Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈

Congratulations to Rachel Bernhard, Professorial Fellow, on receiving a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant!

Her project, ‘Walls and Wicked Problems: The Role of Complexity in Politics,’ will investigate how complexity shapes political discourse.

🔗 Read more: shorturl.at/5bYBw

Logo of the Journal of Law and Courts, featuring the title in white text against a dark teal background with a gold ornamental design on the left side and the hashtag 'OpenAccess' at the bottom.

#OpenAccess from the Journal of Law and Courts -

Measuring How Much Judges Matter for Case Outcomes - cup.org/4mRvrdN

- Ryan Copus & @ryanhubert.bsky.social

#FirstView

🚔 What role does inter-group contact play in discriminatory policing?

➡️ Using a formal model, @ryanhubert.bsky.social & @anthlittle.bsky.social show how positive contact with overpoliced groups can reduce bias—but only if it is sustained over time www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

Screen grab of Big Bang Theory (Season 2, Episode 13) in which Sheldon says "The social sciences are largely hokum."

Big, if true

I’m still a newcomer to this place, but the UK’s long term economic stagnation is not just apparent in the economic data—you can see it all around you.

Just like I am for US blue state politicians, I’m baffled by the center-left’s lack of a coherent growth program. It would be very popular!

This headline is wildly misleading. Many of these ideas are very bad and/or small-bore. You cannot spend or redistribute your way out of an affordability crisis!

This is why you cannot simply throw money at problems. While this is a Republican idea, the lesson applies to other contexts, like subsidies for affordable housing, public transit and healthcare.

You have to pair government money with real efforts to control costs.

After a review process so long and intensive that the title changed twice, I'm excited/relieved that "How to Distinguish Motivated Reasoning from Bayesian Updating" is accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social.

osf.io/preprints/os...

Here is how it's relevant for your Thanksgiving dinner 🦃👇

But this is why your broader point is ultimately right. People should be debating questions like this, and very clearly and explicitly articulating their counterfactual logic!

So in my view, it’s not obviously relevant that Trump did X or Y when thinking about what Harris should have done.

I sense that some Democrats may be talking themselves into suboptimal political strategies by over-reading comparisons to Trump.

I understood you to be implying that Trump’s behavior is the right counterfactual for Harris’s behavior. I don’t agree. Democrats have different incentives/support bases/etc.

Democrats will likely learn some wrong lessons if their analysis presumes Trump is the relevant counterfactual.

This is exactly my point

😏

There’s a lack of clear counterfactual thinking here.

For example, what is the evidence that Democrats would have done better without Cheney’s help? And if you want to claim that, how exactly would you demonstrate it?

I have an op-ed in the NYT today about how to reduce crime.

The key idea, based on decades of strong research evidence: focus on increasing the probability of getting caught, not the punishment.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

There are so many ways to unlock economic potential, but most of them require regulatory reforms (and yes, some deregulation). Many politicians are terrified to take on the special interests that defend the status quo, while others actively fuel culture wars that make the politics of reform toxic 🤷

One would hope that governments across the developed world would be more proactive about reversing this. But alas, many have become resigned to the idea that their economies will just stagnate forever, slowly becoming relatively poorer.

I like Ryan’s paper and (obviously) I think complexity matters for behavior.

But I think Florian’s updating too much from one experiment. I want to see replications and results from ‘nearby’ designs before saying the lottery anomalies have nothing to do with risk.

If you're interested in trying out LLMs in #rstats but don't know where to begin, I've added a few two vignettes to elmer: elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/elm... and elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/pro...

Can you be more specific about what “shitty cultural politics” they are smuggling into the abundance agenda?

Oh yeah I like this way of framing it

Exactly my thinking

The math is extremely useful for the analyst (and replicators), but a reader can learn from a paper without deep reading all the math

Plus, pushing the idea that deep reading all the math is necessary for learning is probably a good way to turn more people off formal theory

💯

We need more counterfactual thinking in these types of post-election takes. For example, it’s possible that deliverism in fact did work in the sense that Harris would have lost *worse* without it!

This seems like a good statement/approach (UC-Irvine).

Thanks Greg!

Fantastic!

In response to protests, Brandeis invited students to transfer to its campus. The university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, promised in an open letter that Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”

I'm proud of my alma mater (Brandeis), but also incredibly sad that this is happening in 2024.

Inside the Crisis at NPR Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?

I’ll just say for myself, I basically stopped listening to NPR programming a few years ago. Partly because there are now more options, but partly because their programming does seem worse and less curious than it used to be (at least imo). It’s sad to watch the decline of such a storied institution.

The free speech “debate” (if we can even call it that) has become incredibly reductive and caused a lot of people to lose sight of what it means to be a constructive member of one’s community.