The professional world of political science — the job market, research methodology, peer review, academic writing, the role of formal theory in the discipline, and occasional dispatches from the trenches.
There is a lot of noise about AI safety these days, and I want to contribute to it in a specific and, I hope, useful way. Maggie and I are spending this year at the Russell Sage Foundation working on, among other things, how to make our theoretical work on classifiers understandable to a broader … Read more
In a 2015 symposium on big data and measurement, Maggie Penn and I argued that social choice theory is central to the analysis of complex data precisely because any reduction of high-dimensional data into a usable measure involves aggregation, and aggregation involves choices about what to preserve and what to discard.1 We used the Florentine … Read more
Hi again! The question I’m about to pose is one that, I’m reliably informed, clears rooms at cocktail parties. But I think it sits at the foundation of why institutions are so hard to reform — and why the people who try to reform them so often end up making things worse. That’s for next … Read more
In response to the concerns raised by colleagues (principally and initially in this petition, but see also Chris Blattman’s take and other responses from both sides), I wanted to clarify why I think that delaying implementation of the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement (JETS) is a poorly thought out goal, one that will differentially disadvantage some … Read more
Hey, long time no see. While we’ve been apart, there’s arisen a bit of a dustup in my little corner of the world about the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) initiative. In a nutshell, DA-RT represents a movement to continued discussion, implementation, and fine-tuning of standards regarding how social science research is produced and shared amongst scholars and … 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
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