Brad LeVeck

Nothing is more frustrating than the automated waiting message telling you that they have a website.

My man, if the website was working for me, I certainly wouldn’t be waiting on the phone listening to automated messages and elevator music.

That John Roberts was more concerned with nuisance lawsuits against the president than he was with whatever this is will haunt this country for a long time

I think we are (unfortunately) about to get some new evidence on how much previous diversionary war/"rally around the flag" effects were driven by selection bias.

Any measures of risk-aversion in your surveys? I'd just be curious to know if that has any correlation with Trump support after controlling for the obvious variables.

I truly do not understand how the anti-SAT movement was able to convince people that *SAT scores*, rather than every single other part of a student’s application, were the thing to abolish to increase equity

The other thing I’ll say about the UCSD stuff is that I’ve seen absolutely nothing that makes me think removing SATs wasn’t a huge mistake, should really go back those.

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025.

US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom.

open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

CNN: Trump briefed this week on options for military operations in Venezuela

NYTImes: AG Pam Bondi Assigns Prosecutor to Look into Epstein's ties to Prominent Democrats

2. This combination of unpopularity + economic trouble creates incentives for escalation: adventurism abroad (Venezuela) and repression at home (prosecuting political opponents).

AKA "gambling for resurrection."

New homes per capita over time

Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update Includes Developer Commentary, Improved Graphics, and a 2-Hour Documentary - IGN Valve is honoring the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 with a celebration that includes a brand-new two-hour documentary, a developer commentary update, and more.

Definitely worth it for the history of games perspective alone. It’s the first 3d shooter with a real narrative that I remember.

Also, even if you’ve played HL2 already, the recently added developer commentary is very cool.
www.ign.com/articles/hal...

Yeah, but we gotta still call it “putting on your whiny pants”.

So, next step… faculty meetings?

It seems like every time I’m about to teach unraveling in information revelation games… the universe provides timely new examples.

blog post: weights and MRP for voters

so far we've talked about weights and MRP for E[Y], vote choice in the population overall.

but what if you want E[Y | V = 1], vote choice in the population of voters.

what are the weights and how do you modify MRP ?

I built a sff pc running SteamOS, basically a homemade Steam console, a month ago because I didn’t think this was happening anytime soon. Oh well.

What intro stats textbook to use?
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/09/w...

Figuring out YIMBY messaging is forever cursed by the fact that NIMBYs are a hard to estimate mixture of “severe misunderstanding causes my NIMBYism” and the reverse.

Just to be clear, I personally think this was a bad trade.

This. I think this capitulation is best explained as a handful of senators trading away 1 in order to stop 2.

This is what's so aggravating — yes, it was not working in extracting a policy concession but it was working in *driving down trump's numbers and provoking GOP infighting* which is what's important if you take Dem rhetoric about the perils of MAGA remotely seriously.

The Romney Whale In my last post I referenced a paper with David Rothschild that we posted earlier this month. The main goal of that work was to try to ex...

There are a few instances of this, like the “Romney Whale,” who @rajivsethi.bsky.social has written on.
rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-...

The obvious problem with that strat though is that the “ad” is usually short lived, as it’s hard to prevent arbitrage.

Though, if you have a good example where there’s a large, measured difference between the consensus of attentive individuals and a betting markets, I’d be interested.

I think the marginal bettor is pretty attentive, and there’s a good reason for this. If you’re an attentive person who disagrees with the market, you have an incentive to change the price.

Saying there’s distortions to all methods also doesn’t change the fact that some methods address very important distortions better than others. At most, it’s an argument for using them as complements rather than substitutes.

I’m not sure what other way you would “know” this, at least not in a way that’s a very good substitute. The quantification is important here because we care how much people’s beliefs changed.

I think this undervalues knowing what the consensus is among attentive individuals. bsky.app/profile/brad...

I think it’s politically meaningful to know what people believe and how those beliefs change in response to events. E.g. this is from election night, and suggests 1) the results were not already “priced in” by attentive people 2) it probably changed how endangered Republican politicians feel.

The betting market odds on Kalshi for Dems gaining control of the US House jumped from a 58% to 74%

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes Republican behavior around the shutdown.

The betting market odds on Kalshi for Dems gaining control of the US House jumped from a 58% to 74%

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes Republican behavior around the shutdown.

Make sure to stop and say hi as you walk through NorCal.