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Will Lowe

@conjugateprior.org

Señor Research Scientist, NPC at the Hertie School in Berlin 🇩🇪 via Princeton, Mannheim, Edinburgh and a bunch of other ivory towers that will probably be billiard balls and decorative boxes by the end of the decade. Rome Statute appreciator.

11750 Posts3639 Follower852 Folgt
Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 5h ago

Professional profiles are like literature reviews. The purpose of a literature review is not to review the literature but to motivate, make plausible, and sketch out the implications of what you want to do next.

NBER@nber.org · 5h ago

LinkedIn histories aren’t fixed; 19 percent of users edit past jobs. These “time-travel” edits track job moves and reveal rising AI language after 2022, and fading DEI mentions after 2025, from @nickbloom.bsky.social, @gideonmoore.bsky.social, Simon, and Wilkie-Rogers www.nber.org/papers/w35546

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 5h ago

The concept of 'dry aqua aerobics' is so great. Not least because of the hidden-in-plain-sight reference to air already in aerobics. But just to drive one more into this lexical pileup, I'd like to coin 'airobics' as a short form for doing aqua aerobics without the water.

Natalie Alana Ashton@natalan.bsky.social · 7h ago

we're currently doing 'dry' aqua aerobics (while the pool is being refurbished). today was my first one, and one of the ladies warned me "it's very different". wasn't sure what to say to that, so i just said "oh, is it?" and she snapped "well obviously"

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · yesterday

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to install. Every operating system is terrible. But you could at least recognize this one" Brew 'Dunno Elegies'

Error: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno
Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · yesterday

Cool looking job here. But he's not kidding about the job being "in person in Syracuse". I taught a text analysis course at IQMR for about a decade and regardless of where I was starting from, travel time to/from Syracuse could sometimes be measured in *days* 😱

Sebastian Karcher@adam42smith.bsky.social · yesterday

I'm hiring an Associate Director for the Center for Qualitative & Multi-Method Inquiry: www.sujobopps.com/postings/114... Run IQMR, work on QDR, help run events around methods @maxwellsu.bsky.social - great for recent MA or PhD interested in alt-ac 1/2

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 2d ago

Here's a simple idea for seeing your way through the current 'AI in academic papers' panic. If you are the author on a paper, you're not claiming you did everything in the paper yourself (whatever that could even mean), you're taking responsibility for everything claimed in the paper yourself.

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 4d ago

This is a very much a thing. Older audience members (👋) often don't intervene because, well, we've already checked out, or doubt that our intervention would help. Sometimes that's wrong, and is anyway no excuse. That said, if you do intervene though I did not, know at least that I have your back.

Devin@dervine7.bsky.social · 4d ago

one thing I’ll note on this is that as a young grad student it can be pretty disheartening to see a talk you’re pretty sure is bs but no one in the q&a is calling it out, and now you’re wondering if there’s something you aren’t getting

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 5d ago

Here's a fun special case of a long-running source of confusion in the English-speaking policy world: the difference between what the economists think and what The Economist thinks.

Dan Davies@dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 6d ago

As I keep pointing out, the underlying premise of the index is wrong. The Big Mac is *not* a globally homogeneous product; it differs in salt content, calories and even weight across different markets according to local tastes. www.economist.com/interactive/...

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · last wk.

And about the LCU: maybe your experience of Machiavelli is different, but I'm down in Discourses on Livy thinking, ok, corrupting men is very easy but, umm, who were the Decemviri again and what did this Quintus Fabius do and god damn, imagine having this whole cast rocking around in your head 😭

David Mimno@dmimno.bsky.social · last wk.

There is SO MUCH good material in Classical antiquity. Just book 1 of Livy could be a seven-season Netflix drama, "The Kings of Rome". Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus out of like four pages of Livy. There's a whole Livy Cinematic Universe there for the taking.

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · last wk.

Two, resilience is about resisting bad information, either internally or externally, so it falls back into a counter-disinformation project that mistakes the current crisis as one of facts, when its really one of consequences.

Mike Caulfield@mikecaulfield.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is what I mean when I say conspiracy theory is not a way of thinking but a form of discourse; its core is Wilhoit's Law but for evidence: There must be in-groups whom norms of argument protect but do not bind, alongside out-groups whom the norms bind but do not protect.

Philip Bump@pbump.com · 2w ago

The core of the right-wing information universe is that one correction from a mainstream outlet proves it can’t be trusted and that one accurate claim in a flurry of false ones proves that they must be.

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 2w ago

Love this idea. Think of all the positions you absolutely want to be term limited but in which you don't want to office holder indulging in complicated backward inductions instead of doing the job. Also, elections all the damn time. What could be more American?

David Burbach 🇺🇸@dburbach.bsky.social · 2w ago

Better proposal: House terms of *random* length. Every day one ball is drawn out of a bin of 1460. If #1 is drawn, House election is held 14 days hence.

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 2w ago

The mathematicians I know seem to think that, just as the legal action in a court case is less the outcome than the reasoning, the math action in proving a result is in the machinery applied or constructed to make the proof go. This seems like a third thing, beyond problem choice & proof correctness

Alice Schwarze@aliceschwarze.bsky.social · 2w ago

So wild to see the proof as a unit of value in math being completely devalued and value shifting to proof selection (ie what's worthwhile proving) and proof validation instead. @randomwalker.bsky.social was spot on in his recent piece on what work is going to be left for humans to do

Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 2w ago

⊥ orthogonal ⊥⊥ independent ⊥⊥⊥ mechanically separate ⊥⊥⊥⊥ Monty Python foot

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 2w ago

When I am writing, I end up looking up lots of weird details. Today, I looked up who is responsible for the statistical independence symbol: Finnish mathematician Gustav Elfving in 1950s. He used a double orthogonal ⊥⊥, bc independence is stronger than orthogonality. Dawid's 1979 paper squished it.

Gustave Elfving, on right looking smoking hot, thinking about geometry no doubt.
Will Lowe@conjugateprior.org · 2w ago

It's fun to speculate why Brits think 'the North' starts half way up the island but, quite boringly, Manchester is probably in the North because ~80% of Great Britain's population lives south of it. In case you're curious, a rough population-by-latitude density plot using 2024 data & some {sf}.

The UK population by latitude plot, badly measured by plotting how many people are in each 0.1 latitude bands and assuming constant population density within local authorities.