Max Nathan

Delighted to announce UCL’s new Professor of Pudding Studies

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

No shade intended! In the UK present setup we is pretty clearly central government? Either directly (eg budgets for policy X) or indirectly (eg funding research on X, funding WWCs on X type things).

Most public policy is more experimental than we’d like to admit - we often don’t know for sure what works (where, for whom), so we have to try things out.

That’s difficult and risky! But everyone benefits from knowing the answers. *National Govts need to support and invest in that.

Evaluation is a public good, and we* should fund it properly - this is VG from @ioramashvili.bsky.social

Absolutely tremendous work here, no notes.

(Apart from to say that this proposal is by the actual president of RIBA)

This is tremendous. Take the time to watch it.

Good idea!

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

V interesting. And well done Anthropic for being upfront on the trade-offs here.

www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Ofc this is just one London borough. But it’s striking, to put it mildly! We need more planning policy experiments like this.

LB Croydon switched to rules-based planning in 2019. Croydon then delivered more houses on new-build sites of 6-10 units than any other London borough since 2004.

Want to know what switching from development control to rules-based planning might look like in the UK?

@mauricelange.bsky.social has numbers 👇

HT @stephenkb.bsky.social

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars?

These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research.

So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Economic Geography Economic Geography publishes research that deepens the understanding of geographical drivers and implications of economic processes on the economy and society.

🚨🎓📚 I am super-excited to be joining the Economic Geography editorial board. Many thanks to the editors for having me!

www.tandfonline.com/journals/rec...

Follow EG here: @econgeog-journal.bsky.social

Please send us your papers :)

📢now forthcoming in ECMA!

The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from US Academia

Class is rarely a focus of research or DEI in elite US occupations.

Evidence suggests it should be: we find a large class gap in at least one occupation - tenure-track academia...🧵

Mysterious emails, incessant demands and a fake lawyer — read our editor’s note about a serious threat we’re facing

www.the-londoner.co.uk/the-londoner...

Ulez bomber: the retired electrician who turned bomb-making extremist Shy 63-year-old’s decision to blow up London traffic camera linked to online conspiracy theories and Islamophobia

Really cool that while we have a national panic about teenagers on phone too much, phone is also causing pensioners to build car bombs www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Thoughts from a newbie using Claude Code for the first time.

I don’t always use GitHub for my projects, but with Claude Code it feels like a must. Having a tool read and write files without version control is just too scary.

Who's secretly filming fake TikToks inside Londoners' homes? We tracked down the viral video account invading people's houses to spread false claims about immigrants.

Superb - and alarming - piece on the torrent of falsehood and disinformation pouring into people's phones, designed to stir up racial hatred.

If you don't subscribe to @londoncentric.media, its investigative journalism is outstanding. @jim.londoncentric.media www.londoncentric.media/p/tiktok-lon...

My pro-immigration misinformation piece that will probably annoy almost everyone is finally out. If you care about democratic trust or are just curious what liberal elites don't want to say out loud, this is for you.

Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

alexanderkustov.substack.com/p/the-uncomf...

🎉 Delighted to have got one of these UCL Research Culture Seed Fund Grants.

I’ll be working with Jessica Ferm, Hannah Schling, Fabio Miccoli and the @rgsibg.bsky.social EGRG to run seminars bringing together economic geographers from across UCL and other London unis. More soon!

Did you miss our latest Up Close and Policy webinar on Spatial Inequalities and Place-Based Solutions? Don't worry, you can now watch the recording now.

Next event on 25 February at 1pm. Book your place and watch the recording here: https://bit.ly/49RF3At

Aaargh

“I decided to try this thing that might wipe all my work, and was amazed to discover that it did, in fact, wipe all my work. I didn’t bother to make a copy and am now furious.”

Regardless of where you are on ChatGPT, this is just an amazing lack of basic common sense.

Always Back Up Your Work, LLM edition

Documenting the geography of science in terms of who produces it, what it studies, and where it diffuses, from Abhishek Nagaraj and Randol Yao www.nber.org/papers/w34694

🎭 Are creative industries quietly remodeling cities?

🌃 In England and Wales, the association between creative activity and neighborhood gentrification is modest yet highly context-dependent—though evidently strong in large cities like London.

🔗 Read more at
doi.org/10.1080/0013...
#EconGeography

🆕 RFBerlin Discussion Paper! Horng Chern Wong, @dennisnovy.bsky.social, Carlo Perroni & Natalie Chen show how rapid urban structural change affected the urban\city divide by boosting city amenities and containing wages for superstar urban service firms.
🔗 www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/u...

👀 Super-interesting paper on remote work, productivity from Arpit and co-authors.

Also has some important lessons for big cities and smaller places👇

Politicians: don't use AI to make your maps.