THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: what if I did a nuclear holocaust. would that be fucked up or what THE REST OF THE WORLD, APPARENTLY: heard you won’t

This week’s episode is Hudson v. Michigan, where the Court held that cops can violate the Constitution as long as they obey it in a parallel universe.

every international student in the last year

lol I was talking about constitutional law

Fantastic stuff here on the long arc toward “mechanical” proofs

social science used to be fun

"[T]he explicit and mutually understood nature of team jargon reduces ambiguity, thereby facilitating language development and minimizing misunderstandings that could otherwise hinder coordination." Just out in our journal, @sociologicalsci.bsky.social

"Academic freedom protects scholars’ right to challenge the orthodoxy; it doesn’t insulate them from charges of bad faith in doing so. But the problem here is one of both supply *and* demand. And ... #SCOTUS bears at least some responsibility for the latter." Me in today's issue of "One First":

This worries me most about AI in science. It's what happened with the advent of Stata and SPSS. They enabled incredibly rapid advances in the sciences and also set the stage for the replication crisis. Sadly, so many scientists simply don't understand the stats they are using.

I’m glad no one expects me to fix society

Is there a name for when a profession fails to provide its practitioners with a usable theory? I mean, to the extent that the professional elite is openly and routinely mocked by lower status professionals doing real work.

how policies in sociology lead to embarrassing outcomes.

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Y’all comparing originalism to a “language game” today is probably gonna upset a dozen philosophers or so.

President Trump just arrived at the Supreme Court to attend arguments in our challenge of his attempt to upend birthright citizenship, the first recorded sitting president to attend oral arguments. Good. We hope he learns something about the Constitution he continually tries to violate.

this might be better than originalism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benge

This is just so flatly immoral, so obviously unjustifiable. www.ft.com/content/83ab...

oh, a cameo by @kimlanelaw.bsky.social on Last Week Tonight 😎

Join "Causal Inference in R Using MatchIt and WeightIt" with @noahgreifer.bsky.social on April 15-17. Gain hands-on #causalinference experience in #Rstats and learn matching and weighting methods for estimating and interpreting treatment effects.

3-year contract for a Phd position in Sociology on the discourse of/about AI, at l'Institut polytechnique de Paris.

Unfortunately, it seems that pretty soon we’ll see Hanna Arendt’s notion of citizenship as the right to have rights back in the news.

I think about this a lot when people say the ASA is not or should not be “political” (whatever that means).

if nothing else, there is something to be said for spending time outside in the sun with thousands of people who share your anger at the state of things

as an outsider looking in, what this looks like to me is unscrupulous partisans leveraging norms of academic collegiality to do hack work, and then getting the vapors when people point out, correctly, that theirs is hack work

Back in the 1960s grad students were exploring with LSD, now they are exploring with this. It's pretty much the same thing I think.

i do not understand the idea that there is something worthwhile, even laudable, in an obviously bad faith effort to reverse engineer an “original meaning” to justify a narrow partisan interest

I recommended the title of this article to be "Would you rather attribute belief change to one horse-sized change or 100 duck-sized changes?"

Of interest to evolutionary social scientists

AI is a charismatic technology that absorbs our attention and distracts from other technological and political economic changes. @kevinbaker.bsky.social shows this masterfully in a new essay on technological transformations in the “kill chain” and how they lead to predictable tragedies.

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Samuel Moyn has been this cartoon all his career

"The core conceit of the project was that the machine could watch so that the analyst could think."

I want to live in a world where I don’t have to keep screaming, “TARGETING CIVILIANS IS ALWAYS WRONG.”

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

I hate that the current consensus is "use AI to code, don't use it to write." Both require thinking! It's dumb to cast writing/coding in terms of sacred/profane.

jfc

oh shit

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wtf what are lawyers doing wtf

well, researcher degrees of freedom implies the existence of researcher degrees of servitude.

"To minimize researcher degrees of freedom, GPT-4o was used... all terms denoting political stance – such as ‘right’ or ‘left-leaning’ – refer to LLM judgements based on this scale unless otherwise indicated."

Check out my new article w/David Eagle in Sociology of Religion academic.oup.com/socrel/advan... We look at the recent schism in the UMC and find that the division goes beyond disagreement on theology; it maps onto longstanding political/religious divides. It's open-access so you have no excuse!

cultural sociologists apparently study beliefs, attitudes, preferences, values, repertoires, schemas, orientations, worldviews, dispositions, boundaries, toolkits, norms, frames, logics, imaginaries, affects, motives, identities, discourses, categories, and vocabularies.

The question is not whether LLMs are good or bad, it's about who is using them to make decisions 😡 😡

"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing. They're bragging"

Videoanálisis | Iván Cepeda y Aberlardo de la Espriella escogieron fórmulas radicalmente opuestas para la vicepresidencia. La elección de Aida Quilcué y José Manuel Restrepo desafían a la candidata uribista Paloma Valencia

This is one of many cases in which ChatGPT is superior to jury trials. www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05...

Jacob Hibel and I have organized an upcoming conference on AI and Social Inequality, which will be held on 3/17 at the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento. This event is open to social scientists, computer scientists, and the policy community. poverty.ucdavis.edu/event/artifi...

My class was scheduled to read Thomas Schelling this month in our course on Nuclear Weapons and World Politics. It turned out to be a current affairs course. Here's part 1 of my series on reading Schelling in this crisis. open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...