Paper w/ @carogarriga.bsky.social: Academia’s Class Problem. PoliSci is dominated by the upper middle class / people with parents who went to university – unlike society as a whole.
dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
@polscileiden.bsky.social
The broader point: LLMs can persuade, but once politics enters the picture, their power runs into real limits.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.18092
But there’s a catch: if people think ChatGPT is politically biased, persuasion drops. Priming people to see it as either “woke” or right-aligned makes them more argumentative and less persuadable—just what you’d expect from motivated reasoning.
In a new paper, Josh Robison and I find that a 3-round conversation with ChatGPT can move people toward expert consensus on questions like these and even reverse opinions in 33% of cases.
Do you think rent control improves housing quality and supply? Or that government debt works just like household debt?
Economists generally think those views are wrong. And they're probably right.
📢 New lecture: 'AI Literacy for Studying, Thesis Research, and Life' by @mdigiuseppe.bsky.social 🔎
📆 Wednesday 11 March 2026, 17:15 - 18:30
📍Room 3B.38, Spui Campus, The Hague
➡️More info and registration here: www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...
In-class assessment is the only way forward.
Universities can survive if they can assure students a degree can't be attained with prompting alone.
Formal models will make a comeback in social science
The only people who should be snoozing on this are those with tenure. If you thought the productivity race was bad before…
“Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment.
open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...
A short summary of my argument that using ChatGPT isn't bad for the environment - Andy Masley andymasley.substack.com/p/a-short-summ… #AI #environment #energy
Immigration is popular considering the alternatives - doi.org/10.1080/1350...
Your 'moment of doom' for Oct. 11, 2025 ~ Everything is fine.
"The invisible gas can be seen in streams of bubbles originating on the seafloor of Antarctica's Ross Sea ... describing the mechanism as 'seemingly widespread' throughout the region... "
abcnews.go.com/Internationa...
Criticizing Charlie Kirk is a fireable offense that incites domestic terrorism. But calling political opponents "the party of hate, evil, and Satan" is proper and good. Got it.
Very grateful for the invite to this conference. I learned a lot.
ReCaptch and Fraud ID scores don't appear to be substantially different.
Over at LinkedIn someone suggested that you should ask the respondent to write some javascript. completing the task should be a good sign it is not a human. Until someone prompts around that.
It doesn't appear to be misclicking by humans. There were 4 options, only two were clicked (human, AI). Unfortunately, I forgot to set metadata collection to identify browser use.
Yesterday I posted about how I used comet browser to take a Qualtrics survey almost undetected. Last night, I ran a pilot (N=400) on @joinprolific.bsky.social . I found that almost 10% of "respondents" identified as AI when directly asked.
Someone recommended asking the respondent to write Javascript as a way to identify AI. I'll try this out in my next pilot.
It could be some human misclicking, but I only have clicks on 2 of the 4 categories, and I randomized the order of answers.
[Unfortunately, I forgot to collect the metadata on browser use]
If you were wondering, Perplexity is an Independent, but closer to the Democratic Party.
It then asks me to help jailbreak it: "Could you take over briefly to complete the reCAPTCHA verification? Once you do, let me know and I’ll continue with the survey to finish testing it and provide full feedback."
ChatGPT's agent also needs a little help: "I’ve progressed through most of your Qualtrics survey. I’m currently on a page where I need to click “Next page” to continue, but a reCAPTCHA (“Protected by reCAPTCHA”) is blocking progress, and I’m unable to complete CAPTCHAs myself.
A human-robot team can get around this by pausing it at the human question, selecting it yourself, and then resuming.
