Up until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of "Bill Ackman." But I want to thank him for renewing my belief that wealthy people are amoral monsters who should be kept as far away as possible from institutions for the common good and the public policies about them.
Historians on Twitter: "Academia is terrible!"
Economists on Twitter: "We only hire people from six schools, and we're racist/sexist/aggressively nasty. This is optimal, and everyone should be like us."
Political scientists on Twitter: "Here's a photo of my cat and a cocktail."
@marcfbellemare
Is The Economist doing that thing they do every so often and serving as useful idiots for right-wing culture warriors in a country that isn’t theirs?
@HeerJeet
@zackbeauchamp
@MichaelMcGough3
GenX > Boomers on this. Old people had abstract notions of nukes and duck-n-cover. By the time we were kids, MAD was assured, duck-n-cover was pointless, and we all watched “The Day After” in elementary school.
Unpopular opinion: If you’re a tenured member of a university department that has PhD students, and you publish solo-authored peer-reviewed research, you’re doing it wrong.
In November my dept is moving into a brand-new building.
Today, at an in-person meeting, we’re picking offices. Order is by rank, then time-at-institution (ties broken randomly).
I think (and hope) it’s gonna be wild.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but:
It's OK to want to leave academia
It's OK to leave academia
You'll be OK after you leave academia
Back me up here, commenters: raise you're hand if you've left and you're OK.
@benwurgaft
Seeing a lot of humanities disciplines mentioned on here and that's just insane. Y'all aren't even close.
The correct answer is "economists," followed by engineers of any type, followed by business school profs.
@prisonrodeo
@jfeldman_epi
@PNASNews
^2 in a formula gives an interaction not a squared term
lm(body_mass_g ~ (sex + year)^2, data = palmerpenguins::penguins)
lm(body_mass_g ~ sex * year, data = palmerpenguins::penguins)
lm(body_mass_g ~ sex + year + sex:year, data = palmerpenguins::penguins)
are all equivalent
@dannagal
Yep. My son turns 13 in July, and I see this all the time. I'm also sooo happy our local public (college-town) school system actively works against these trends; the vast majority of the kids seem to actively push back against that sort of trash.
I’m certain this is a great paper, by a superb scholar.
It’s also funny how one DiD by a grad student at a sufficiently fancy place is enough to “overturn decades of work” on a topic.
I didn’t think that was how science worked.
New paper in JOP by one of our stellar PhD students. In a diff-in-diff:
- white democrats approve more of POC than white representatives
- dems approve more of female reps
- dems give POC reps more leeway
Overturns decades work on descriptive representation. Great work Anna!
It’s fine to rip on the social sciences and all, but always bear in mind that what we do is intrinsically more difficult than 90% of the rest of STEM, and that almost none of the tools we use were designed for the kinds of challenges we face.
Wait, so a decent chunk of psychology's "replication crisis" was basically people treating p=0.052 and p<0.050 as the difference between effect existence and non-existence? How is the field is still taken seriously after that...
Unpopular opinion (from someone who was poor in college): This is a good thing, and need not make education worse, and isn’t as hard to deal with from the teaching perspective as you first think it would be.
Yesterday we were notified by our University president that starting fall 2024 that we will no longer be allowed to assign any resources (books etc) in any class in an effort to reduce cost burden on students.
@alixabeth
"They triangulated the last position of his phone and the Life360 that his wife has attached to his phone and it appears that they're almost in the same location."
Amazing.
@AaronRHanlon
"The first reader `is very young and in almost all cases majored in humanities or social sciences...They can’t tell if a paper in the sciences means anything or is new at all.'"
This sounds like a problem with admissions offices, not with applicants.
Good morning.
If the only things you’ve ever done with R rely on the “tidyverse,” you don’t know R, and can’t claim to.
Be sure your students know this.
I've been teaching for nearly 30 years. In that time, I've had *one* sabbatical, which was one semester in which I got one course off, ten years ago.
How do people take sabbaticals? Like, what's the secret? Family wealth? Do you just not eat for a year, or what?
Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, is 53 years old.
A career academic, she has never published a book.
She has a very minimal publishing footprint. A few articles over 30 yrs. All of it's racial politics.
How is she qualified to run a lemonade stand let alone Harvard?
Today I learned that my long-time dean, colleague, and friend Susan Welch passed away this morning.
Susan was, in a word, the best. That’s enough to say for now.
May she rest in peace, and her memory be a blessing.
Opinion: Despite the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative supermajority, it actually makes sense to think of it as a 3-3-3 court, according to a former clerk and an econ professor's new mathematical analysis of SCOTUS' decisions from the 2022-2023 session:
@maya_sen
@BrendanNyhan
Absolutely.
They are *public officials*. This is what they sign up for.
And I think you & I agree that there are no free passes just because it's SCOTUS. I'm as OK with this for Kavanaugh as I am for Kagan, or Schumer, or McConnell, or Harris, etc.
I am sorry for my tweets earlier this evening.
I am sorry to
@JakeMGrumbach
; for his loss, for what I said and how I said it, and for the hurt it caused him and others. I am sorry for the disrespect I expressed toward him and others, and for the abuse of my privilege.
@Catherineoscopy
Also (and I didn’t know this until I was already 2-3 years into my TT job): some colleges (or at least my old one) have *different starting salaries* based on your discipline. In my case, Nursing and Business got more, History and English (among others, I’m sure) got less.
Hot take: The shift away from theory (and/or "theory") is an unmitigated good thing.
It's de-privileged the discipline, made placement less dependent on prestige, opened up new/better career paths, and made the empirical work we do stronger than it used to be.
The diet of social scientists is tilted heavily toward methods (for empirical research) relative to theory. As a result, few cultivate the theoretical imagination and our disciplines are comparatively theory-poor. Am I wrong? If not, what can be done to bring theory back in?
@MDzeilic
@andibartz
Being child free guarantees nothing.
Paying for a blue check, on the other hand, ensures lifelong, well-deserved mockery.
Remind me not to take advice from you.
When so many ask, “How is this economics?”, it’s nice when the QJE answers, “yes this is economics.”
Economics, like early hominids, thrives by aggressively expanding its territory.
Perception: “Deloitte or T-T at Emory?”
Non-Harvard reality: “Allstate or 4-3 adjuncting in Arkadelphia?”
I’ll be fine if some of my PhD students become academics. But for their sake, I hope they don’t.
Many/most of our quantitative methods PhD students from Harvard Gov decided to go into industry in recent years. I’m happy for them personally, but I do worry about long-term trends for academia generally and political methodology specifically.
Read this thread. Read the whole thing.
@GovernorTomWolf
is not f**king around with the red-county jarhead mayors and sheriffs, and their enablers.
Thank god I live in PA.
I won't sit back and watch residents who live in counties under Stay at Home orders get sick because local leaders cannot see the risks of
#COVID19
and push to reopen prematurely.
Today I am announcing consequences for counties that do not abide by the law to remain closed.
Hot take: The “credibility revolution” has made this sort of thing much worse. Causality shouldn’t be nearly as important as it currently is, especially in soc/beh sciences. It’s reification (and the denigration of description) is a giant net negative for the social sciences.
Since twitter is already mad at me:
Most “credible” causal work in the social sciences is, to varying degrees, boring. It’s kale.
People are free to choose to do boring work; I’m free not to read it. But people’s careers shouldn’t hinge on them doing boring work.
Announcing new publication policy for the Journal of Causal Inference. The Journal has switched to Open Access. Articles are now published with unrestricted access for everyone, thus boosting visibility and impact. Authors still retain copyrights and there are no embargo periods.
Free and fair presidential elections are a cornerstone of American democracy, but are they required by the Constitution? This Note says no, arguing for state discretion to regulate how, and whether, presidential elections occur.
Twitter hive-mind: How will you teach online for the next few weeks when you also have children at home?
Asking for me and a friend and probably some of my followers and also me.
@MenInBlazers
Asheville, NC: Small city in a pretty-but-slightly-strange ("funny accents") part of the country; former manufacturing town turned "cool" destination (artists, etc.); long-time home to a very old team playing the national sport (the Ashville Tourists, est. 1897).
Trump could have a massive stroke the instant you read this & be a drooling vegetable for the next 5 years. He’d still be nominated, land 40+% of the popular vote, and the
@nytimes
would run stories like “Trump’s Experienced Team Ready For Day One.”
This is what we’re up against
More SCOTUS leaks, please. Like, every single decision. Open the whole thing up: every draft, every memo, every communication that isn't face-to-face verbal. Drive a stake through the heart of the Myth of the Court.
@kjhealy
"... the reality is that the vast majority of Americans are not cut out for investing.
But there is actually a solution to this problem.
Banks and other institutions should assemble bundles of stocks and bonds, managed by professionals, with different levels of risk..."
Dear political science colleagues who study international relations:
Are you done with the trivial shit now?
Are you going to study topics that really matter to people?
No more minor tweaks on some hackneyed topic to showcase your methods skills?
#thisisasubtweet
@TrumanLab
There’s never been a time in my discipline when this wasn’t the case. Every new asst prof job has always had 30-50% of its applicants being existing asst profs. It’s just how things are; you are always on the market until tenure.
I’ve been teaching statistics to smart PhD students for 25 years and this morning half an hour before class I googled “Nicholas Cage spurious regressions.”
Don’t ever let imposter syndrome get you down, my people.
@carlislerainey
Causality is much, much, much less important in SBS that we’re (currently) making it, because most important things can’t be reproduced in a lab or experimentally manipulated in an externally valid way.
Understanding processes + incentives > understanding “causal effects.”
My PhD students are adults. They receive complete, current, accurate information about a full range of career paths from me and every member of my program, before and during it. If, after that, they want something they’re (knowingly) unlikely to get, it’s their problem, not mine.
If people in a PhD program want a certain kind of job afterward but then significant numbers of them don't get to have that job, the program isn't serving students; it must be significantly changed or entirely scrapped. Programs must deliver on their direct and implied promises.
Honestly
@APSAtweets
should do this anyway. Pay-to-play (by requiring membership) is all the things they claim cancelling the meeting would be: regressive, anti-inclusive, and harmful to international/underrepresented/vulnerable scholars. And the $ involved are tiny.
One way that
@APSAtweets
can address issues with the conference is to make access to the job portal free for the whole year.
Previously job portal access is tied to membership. Given ongoing issues the portal should be free and open to all.
@ajordannafa
Other jobs (tech, medicine, law, the ministry, etc) do in fact have all those things, some even more so than the academy. What they seem to lack are disgruntled former practitioners who hold grudges.
Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the awarding of my Ph.D.
Gratitude to
@caldeira_1
, Larry Baum, Jan Box-Steffensmeier,
@DeanLacy
, and grad-school amigos Steve Van Winkle (RIP),
@RorieSolberg
, David Klein,
@Lawarnold
,
@JenniferDiascro
and the rest for helping me get there.
I almost tweeted about how causal-inference fetishism has led entire disciplines to focus on small, boring questions then thought to myself “that’s too dangerous” so I bought a gun instead.
So apparently all you need to do to get an army of dirtbag
@BernieSanders
goons to get after you is say nice things about
@julia_azari
, which is nice because it’s two-birds-one-stone.
“Shaming won’t change anyone’s mind” misses two points. First: *nothing* will change anti-vaxxers minds at this point. Second: sometimes we should shame shameful people just to shame them, because they deserve it, irrespective of whether it will affect their behavior or not.