Kevin A. Bryan

Wasn't sure this particular one was a good fit for the bsky crowd, hah!

Hah! Yeah, no one really studies "social science", but eg at an engineering crowd talk, I wouldn't bat at eye at an economist or a political scientist saying "as a social scientist, how we should look at this is..." or similar

A much more common term in the US than Europe. Social Science departments and even high school classes called "social science" are very common over here so that self description wouldn't make anyone bat an eye.

Syllabus here: kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre...

Course AI here on AllDayTA (to be updated weekly as we progress, including with AI-driven adaptive quizzes!): app.alldayta.com/university-o... 2/2

New class on Progress starting tomorrow - I'm amped! Trying to put some rigor from economics, economic history, and philosophy on a topic very much in the air. It will be awesome.

(And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2

I cover project setup, version control, my daily very simple workflow, what to use for code (Python or R), what AI is high value, why LaTeX, how to do it easily, why all this matters even for qual projects, and links to exactly what to d/l. My own practices were very sloppy-this is a better way. 2/2

Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math boot camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2 kevinbryanecon.com/techstack.html

PS - An awesome dev of ours was testing the featureand told me "I got it wrong on purpose at first for testing, but then forgot to divide by 2 for expected value until the system brought me there!" Exactly. Imagine this help for the student, and then summed up & reported back to you for each hw!

All Day TA All Day TA is an AI EdTech company focused on higher education that enables professors to build customized AI teaching assistants for their courses. Available 24/7, it provides students with instant, ...

Honestly, it's a really nice system. As always, everything is all siloed: your content is never used for any training nor leaves your course, and is deleted on demand. The whole alldayta.com is $100 per class section per term - a couple bucks per student on average. AI complements our teaching! 6/6

So instead of "here's a hw, half of you go home and cheat, the rest hand it in and get 7/10, and neither you nor the student fully understands what was done wrong", we deter cheating, ensure everyone 'gets enough questions correct' and thinks through incorrect ones, and report back to the prof. 5/6

When the students do their assignment, and get a question wrong, the AI forces them to explain their logic, then uses your lectures, handouts, and so on to try to correct mistakes. We then use another AI system to report back to you precisely where students have been going wrong *and why*. 4/6

That's exactly what we built. Our system already interpreted the learning goals of your course, topic by topic. For question banks, we propose these using our AI, and once you edit and approve, we spin up question banks of varying difficulty. You can manually add, edit or kill these, of course. 3/6

The whole deal with All Day TA is "AI for university classes that is pedagogically-sensible, uses your language, and emphasizes your content only". What does that mean for assignments? Questions at level of your class, covering your learning goals, and giving students feedback the way you would. 2/6

I know lots of skepticism about AI here, but let me show you something we put out which I think is a huge improvement for university assignments. This is "Intelligent Quiz", a feature on All Day TA (www.alldayta.com). Assignments now have tons of cheating + little feedback to us or the students. 1/9

(Btw, anedcotes on "the times they are a-changin'", for the student club booths set up on the main drag, the busiest was the Bible Club - I was equally surprised -, second was the Baking Club. The more political booths were very empty...)

Beautiful Day 1 of school here at U Toronto! Love seeing the students back, and that the undergrads all dress exactly like we did in '98 (I saw 3 Nirvana T-shirts, literally). I'm doing my best to crank up the rigor in my courses - we're taking the role of univs back to '98 also!

But can get clout by promulgating research consensus in an interesting and accessible way, or by using "PhD" to bluster and stir shit up. A well known Princeton historian used his clout to personally attack me here last year for reasons totally unrelated to his expertise. That's bad for academia.

For sure, and that around medicine is much older (BC is a North American center of not getting kids vaccinated - crunchy types plus conservative immigrants, not MAGA).

Definitely some of this but also many of the "influencers" were just very prominent people in the field, who made the mistake of chasing social media clout at the cost of careful rigorous analysis. Agree that there is a demand problem: people liked the clout chasing!

Yeah for sure. The mRNA situation really seems like an RFK specific issue. There is no general argument that mRNA researchers are not doing useful science, either in Congress or worldwide, no? But I think it would be easier to educate the public if trust in universities overall was higher.

I'd separate Trump from general public trust (incl. outside US); some unique features there. Even there, though, note that Senate NIH appropriations are up for 2026. I think the medical-related field with the trust deficit is public health, for reasons 1-8. But also - all this below was a mistake.

I also worried this is too milquetoast to actually change behavior, but reaction (on bsky only, of c.) is 80% "go F yourself", 10% "we all already do these things but Republicans still hate us" and 10% "all 8 are bad, apolitical science impossible, who can say what 'useful', 'neutral', 'bias' mean?"

If an academic thinks it is *impossible* to do unbiased research, you will not find it surprising that politicians and the public start demanding universities hire more people who share the politician's and public's preferences. This would be a disaster. The former actually is possible.

I really disagree with this too. I don't know what would convince you, but really a big shift in politicization since ~2015, incredibly noticeable & does affect public trust. In this case, the shift has been progressive, but everything I wrote applied exactly the same to conservative politicization.

I disagree. Of course we use technical language in our journals; that goes without saying. But there are huge differences in how fields interact with the public. Some do not see reaching the public, or having public impact, as important. Some do not see objectivity as important. And so on.

Public health is one of the fields that needs to take this advice though! Obviously RFK is a nut but the public view into a lot of what was happening in public health during COVID absolutely harmed public trust.

I think generally the sciences are not the biggest issue here, but there are exceptions.

Speaking only to other academics, with the opinion that there is no need to care whether those outside a tiny academic clique care.

And 90% of what I have been involved with as well. But as you can see in the comments here (and only here!), a heck of lot of colleagues disagree that these are milquetoast tautologies.

All for fruitful discussion here! I think my definition would be "would a neutral reader know the political preferences - not the research results, but preferences - of the person based in their curriculum or research?" I think for 80% of faculty, answer is no. But for the rest?