Conor Seyle

Important topic! We know women's inclusion is generally associated with better outcomes, so why don't we see more inclusion of women? This piece gives a good answer - there's both social and institutional pathways to inclusion (or exclusion).

PAX has officially joined Bluesky! PAX-skeets available from ‪@paxsapiens.bsky.social‬

Hello Bluesky! As our first post, PAX sapiens is proud to announce its latest pandemic prevention project, the Pandemic Compensation Initiative. This will find solutions to remove economic and political barriers to early disease reporting particularly for lower- and middle-income countries. 🧵 (1/7)

This strengthens a suspicion I have had for a long time that the big famous speech in Season 1 about "What has this cost me? Everything." is a riff on Subcomandante Marcos and the "por todos todo, por nosotros nada" slogan.

The @csis.org critical minerals team is hiring! I bet working with @gracebaskaran.bsky.social would be very rewarding (and fun).

careers.csis.org/opportunitie...

Since 1954, "The Handbook of Social Psychology" has been the field’s most authoritative reference work, and today is the launch of the 6th edition. Best news? The HSP is now open-access—free to read, download, and share.

the-hsp.com

dracula: ah ah ah! listen to them, the children of the night. what music they make!

bats: [extremely loud ska]

... but if you're trying to make a larger argument about what framing is then you'll need to declare an epistemic framing up front and apply it consistently, and in that case yeah Rorty is not very useful because he deliberately dismisses that question as useful.

It probably depends on the journal and the larger goal of the piece - it's fundamentally a question about epistemology, and I think if you want to engage with something like how different epistemic communities engage with framing then you can get by with this model...

I always liked Rorty's take, which a bad paraphrase of is "you can't, so pick language that you think does what you want it to do."

YouTube video by Gogol Bordello Gogol Bordello - Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)

"We come in rougher every time"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKpg...

U.S. Public Opinions on Opioids, Responsibility, and China - PAX sapiens A new report on American perceptions and public views on responsibility and the roles of entities like China.

New publication! A poll on US experiences with opioids and perspective on China's role.

www.paxsapiens.org/public-opioi...

Opinion doesn't follow the political emphasis on China - plenty of people see China as part of the problem, but the majority hold USG accountable for solving it.

Washington and Beijing Don’t Understand Each Other’s Fentanyl Positions Perception gaps are a major problem in the fight against drug-trafficking.

New FP piece informed by a discussion that PAX sapiens hosted, on US/China cooperation around fentanyl issues - it shows the gaps between the sides but also some ways forward.

foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/27/c...

You can only do the stuff that doens't work for so long. Check out this by our PAX Policy VP on why Democratic-Republican approaches to Venezuela are increasingly converging.

U.S. Venezuela Policy: Why Both Biden and Trump Moved From Sanctions to Engagement With Maduro's Regime (foreignpolicy.com)

Maps of US comparing Google search volume for "eyes hurt" with total solar eclipse path on April 2024

This was avoidable.

Navigating the uncertainties of US-China relations over the next decade | Brookings Many economic, geopolitical, and technological challenges and opportunities will influence the trajectory of U.S.-China relations.

Our report with the Grandview Institution and Reos Partners on the future of the Sino-US relationship is launching Friday at Brookings. Still space, sign up to attend or stream:

www.brookings.edu/events/navig...

Nothing is final, but we're hoping to announce a more sustained project around evidence that track-2s work and how to make them work better in 2024!

New RAND report, funded by PAX, on lessons-learned from US/China track-2s. Hopefully here's some evidence for the value-add of engagement.

www.rand.org/pubs/researc...

A good data-based look. We have got to figure this stuff out, in Colorado and across the US! The unwillingness to build housing is another example of a completely predictable negative outcome that we seem as a society unwilling to prevent due to individual-level incentives.

Wolfsthal puts his thumb on a key issue: Deterrence does work, but "... the needs of deterrence and nuclear reassurance need to be balanced against the risk that nuclear overreliance can create risks of escalation, pre-emption, crisis instability, and arms race instability. Nothing is cost-free."

I had a lot of fun talking about biases and what to do about them with the non-sky Western Research Advocates podcast team. These kinds of conversations are useful for thinking things through!

westernresourceadvocates.org/podcasts/exp...

What does "evidence" mean in the idea of evidence-based practice? There's a lot of ink spilled about that, but perhaps not that much descriptive empirical work on it.

Our recent piece on this is up at JPD here, reporting on some analyses not included in the joint OEF/AfP report from last year.

Good stuff! Does the age effect hold when controlling for party affiliation?

Posting to dip my toes in the sky - I'm Conor, I post occasionally on issues of psychology, governance, peacebuilding, and where all these things intersect.