This is also the face I make when doing bayes, very cool mr. coypu! Looks like a cool, short bayes intro book!

AAPOR program’s up. So much cool work this year- really stoked to hear about all of it! I’ll be sharing some of GP’s work on bot/LLM detection, and also our work on survey experiment designs that manipulate attention in-survey to understand how noisier environments modify ad effects.

I finished CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) from @stanfordnlp.bsky.social It was a fantastic way to get back into the weeds with recent LLM training/arch advances and strengthen my systems engineering skills. I wrote up a short review + some practical tips for other auditors-

More like the tech wrong

Could. Not. Resist.

That new Bonica et al paper that's being passed around with claims that moderating hurts turnout doesn't have much turnout analysis in it at all, and certainty not enough for that conclusion open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

So I was thinking about MIT’s “missing semester” course (missing.csail.mit.edu) on skills needed but often not explicitly taught. What are some stats/survey stats equivalents y’all find super important- that is, important for research/practice, not commonly classroom taught?

This is an absolute scandal. Trump and Marco Rubio abandoned American workers and their families abroad, delaying waivers to provide for their safe return to the United States. As these civil servants lost their possessions, housing, and money, Elon Musk was slandering them with bogus accusations.

Don’t love the guy to put it mildly, but I have a ton of respect for him here.

Reminder that ipums.org has all the acs, census, CPS, NHIS, MEPS, and so much more. Bonus that it’s cleaned and harmonized in ways that make these data really easy to use in practice.

AMFAR has published a report on how the foreign aid freeze affects PEPFAR, which actually still hasn't resumed. They estimate that hundreds of thousands of people lose access to HIV antivirals and 1500 babies are expected to contract HIV — *each day* 🧵

Thanks very much to everybody who chimed in on this thread about attention --I wrote up some notes! My conclusion from the discussion is that polisci should coordinate on an info board / faux feed design to study (probs v. heterogeneous effects on attention) alexandercoppock.com/attention.pdf

🤡

Like Bayes, Jaynes, thinking about prior specification, or Kangaroos drinking Fosters? New post: andytimm.github.io/posts/kangar...

I’ve been thinking about this tension lately- Trump gets credit for grabbing attention well, but a key story of last cycle is his strength with low-engagement folks. One way to resolve this is that making news might sort of sieve-like; you need to be constantly high viz everywhere to get through.

Our product and engineering teams are both hiring! Grow Progress is a wonderful place to work, and our platform supports highly impactful candidates and organizations on the left. Come joins us! Shoot me a DM if you’re interested and have questions. Links in 🧵

Another incredible essay. Some striking passages to get you interested:

Gottheimer keeps using the "hardworking families" line but apparently does not apply that term to hardworking families who rely on the bus or the train. The only people who matter to him are the small number of people who drive into Manhattan.

Unfortunate news for those of hoping to create a healthy “niche election maps guy” ecosystem over here

Bunch of great papers here. Also, not my circus and not my monkeys, what does it say about academic publishing that something as obviously meritorious and practically useful as PSIS took that long to get published? 9 years!?

It’s happening 😃 (The trailing off of today’s data in the graphs is a bit hard to read, but oh well)

We’re internalizing your externalities 😃

Did I stay up to midnight for New Years? No. Did I stay up to midnight to celebrate congestion pricing? Hell yes I did! Congratulations to all the folks who worked so hard to make this happen in the face of such bad faith opposition, it will make a huge difference for NYC.

It’s happening! Tonight, MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber unveiled one of the signs at the entrance to the Congestion Relief Zone. Tolling begins at midnight. Learn more: congestionreliefzone.mta.info

Everyone needs to reconsider their “best/most important papers of 2024” if they missed this: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00536

Lots of fantastic stuff here, some of which I hadn’t seen and am excited to read.

A few books I found particularly valuable/important/fun this year 🧵 Introduction to Modern Causal Inference Convex Optimization Polling at a Crossroads We Have Never Been Woke The Point of View of the Universe The Hollow Parties Unsong Does Anything really Matter? Essays on Parfit …

So my research team and I have interviewed over 250 poor and working class people in Pennsylvania about their views of politics. One thing I keep thinking about that we heard - including in a follow-up interview just last week - is a dislike of politics that seems too much like entertainment.

Great thread from Chris on this paper. I love being pessimistic about voter attitudes towards YIMBY stuff too, but maybe we should pump the breaks a bit.

Vibecession remains a bit wild and rather disturbing. I kinda expected something like this, but seeing the chart is still jarring. From ( @pkrugman.bsky.social ‘s new substack).

Wow, that’s quite the upward trend! It’s quite fun to be working in survey experiments land while this happens.

AAPOR issues a statement regarding the Trump. v. Selzer, Selzer & Company, Des Moines Register & Tribune Company & Gannett Co. Lawsuit. Read more here: bit.ly/4gHwhqb

A nice follow up to the @upshot.nytimes.com piece a while ago.

Does anyone of any political science work looking to extend the “Steadfast Democrats” (linked) social constraint type argument to Latino vote choice in the past few cycles? I’ve seen a few different non-public results that make that case re:2024, so I’m curious if there’s further academic work.

Very cool paper addressing some challenges in effect generalization!

I was today years old when I realized that the word "GULLIBLE" in all caps, but upside down, looks like a cowboy chasing a horse.

I’m increasingly skeptical spammy fundraising is worth the brand damage it does to the party. Lots of good points in this thread

Curious both whether this is true, and for any citations have for Jon.

@rnishimura.bsky.social At one point this election cycle I think I saw you gesture at the implications of so many pollsters, especially old school ones, being deeply design based/frequentist. Did you ever see anyone turn that into an article or blog post? Waffling on doing it myself.

Candles: lit. Little xmas tree: up. Soft ornaments: stolen by Hypnos. Happy cozy season y’all.

Very cool little extension of what we can learn from IVs in persuasion experiments.

🎉 Bring Bluesky-powered comments to your #QuartoPub blog with this new extension. Publish your blog, post about it on Bluesky, then update your blog with `{{< bluesky-comments {post_link} >}}`. Replies to your post become comments! pkg.garrickadenbuie.com/quarto-blues...

This answer may surprise you, but the real reason Kamala lost, the only explanation you need, the one we can know even before VF updates: …is how human society changed in the 17th century in response to us understanding probability. Check to do more “research” (reading books on vacation) plz!

Bringing this over from twitter to pin; New blog post from me- I walk through why MaxDiff isn’t a great way to model discrete choice, and discuss some alternatives 🧵

I cobbled together a quick and not at all-exhaustive list of elections reporters, analysts, operatives and analysts - if you're interested in this stuff please follow and share widely! go.bsky.app/A8RNWyo

FWL really is one of the best “one weird trick” tools.

Put together a quick starter pack for political methodologists (broadly defined) who have made their way over to BlueSky. If I've missed folks, please let me know! go.bsky.app/JBavA7x

Has anyone put together a “ML for Causal Inference” starter pack yet? If not, I’ll put that together, throw recs my way :) (Trying to make this 🦋 place cozy/useful in earnest for me, this is a way I see to contribute to that)