[This is the first ever guest post on Math Of Politics. If you’re interested in posting on Math Of Politics, drop me an email.] By Scott Ainsworth. To understand the Cotton letter, we need to think about the operation of treaties. Treaties are like contracts, designed to solidify current behaviors or constrain future behaviors for some period of … Read more
Vaccination, both in terms of its social good and the role of government in securing that social good while respecting individual liberty, has been a hot topic lately. In fact, it’s gone viral. (HAHAHAHA. Sorry.) In this short post, I link the debate about vaccination, liberty, and social welfare, with the work of Amartya Sen, a preeminent … Read more
The Greek Tragedy is a “thing.” And lately it has reemerged. The question at the heart of this post is how one should bargain when between a rock and hard place.[0] This point was raised and discussed very well by Henry Farrell in this piece, which was responding to this op-ed in the NY Times by Yanis Varoufakis, the … Read more
The recent events in Montana have sparked a broad debate about the ethics of field experiments (I’ve written once and twice about it, and other recent posts include this letter from Dan Carpenter, this Upshot post by Derek Willis, and this Monkey Cage post by Dan Drezner). I wanted to continue a point that I … Read more
Nothing gets political scientists as excited as elections. In this previous post, I discussed the Montana field experiment controversy. In that post, I pointed out that the ethics of field experiments in elections—e.g., in which some people are given additional information and others are not—are complicated. In the majority of the post, I was attempting to … Read more
Three political scientists have recently attracted a great deal of attention because they sent mailers to 100,000 Montana voters. The basics of the story are available elsewhere (see the link above), so I’ll move along to my points. The researchers’ study is being criticized on at least three grounds, and I’ll respond to two of these, setting the third … Read more
Steven Pinker recently offered a lengthy explanation of “Why Academics Stink At Writing.” First, it is important to note that the title of Pinker’s post is misleading. Indeed, as he points out early on, he is actually arguing about why academic writing is “turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?” This is different … Read more
Yesterday, while actively following the events in Ferguson, I was asked the following by @GenXMedia: White Suburban America seems riddled with apathy, excuses and disconnect about #Ferguson. Any ideas why? Upon further prompting, it became clear that @GenXMedia wanted a response to each of the three things that White Suburban America is riddled with: apathy, excuses, and disconnect. It is important … Read more
Like many people, especially here in St. Louis, the ongoing events in Ferguson have consumed my attention and, frankly, really shaken me. After much thought, I have possibly come up with a manageable take on one angle of “the math of” the situation. It is important to distinguish protest from rebellion. Protest is distinguished from rebellion on the basis … Read more
We now live in a world of seemingly never-ending “data” and, relatedly, one of ever-cheaper computational resources. This has led to lots of really cool topics being (re)discovered. Text analysis, genetics, fMRI brain scans, (social and anti-social) networks, campaign finance data… these are all areas of analysis that, practically speaking were “doubly impossible” ten years ago: neither … Read more