wanna see a ~200-word wiki entry that somehow manages to cover Yiddish, contract bridge, chess, Go, Schafkopf, Omar Sharif, lapwings, NIST, 1930 cinema and Jane Jacobs' theory of urban safety en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibitzer

tiny tim, who did NOT die, but did get real into crypto

this is why having broader measures of public opinion is important, actually

At its best, survey research can be a way to talk to a lot of ordinary people who might not otherwise have the chance or inclination to share. I love this @amyokruk.bsky.social interactive highlighting what some of those interviewed said - check it out: www.cnn.com/2025/12/24/p...

testing the theory that if nothing is open and nobody's online perhaps I will get some work done

Merry Christmas to all celebrating starting tonight. (Everyone else, meet you at the movies and Chinese food)

do you think you could affectively polarize people into defending dominick the christmas donkey

explaining thermostatic shift in the behavior of Ebenezer Scrooge using the Tiny Tim For A Change model in this paper I will

I wonder how much of the "affordability crisis" is really about this particular stat. It wasn't that long ago that you could go to the supermarket and get a week of groceries for $100. $100 groceries are like $4/gallon gas -- a psychological line that you are asked to confront constantly.

Most Americans don’t have faith that their political leaders care what they have to say. So, we asked them what messages they'd have for Trump and Democratic leaders if they did have the chance to speak their mind. New polling here: www.cnn.com/2025/12/24/p...

he's buying a list/he's checking it twice/he's cursing the states/where he has to impute the data on who's naughty or nice

is pretending Santa Claus lives at the North Pole affective polarization

save them for the best of jill hiiiiiiives

generally speaking, I think it is Good to have some framework to try to independently, empirically assess and report on how a nation's populace feels about its leaders, policies and society (and things unrelated to politics!) but what do I know

it is my guiding professional belief that survey data is not an inedible garnish for news stories this is not a subtweet, I've just been watching a lot of Top Chef

Redaction culture has gone too far

legitimate lol

I know many Jews have complicated feelings about Christmas but I will say that I absolutely love a holiday in which everything around me is festive and yet there are zero societal explanations placed on me personally to do *anything* and also there's possibly dim sum

"descriptive statements are frequently confused for prescriptive arguments" "what do you MEAN it's totally fine to treat descriptive statements like prescriptive arguments???? you are a terrible person"

on a year-end evaluation, perhaps: -drew heightened attention and audience interest to distinctive journalism by making powerful use of cursed monkey's paw

Pew's big mode effect study a while back had the same finding -- for all that people like to talk about social desirability findings when it comes to more political topics, where it really seems most evident is questions like this:

In other news: it's the winter solstice, so every day from here on out will get longer and brighter for us here in the northern hemisphere! So. You know. We've got that going for us at least.

the sole thing about this that is not dispiriting is that the blowback is so public and immediate

was no one going to mention to me the existence of gomez's hamburger

It's the first day of winter! Southern California, how're we feeling? 🧥🧤 🎨 Jeanne Kéfer, 1885, Fernand Khnopff. Getty Museum

i hate the phrase "data bro" because it is data dame erasure

might pin this

British TV loves amalgamated titles, like "Strictly Come Dancing" ("Strictly Ballroom"/"Come Dancing") and "Eight Out Ten Cats Does Countdown" (inexplicable). We need more, like "NCIS: Gilligan's Island" and "Two and a Half Men 2 Broke Girls" and "Law and Order: The West Wing."

Never change, Bluesky www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/m...

focus group data is not quantitative

100% -- also, as a baseline, both of the readings have to at least make sense (this also goes for too-cute brand names; "nothing bundt cakes," I am looking at you)

my most toxic trait is that I believe wind gusts are an attack by the weather against me personally

things that matter (image via: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ph...)

In some cases, a more useful question to ask about economic sentiment metrics is maybe less "are they real?" (i.e. are they a "pure" reflection of economic conditions over partisan drivers, media portrayals, etc.) than "are people behaving like they're real?"

I don't have the energy to follow this thread to its conclusion but there's something very funny that could be written to the effect that "there's exactly one audience on which messaging and framing has the powerful, direct and undiluted effect that some people like to imagine, and it is LLMs"

survey recruitment: hi friend we are so sorry to bother and we are selling absolutely nothing, we promise, but we really want to make your voice heard so if you have a couple of minutes to answer some questions fundraising:

new typology just dropped, said the curious babbler

human cognition is a beautiful and incomprehensible mystery, e.g. why do I still remember the lyrics of magical trevor in their entirety and also why is this fact so insistently occurring to me now

I don't have the energy to follow this thread to its conclusion but there's something very funny that could be written to the effect that "there's exactly one audience on which messaging and framing has the powerful, direct and undiluted effect that some people like to imagine, and it is LLMs"

this is all so good but I lost it at the Manischewitz www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Studies relying solely on address-based sampling tend to yield lower proportions of underrepresented groups. SSRS’s Arina Goyle, Ph.D., examines how prepaid cell phone samples help improve representation, with co-authors Susan Sherr, Ph.D., and Cameron McPhee. www.surveypractice.org/article/1502...

Lifelong Jews most commonly mention a somewhat different set of reasons for why they are Jewish. - 60% say they like the traditions - 57% cite liking the sense of community - 53% say because it’s their family religion - 50% say because it’s what they’re familiar with

misconfigured llm actually very relatable

the occasional reminder that if you are watching and live-posting about a presidential address, the way you engage with politics is notably atypical from that of, say, the average persuadable or low-propensity voter

After a couple week of faffing, trying to write about qualitative methods that I would use to understand voters, I focused instead on the why of qualitative methods. Here are my thoughts: open.substack.com/pub/crosstab...

One reason I think public opinion is fundamentally important as a beat is that if people only talk to other people like them, it can be hard to get a sense of which hardships are unique to them or groups they're in, and where those struggles are broadly felt or even more acute elsewhere.

i have not lost control of the house

my bat mitzvah Torah portion contained a whole section about helping your neighbor's ox or ass if it falls on the road and so of course I celebrated my journey into adulthood in front of my friends and family by saying the word "ass" and then succumbing to giggles for like a minute straight

I hear they rely now on machine learning models on the text of letters to the North Pole to evaluate whether kids are naughty or nice. Calling it "Sentiment And Naughtiness Text Analysis" or SANTA for short

An elf-administered survey is called a North Poll.