Rense Corten 🟥

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

On elite college admission inequity: Kids from the top 1% are twice as likely to get into Ivy-Plus colleges as middle-class peers with same scores, a gap absent at public flagships. Advantage comes from legacy status, non-academic credentials, athletic recruitment (none predict post-college success)

Fifteen Years

No, YOU'RE crying on the train into work...
xkcd.com/3172/

Baby names aren’t just personal choices; they reflect culture, geography, gender, identity, and as i've been investigating, politics too. I’ve been analyzing 50 years of U.S. baby naming to see how they map onto political polarization in the U.S.
Here’s what I found 🧵

This is a very interesting paper but the empirical evidence presented for an increase in connectivity (in their Fig. 1E) is rather problematic. A little thread 👇(1/7):

Glad it was useful 😉

it is almost as if accommodating and conceding to far right ideas legitimizes them and signals to voters that the far right is a legitimate choice for governance

The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds that Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for pers...

Correct link (without typo) to the blog by Cox: tinyurl.com/28taeyet

The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds that Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for pers...

This was right after I finished my dissertation, so a sudden decrease is more likely!
Correct link to the blog by Cox: tinyurl.com/28taeyet

7/7 In conclusion, although this is an elegant and theoretically interesting model, if the empirical premise of its explanation for polarization does not hold, I'm not sure what to make of it.

The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss - The Survey Center on American Life The May 2021 American Perspectives Survey finds that Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for pers...

6/7 Finally, such a marked increase in connectivity cause by social media is not known in the (sociological) literature on personal networks, nor does it show up in other data sources (e.g., tinyurl.com/28taeyet)%3E Indeed, this would have been remarkable discovery, worthy of a paper in itself!

5/7 Most of the "transition" around 2008 seems driven by the fact that almost all data points before and after are based on different measurement instruments, respectively name generators ("with whom did you discuss...?") and asking for aggregated numbers ("how many close friends do you have?")

4/7 The data sources for some of the data points are rather unclear. For example, to my knowledge, core discussion networks were not measured in the GSS after 2010 but they are reported in the Figure. Also some other data points (e.g., for Norway and Germany) are attributed to the wrong data sources

3/7 The supposed "transition" in connectivity around 2008 is based on the data points of 4 countries, but then compared to polarization in only the US. If one would take only the US data points for connectivity too, the transition is much less clear

2/7 The selection of countries is strangely selective, focusing only on the US and North-West Europe

This is a very interesting paper but the empirical evidence presented for an increase in connectivity (in their Fig. 1E) is rather problematic. A little thread 👇(1/7):

Kiesraad published a pre-release of the 2025 election results, but the data isn't analysis-friendly.

Our @odissei-soda.bsky.social team turned it into an easy-to-use database for researchers. It’s open data and ready to explore. Download & code 👉 github.com/sodascience/...

Job Opportunity! We're looking for a post-doc or late doc to join our team at @gesis.org and @konsortswd.bsky.social (hi @nfdi.de)! You'll work on enhancing comparability of German survey data across projects & disciplines. Strong German skills & interest in social structure required. Check it out:

Following up on this: should we start new journals (which creates huge coordination problems) or try to wrangle our beloved top journals out of the hands of the big publishers? Are there any good examples/strategies for the latter?

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Registration is now open for the 2026 edition of our UU PhD summer school. Check out the not-to-be-missed speaker lineup 🤩🤩 signup now!! @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social @utrechtpmi.bsky.social @epsgraduateschool.bsky.social @rlberendsen.bsky.social @mproveniers.bsky.social @kaisakajala.bsky.social

Thanks for rubbing it in...

Sure, I don't think these are conflicting views. *If* the data allow for a causal interpretation, all the better. My point was rather that even if they don't, that doesn't mean we cannot learn anything about causality at all (which seems a common position in some circles, but I don't mean you)

How I've always understood the logic of observational research is that we test (and try to falsify) predictions about correlations that we should observe in the data, given our *causal* theory. We don't infer causality from correlations, but the other way round!

Et tu, Cornell?

Daarnaast hoort een beoordelaar in goede collegiale verhoudingen ook niet "bang" te zijn voor een examencommissie (zeg ik als lid van de examencommissie), hoewel ik snap dat je geen zin hebt in gedoe.

M.i. hoort een 10 niet voor een platonische "perfecte scriptie" te zijn, maar voor een werkstuk dat geheel voldoet aan de beoordelingscriteria (wat best zeldzaam mag zijn). Als het voor een (menselijke) student theoretisch onmogelijk is aan de criteria te voldoen, dan kloppen die criteria dus niet.

Waarom geen 10 voor scripties?

Maar het probleem daarmee is weer dat de criteria per universiteit verschillen, net als de regelingen rond herkansingen etc (wat potentieel weer effect heeft op de cijfers). Het vergroot bovendien kunstmatig het verschil tussen mensen net onder en boven de streep. Ook afschaffen wmb dus.

Wij geven wel degelijk zessen, want als zeker bent dat het inderdaad voldoende is mag de examencommissie gerust kijken. En ook een 10 moet gewoon kunnen vind ik (zo niet, dan is er iets mis met de beoordelingscriteria)