Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again

Thinking about adding a question to my surveys like this except for "It's the End of the World as We Know It" and immediately disqualifying anyone who says "yes" as being a bot or a liar.

To "yes---and" this: I wonder what happened on January 6th 2021 that precipitated all of these platforms to suspend his account while he was still President 🤔

Ok but, also, why are they visualized to look like discount Stardew Valley?

Daily reminder to all the reply guys to polling results on this website who are shocked and appalled that any normal person could dare be unsure how they feel about various political questions these days

To square this circle: I don't think any young guys are listening to your message about tariffs unless you're capable of talking like the guy kind of guy they shoot the shit with in a game lobby in between matches.

If Democrats want to continue to erode Trump's support with young men, they should be trumpeting about how his tarrifs are making their video games more expensive, I'm not even joking

To crassly riff off George Fox: there is only One before whom I Quake---and it sure as fuck isn't Donald Trump.

People can say any horrible thing they want about Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump or anyone else. And the government is forbidden from taking retaliatory action against them.

A few months ago, Paul Musgrave introduced the Qatar Cars dataset, an updated version of mtcars better suited for teaching international audiences. Shortly after, @andrew.heiss.phd made it into an R package. I thought I'd go ahead and make it a Python package! #datatabs github.com/prlitics/qat...

This is not a subtweet against anyone in particular, I just came across an idea once too many times today. But: People are more than just their revealed preferences! Especially when we are enmeshed in systems structuring choices and behaviors contrary to our best interests!

holy crap, this is the exact anti-civil society authoritarian playbook invented by Russia and Hungary

I'm a single issue voter at this point and that issue is "Congress finding its spine and remembering that it's the first branch."

It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

My SIL turned 27 and we only had a bunch of individual candles to put on the cake, so we debated how many to put on. My suggestion of using 5 and "lighting them in binary because it's the most parsimonious" was, shockingly, rejected.

My whole ass dissertation was about how video games have a lot of positive political potential and my wife and I only let our daughter play games we choose on her tablet or with us in the room--and only for maybe an hour a day. Seriously: we must raise our kids to touch grass. For democracy's sake

Huh an awful lot of rhetoric shifted from Old Testament to New Testament over the past few hours

Research: Believing that the mass public in the opposing party supports undemocratic tactics leads people to be more supportive of undemocratic tactics themselves. Being assured that a majority of your opponents oppose such radical tactics increases support for democratic norms osf.io/my987/download

Grifters and ghouls: "There can be NO DOUBT that [insert target of blame] is responsible for this heinous act!" Reality, less than 24 hours later: *introduces a lot of doubt*

Wake up, babe---a new major release of ggplot has dropped! #databs www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/09...

Holding Kirk's wife and children in The Light. We must continue to strive for an America where political violence is relegated to the history books.

Some of you are about to find out what your fantasies of violent revolution are going to lead to. This will lead to nothing but darkness, but too many people confuse hurting an enemy with actually achieving a goal and solving a problem. It's an issue that plagues all identities and communities.

Millennial marriage in a nutshell. My wife: "Have you seen this thing online?" Me: "No?" Wife: "Oh it's awful. Hold on, you have to watch it." Me: "...do I?" Wife: "There are memes I want to send you, so yes 🥰"

I have never, and will never, give a fuck about Bill Clinton or anyone else in the Epstein files. Burn them all.

One of the ways I best understand how statistics works is through simulation. But I haven't found a lot of resources showing how to simulate time series models that doesn't just abstract it away. This is my attempt to make that kind of resource. www.peterlicari.com/posts/simula... #databs

I was initially fairly ambivalent about multimodal AI until I uploaded my headshot and it described me as "between 38-42." I took my headshot at 29. Burn it all down and salt the earth.

Website: "Remember this device for 60 days?" Me: "Yes." Me: *Logs back in 2 minutes later* Website:

WE MUST CHANGE THE NAME OF THE CUMULATIVE SUM FUNCTIONS IN R AND PYTHON!!! HOW CAN I, PETER R. LICARI, TAKE THIS IMPORTANT MATHEMATICAL OPERATION SERIOUSLY IF I'M FORCED TO WRITE IT OUT AS "CUMSUM"---THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

Pre-registering this take: but should Trump die while still in office, about 20-30% of the country will, within 6 months, believe that he was assassinated by the deep state.

One reason to be happy to have depression, I guess.

A take on the "polling" discourse: "My thermostat doesn't perfectly measure the temperature in every room, therefore it's worthless" and "I can only decide to turn on/off my ceiling fan once I've consulted the thermostat and it displays a certain temperature" Are both pretty foolish positions.

A lot has been said but I'll hasten to add: "Our stilted messages obliquely talking about issue X polled poorly" ≠ "you should avoid talking about issue X" or "issue X is unconvincing/unimportant". Maybe we should consider that **how we discuss X** matters.

Self-reported "convincingness" or "persuadability" almost always reflects the respondents pre-existing beliefs. For example: I think pineapple on pizza is heresy. I will find any message critiquing the practice at least "somewhat convincing."

This is my supervillain origin story.

At the very least, it's not in the order we're often taught. For example: Calculus students are taught the concept of "limits" prior to derivatives and then you get integrals. Historically, this is effectively backwards!

And to the one who wrote "what a great survey": 1. You're a bot. I've only uttered that sentence maybe twice in my life and never when I was on the receiving end of a questionnaire. But, 2. No one likes a suck-up.

To the survey taker who responded to my open-end with "what a dumb fucking question", I appreciate your candor.

Ok, I was skeptical about the whole "PhD Level" thing, but if it starts answering questions with "good question", it might pass the PhD version of the Turing test

I've been telling clients interested in persuasion for years: You *will*, virtually guaranteed, have weaker effects IRL than in your experiment because folks in the experiment are usually paid to pay attention---which isn't normal! So glad for some rigorous work that I can point to on this!

There's something about having your child, in their first week of Kindergarten, cheerfully describe how good she did that day in the drill "pretending that we had to run away from a bad guy at the school" that simultaneously fills you with deep plutonian sadness and incandescent rage.

I promise, you don't actually "gotta hand it to them"

My bed looks lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And models to run before I sleep, And models to run before I sleep.

Just putting out there how disturbing it should be for any leader of a little-l liberal country to say that they were "bothered" by the imposition of, and deference to, Constitutional constraints.

Thought as I played with the new open source OpenAI LLM: Has there been work about OS as a way to limit regulatory pushback? Even if the courts rule for CW holders, the fact that thousands of diffused people have a local model seems to limit potential recourse. "Cats out of the bag" and all that.

I love how the state names get progressively less sensible as the map goes from West to East.

Every response from GPT5 is gonna just be "Well, it depends."

Just dropped my daughter off for her last day at the daycare/Pre-K she's been at since she was 1 1/2 because she starts Kindergarten next week and I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING

at the risk of a hot take, I believe it is per se a good thing to gather quantitative data, as accurately as possible, to help the public better understand the contours of the world and society we live in