Stephen Vaisey 🇺🇦

title: Informal (De-)Regulation in the Marketplace of Ideas abstract: Democratic societies face tradeoffs regarding the production, acquisition, and exchange of information and ideas. On the one hand, they benefit from institutions that reduce the transaction costs citizens must pay to acquire reliable information they can use to pursue their goals; on the other hand, those institutions impose conformity costs on citizens’ belief systems. This has traditionally placed civil institutions such as the media, the scientific community, and political parties in the role of informal regulators, which set norms regarding the (combinations of) beliefs citizens should or should not express in lieu of the government setting rules regarding the beliefs citizens can or cannot express. I argue that the interaction of heightened political sectarianism with changes in the structure of the public sphere have weakened these institutions and altered the informal regulations that govern the proverbial “marketplace of ideas.” This framework illuminates recent phenomena of scholarly concern – namely, the health of the political information environment and the evolution of contemporary political ideologies.

new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj

tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.

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🚨 New article out!
How robust is the psychology of social class?
Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries.
Published in Nature Human Behaviour:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Computational Urban Ecology of New York City Rats Urban rats are highly adaptable, thriving in the dynamic and often inhospitable conditions of modern cities. Despite substantial mitigation efforts, they remain an enduring presence in urban environme...

New preprint!



tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵

w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My frustration at the absurd missed connection between the compassionate great quant scientists on my inbox looking for jobs and the software teams looking for help with data cannot be put into words and it's dangerously close to making me want to do the thing I swear I won't do (work on hiring)

"My First R Package"

Next week I’ll be giving a hands-on workshop on #RStats We'll start from scratch and build our very own 📦

Re-use go-to functions, boost reproducibility, and share code with colleagues.

I always a blast teaching this and am excited to meet the new group!

tinyurl.com/mv2hrd8n

Today, the University of Minnesota announced via a very chipper email that Google’s AI “will now be available to students, faculty, and staff.” I have thoughts! 🧵

Longitudinal Data Using R | Online Seminar | Statistical Horizons Use R to explore longitudinal data in this online course with Stephen Vaisey, Ph.D. Apply fixed effects, growth curves, and difference-in-differences models.

Learn how to analyze panel data with @stephenvaisey.com. "Longitudinal Data Analysis Using #Rstats" will be taught on Aug. 5-8. We will cover mixed models, fixed-effects models, between-within models, and dynamic panel models.

Causal evidence that "the proliferation of surveys may lead to lower response rates" doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Two things can be true:
-Universities can and should do more to counter groupthink and conformism, which can undermine their teaching and research missions
-No one in higher education should make common cause with the authoritarian attack on academic freedom in the U.S.

A Lay Theory of the Successful Graduate Student/Academic Just recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece on what it takes to be successful in an academic career.  It was a pleasant essay, which emphasized some of the usual suspects like indu…

As I am going over old blog posts, here is a nice blog by @bwroberts.bsky.social on qualities in graduate students that, in his opinion, lead to a successful career in academia. Still very good advice. pigee.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/a...

Version 0.5.0 of #Rstats {fwb} is out!

{fwb} implements the fractional weighted bootstrap (aka Bayesian bootstrap), which involves repeatedly sampling sets of weights and computing the quantity of interest in each weighted sample. It contains drop-ins for boot::boot() and sandwich::vcovBS().

Box of copies of The Effect: Second Edition

I got an exciting box in the mail today! Looks like The Effect: Second Edition is live! I've updated the website as well, so you can check out the changes and the new Partial Identification chapter (+ a new mini-chapter on finding material in the book) at theeffectbook.net

🤦‍♂️

If you are a quantitative sociologist graduating soon, you should check this out!

If I had to hazard a guess, the academic market this year will be very strange because the big hit will come at the wealthiest/most elite institutions as they absorbed so much grant funding. LACs and smaller R1s might still be able to hire at expected rates.

Opposite of the usual downturn pattern.

Simultaneous confidence bands: Theory, implementation, and an application to SVARs Simultaneous confidence bands are versatile tools for visualizing estimation uncertainty for parameter vectors, such as impulse response functions. In linear models, it is known that that the sup-t c...

Randomly obsessed with simultaneous (uniform) inference. Feel free to ask about it. A mini thread on this follows. 🧵

Recommended reading:

#statssky #econsky #episky

Victor Klemperer: The Language of the Third Reich.

This July 4 I am reading this remarkable book detailing the impoverished and Orwellian language of the Nazi era, written by a German-Jewish philologist who lived through it. Unsurprising echoes to present-day USA. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2...

You need to be able to contain your anger and despair and write them in a diary or something instead of screaming them out to the public, demanding everyone else try and stop your panic attack for you. The public isn't your mommy or your nanny or your therapist or priest.

results from an experiment (details in the blog post).

I recently fielded an experiment on dynamic constraint and ended up with null results (surprise!). rather than trying to publish it, or *file-draw* it, here is a blog post where I simply talk about it!

Dynamic Constraint and Other Beautiful Lies
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/constraint/

Yale Philosophy offers a course on “Formal Philosophical Methods” — a broad introduction to probability, logic, formal semantics, etc.

Instructor Calum McNamara has now made all materials for the course (78 pages) freely available

static1.squarespace.com/static/6255f...

dems to rurals: “this is real america, not the dirty cities (ew). football, cornfields, county fairs. here’s a trillion dollars”

GOP to rurals: “these degenerate druggy hill people will learn the dignity of work once we defund their schools and hospitals”

rural elections:

[dem🟦] 7%
[rep🟥] 91%

This was a fun paper to write (published 5 years ago now). Here's a non-paywalled preprint version. osf.io/preprints/me...

For way more on the subject, see the whole-ass book I wrote. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

We were lucky enough to have our YouGov/The Economist poll in field when the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. You can see the partisan realignment in real time

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community.

🔗 epssnet.org

Here’s a thread with everything you need to know.

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It's been a while since I've looked at Nickell 1981 but I don't think he estimated the bias as flipping signs and it does work a bit differently for random intercepts. But I could be misremembering.

Watch out for those lags with FEs. Craziest shit I've ever seen. Opposite signs of the true effects!!! 🤯

scholar.google.com/citations?vi...

In October I'll be giving a 2-day workshop at @stathorizons.bsky.social about how to make beautiful websites with #QuartoPub! Learn how to make and deploy personal websites, research websites, an course websites all with minimal HTML/CSS