Excited to make it through this tonight!

🔥🔥🔥 www.ft.com/content/ad94...

This is very good and worth a read, wherever you land. The inclusion of Drake dissing is particularly to my taste.

I wrote about the endless temptation successful people feel to justify and feel justified in a clearly toxic system. Happy new year. open.substack.com/pub/rottenan...

3/ As the division of labor between universities and firms deepens, policymakers increasingly rely on these programs. Yet we still know surprisingly little about what participation means for scientists themselves.

Today is the last day that you can repost this image

FACETS Journal is accepting submissions for its 10-year anniversary collection exploring the opportunities and challenges in research. Submit by March 31, 2026. More here ▶️ https://ow.ly/zAa550XLtu6 Guest editors: Jules Blais & Fanie Pelletier

A propos of some stuff, a brief thread on randomized experiments. 👇 We like randomization as it provides us with a powerful way to solve a big problem: identification. Identification should not - cannot - precede other parts of the research process: theory, conceptualization, operationalization.

I had to update a tonne of R packages this morning... RIP to me and all of the ways none of my work will work anymore 😪

Call me anti-innovation or whatever, but I prefer my scientists to think like Bengio: “As scientists, I believe we have a duty to observe current trends in our fields, warn the public and policymakers if significant risks arise, and contribute to potential solutions.” thelogic.co/commentary/q...

Academia has felt like a real slog for the last ~18 months. In the last 2 though, 4-5 projects (some solo, some w/ co's) have all reared their heads again and sprinted towards the finish-ish (aka submission). While I know there's a long road post-sub to anything, it feels pretty reinvigorating!

Political polarization on confidence in the scientific community accelerated in the 2024 General Social Survey, with moderates now showing a significant downturn. (Apologies if I missed this updated with 2024 data already) /1

You’ve just died. The sixth picture in your phone gallery is what killed you.

Re: Summers, Sahm and econ’s many other problems. I’m a pretty average PhD student, and I didn’t pursue an Econ PhD because of its issues with race, gender, hierarchy etc etc etc 1) in the minds of some - I know this first hand - it’s “just a women’s issue” … the “just” being absurd even

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

we're done

W O W

"The multiyear spending plan also calls for a 2% cut to the nation’s three major research funding councils. But that reduction is far smaller than the 15% cut researchers had feared was coming, and science advocacy groups generally welcomed the budget."

It has been a great day at @stemcellnetwork.ca's #TMM2025! And I'm looking forward to more tomorrow, including joining @jsnyder.bsky.social, @lr-bg.bsky.social, & @deanshamess.ca first thing, for a discussion on public trust in science and policy decisions.

Incredibly excited to be presenting some (preliminary) results from my dissertation at Till & McCulloch 2025 @stemcellnetwork.ca tomorrow. Bigger thread to follow but, we launched an experiment in Canada and the US exploring some timely questions about the public funding of science (PFS). (1/2)

How do people around the world encounter science, and what shapes those encounters? Our new global study found that social media now carries much of the world’s science content, but local culture, infrastructure, and curiosity still determine how people engage. #ScienceSky #scicomm

Anti-elitism is so effective today that campaigns against populist candidates can *increase* support for them. www.nber.org/papers/w34430

to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

One tactic these data guys use online is to dismiss academic work they don’t like by calling it “overly complex” or “disconnected from reality.” I call this anti-rigor propaganda. It’s a move to sour people on serious scholarship when you don’t have better evidence. Adam addresses it in the piece.

Wrote a thing www.liberalcurrents.com/wars-on-scie...

sigh open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

humans ARE NOT built for this 9-5 shit In hunter gatherer times I would’ve raced cars

This is why we need a public inquiry (as even Wyant seems to imply).

Transparency helps innovation ... until it doesn't. My new paper with Cunningham, Hodgson, and Wang (on the JM!) studies the 2017 FDA Final Rule, which required drug firms to publicly disclose all clinical trial results. Disclosure increased, but innovation slowed. cowles.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

Realizing that I posted these Deadwood shitposts about 15k followers ago so a repost can’t hurt

And, I won't wade into this debate any longer, but statistical research often focuses on edge cases. It's a question of consistency and efficiency of estimators and procedures. That's how we have vetted methods for the entirety of mathematical statistics.

Millennials are the chosen people, the only ones who can redeem the world

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..." Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ; We really need more papers on this issue

this is the adulthood I was promised

5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...

Has anyone written about what we might call social media “framers”? That is, people who share a video but prime reaction with text we read before we view the clip? I watch a lot of clips and initially think, e.g., “yeah, what an ass.” But without the framing I might interpret differently. 1/2

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

I am all for recognising the normative dimension of social science, purpose-dependence of evidence, and diversity of methodologies across disciplines. However there is no need to contrast social science en masse to some monolithic entity of ‘natural science’ which allegedly lacks those features.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

The best pasta shape is rigatoni

Soon only monks will know how to read. They will ensure the continuance of human knowledge by painstakingly copying vellum codices by candlelight.

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

“The New York Times collaborated with a white nationalist eugenicist hacker and agreed to keep his identity a secret to publish a Zohran Mamdani hit piece” is a way bigger story than “18 year old Zohran Mamdani ticked ‘African American’ on his Columbia application because he was a citizen of Uganda”

(1/5) Out now in Acta Politica: Populist parties increasingly target scientists and scientific knowledge. By analyzing 15 annual waves of representative panel data from the Netherlands (2007–2022), I examine to what extent populist parties fuel science skepticism among their supporters.

Reading Jacques Ellul's (1962) book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. In it, he laments how American scientists had abandoned the term “propaganda” because it “cannot be defined with any degree of precision," calling that "intellectual surrender." We've been down this same road before.

Given the discussion at #metascience2025, does anyone know if Google Deepmind is/has trained models on the data @cos.io's OSF? Similarly (and if so) whether and how that interacts with Licensing. Plenty of repos have no license which retains copyright.