vanessabaird.bsky.social

ngl this is probably the most useful thing I've made thus far, a comprehensive feed equivalent of paper-picnic.com

What we can and can't learn from the Texas Democratic primary On the urge to view this race through a "Tea Party of the Left" lens

At Tusk: Why the Texas Senate Democratic primary doesn't fit the "Tea Party of the Left" framework
smotus.substack.com/p/what-we-ca...

That time when a transgirl was brought to talk to a "detransitioned" teen to talk him out of being trans.

This detransitioned kid was a pony trick at an anti-trans conference, so the dad thought it would work.

After being left alone, all the kids did was talk about what idiots their parents are.

Provision of gender-affirming care for trans and gender-diverse adults: a systematic review of health and quality of life outcomes, values and preferences, and costs There is a substantial evidence base documenting the impact of gender-affirming care on health outcomes among transgender (trans) and gender-diverse p…

“No studies identified significant negative outcomes or harms.”

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that gender-affirming care for people of all ages is good for mental health, reduces self-harm, and leads to happier people. The media are lying about this and don’t care. I think that’s bad!

Amazing thread on the scare of increasing numbers of gay people.

Oh you think it’s just natural with increasing acceptance, more people out of closet?

Nope. Obv a clear sign of a gay conspiracy to make non-gay people gay.

I have seen job and conference talks bomb because the researcher hadn't considered exactly how their topic fits into the literature beyond the simple-minded "We haven't done this exact thing before," which is the weakest of weak tea.

This old-people tech warnings are as old as the ancient Greeks. Every generation is out there screaming about how the new tech is going to ruin our young people's minds.

She was very busy shooting puppies in 2020, so it is hard to remember what was happening.

I have heard people like Gays Against Groomers say that trans women are just gay men who have internalized homophobia.

The logic-twisting people pretzel themselves into denying the reality of something they don't understand is breathtaking stupidity.

Same kind of inference with using countries as the unit of analysis to predict things like decide to go to war or outcomes like revolutions. It’s hard but pretending it’s easy feels good. Certainty lulls dummies like the dude you are talking to. Helluva drug.

And the discussion you had with dude requires some pretty high level thinking. Systemic barriers are black box. That’s ok but people make the individualistic or micro level fallacy.

And though I’m happy with the causal inference revolution, it doesn’t cure our addiction to putting things in TRUE FALSE boxes.

And moreover nothing proves anything really. That’s why science progresses. And we give them no tools to asses uncertainty. Because we don’t really have hard and fast rules for inference.

So I set up a set of statements and I asked them to classify. What kind of argument is this or whether it’s a fact. And I say things like, “the rule of law is supported by good people who were raised with good values.” The overwhelming majority of students say that that sentence is causal.

they always veer into normative ethical arguments when I’m asking for a different kind of argument. And since every instructor tends to assign a specific kind of argument, they don’t know to distinguish what they’re asking for from what students would have been asked for in another class.

Ie. falsifiable. They look at me like I’m crazy. Why would you want me to argue something that could be wrong?

Then there is just the difference between an argument and a fact, which is actually quite difficult to teach.

But our overreliance on memorization teaches them that only facts matter. And when I say, please do not summarize the material. Please make an argument that could be wrong.

Then there are also arguments about how to attach the meaning of a word to a set of events or other kinds of facts like a statistical inference. Or the legal definition of what constitutes genocide or something like that.

I could go on and on about this. But there is no class at the university level or in high school that teaches students that there is a difference between general predictive causality and causality of a single event.

You had me at a “mere flurry away from humiliating…” the Washington Post”

Cult leaders convince their followers that everyone is out to get the cult. And the cult is going to save all the babies.

Psychologically, the cult becomes the baby; cult members protect it like a mama bear protects her cubs. Fervor.

That is why they are so dangerous.

And yet we call people who want a better lives for their children "illegals."

WTF.

Weird that some people believe all people deserve to live in dignity and free of terror.

We give dignity to citizens with DUIs, etc.

But people “guilty “ of a non-violent civil law deserve to be incarcerated with their children. And if you don’t agree, you hate America

I just finished this book and it is — hands down — one of the best books I've ever read.

Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors is now forthcoming in the APSR!

We use a game theoretic treatment and continuous DiD(iD) to show when redistricting reforms work

with @corymccartan.com, @simko.bsky.social, Emma Ebowe, Michael Zhao, and Kosuke Imai

Plus, we found at the time that this might be cultural. We found that Russians agreed much more often than people in other countries we were looking at.

But yeah, it is also fake reliability.

Items need to be scaled in opposite directions.

In grad school, I came up with the idea of simply measuring how often a person agreed with the survey question on all other political attitudes to control for such bias. Not that this is a great solution but better than ignoring.

Congratulations! And yay for celebrating the wins. Academia can be so tough.

We decided not to conduct a 21st century Tuskegee and allow half of the infants to be destined to die of hepatitis.

I have the same ethic about taking surveys, but I don't think I have gotten a single one. I am not on the same lists or something.