Sean Gailmard

What is the point of democracy in this world?

The OG Glen Campbell version is my favorite song of all time so I am grateful to learn of this cover

Hello. Do you sense a tension between our field's support for democracy, and our widespread (in some subfieds) doubt for the reasoning capacity of voters? If they're so stupid, what are we defending?

However it centralized control over state resources under whichever party runs the state. Resources are no longer spread around counties run by competing parties. California policy is therefore more programmatic and attached to that party’s agenda.

So what you're saying is only outcomes matter

This sentiment is more common in my field than I expected when I entered it. In this line of thinking, what is the role of a demos in a democratic system?

Interesting paper, thanks for linking it. I find it hard to know what it means for policy going forward. The wage/employment effects are estimated under a specific immigration regime; I am unsure how to extrapolate them to a different, greatly expanded regime.

Grumbach is external validity pilled, it's happening

If we "do politics," it seems undignified to be surprised when they do it back.

It's unpleasant for our self concept but the university is the agent of the state. Especially the public university, but given their funding model, private research universities too. If they're not useful to the state, we should expect conflict and curtailment.

I'm sympathetic to Dave's points, but also wonder what did we collectively expect? The political actors doing this stuff do not see academia as a non-ideological truth machine, and I'm not sure we make a convincing case that they should. It's easy to find colleagues who explicitly reject that model.

In that world, if you move Dem candidates further left on L-R position and make no other changes, you will lose more.

Or maybe there is a host of interlocking factors, and if you shift L-R ideology far from center, you have to improve other factors to compensate. Random victory among viable candidates in a primary doesn't address this.

Relevance being, the reduced-form null effect of L-R position is consistent with many different structural models. The tempting inference for left-maxxers is that the r.f. null is a structural 0 on candidate moderation in voter utility functions.

Maybe...

Gon spam you til you reply bro sorry

Also your list doesn't include reasons why moderation doesn't matter, it includes reasons why we measure it wrong.

Perhaps you exclude it from a list of "plausible mechanisms" not because are unaware it's a mechanism, but you find it implausible. Not sure why that would be, however.

Going to say again, another mechanism is that viable candidates maximize Pr(win), and observed positions are close-to-optimally calibrated to their jurisdictions. Null effect = 0 effect of marginal change = first order condition satisfied.

There is an external validity problem built into extrapolating the result of one person's optimal choice to utility that another would experience from the same choice.

If you love shrimp and eat 100 at the buffet, you get about the same jollies from eating 99 or 101. If I don't love shrimp but eat 100 at the buffet, I get a definite increase in jollies from eating 99 instead and a definite decrease from eating 101.

I further don't understand why anyone is comfortable drawing general conclusions from RD or DD models. Candidate position is a choice variable. 0 effect from small changes is what you expect if it is chosen optimally. You are measuring (successful) optimization by the candidates in question.

I don't understand how you know their model is biased (or they know it about yours). You just know that they are different.

In your view, would that move lead the Trump Admin to back down and restore funding? If not, how much should UCLA or the system be willing to pay, for the principle of fighting back and saying no?

Pluto was once a planet

The student's return on effort to become skilled at our standard assessments is now close to 0. If we want them to put in effort, the return must be higher. We must either teach them to do things that AI cannot do, or teach them to use AI to make their own work better than it would be with AI alone.

There's a Turing test point in here. Whether AI bots can think/analyze/etc. is irrelevant. In many standard tasks we use to assess students, they are reliably as good as a college junior at a reputable university. Therefore, bans are a waste of time and, at best, let the professors fool themselves.

Students are entering a world where Gen AI will be widely available. We must teach them to use it as a complement for the skills we teach, not resist it as a substitute.

A corollary is, we must teach skills that AI cannot reliably replicate reasonably well. Being honest, we often don't.

This is true. But it’s also true that SS/HUM defines literatures, fac lines, and whole fields in ways that appeal to progressives and reinforce their worldview. It’s not healthy for academia, intellectually or politically.

It's back! I would appreciate any comments.