy.co's Freakonomics review, which was published almost 20 years ago:

My R package netmem: Social Network Measures using Matrices is now on CRAN! It’s a matrix-based framework for social network analysis, designed to handle complex structures @chisocnet.bsky.social 🔗 CRAN: cran.r-project.org/web/packages... #ChiSocNet #NetworkScience #RStats

wow

“The devil exists and DT sold his soul in exchange for power” still looks like a somewhat plausible explanation to me.

good morning

obvi youtu.be/aI0euMFAWF8

There’s Trump-style corruption, which is all bullshit, bluster, bags of cash, and him daring you to stop him. And then there’s corruption of the John Roberts kind. It’s just as deliberate and destructive, but quieter, more genteel, like a cancer that grows in your bones rather than on your face.

NEW: Tony Cheng, Johann Koehler, "Making Progress in the Chicago Police Department, 1862–2024" sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...