Attaching some random screenshots but could’ve done this across hundreds of city blocks or stretches of road.

"This election is about the threat of trans kids" is the worst possible messaging for Dems yet so many candidates are leaning into it. No voter will flip R->D over it. Low-info voters read this as "you're focused on bullshit that doesn't affect me" while the base reads this as "you're an asshole."

Adam Bonin@adambonin.bsky.social · last wk.

Incredibly disappointing ad from Mary Peltola (D-AK) saying she neither supports "kids getting surgeries to change genders or men in girls bathrooms." Yes, flipping the Senate is essential and can stop bad laws and bad judges from happening, but she can do it without my support from the lower 48.

The 2025 American Community Survey should have come out today. But it has been delayed because of unusual political encroachment at Census. ACS drives business and policy decisions, especially in local communities, and is the primary input to Census’s immigration estimates.

Have been incredibly busy these past two months, but finally really turning my attention back to my upcoming appropriations paper. Some of the data are not 100% done yet, but I want to focus on how much domestic discretionary funding has been cut in the last few years. Posted only on Bluesky.

Half of our seminars should be pre analysis plans and the other half results. Imagine if people had an up front stake in your research, and imagine getting great input before you finalize your analysis strategy. It should be the norm.

NYT poll of LV shows D+9 generic ballot ±3.2. Plugging that into my simple congressional swing model (tinyurl.com/cmchousemodel) gives 241D–194R, with 94% chance of D win. Effect of redistricting in that environment is R+4 seats, with TX and FL doing the heavy lifting, and NC slightly backfiring

Others have said this but it’s truly insane that Brett Kavanaugh, lover of the major questions doctrine, thinks there’s a good chance USPS can use a vague grant of authority over mail processing to radically alter absentee voting procedures in all 50 states without congressional approval. Come on.

From Alito dissent on mail ballots (L). How can this possibly be squared with the "major questions doctrine"!?!? (R from WV v. EPA)

the other strange thing about this is that the 2024 election result was exceptionally narrow and yet commentators left and right talk about it like it was 1984

This is cool but I think an over-use of RD - CEF really looks like it curves at the cut point. But why do we expect a jump? Impact is probably higher for internal locations - so the relevant treatment intensity isn’t at 0.

Christian Odendahl@codendahl.bsky.social · 4w ago

Less congestion. More money. Less pollution. And it turns out: faster emergency services. www.nber.org/digest/20260...

He literally goes around with this slide. The same 'proof' would imply that no stationary AR(1) process with unbounded increments can exist. Error probability is not constant!

rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · 4w ago

yann lecun's 'proof' that LLMs cannot converge to a correct answer and can only diverge is one of the most embarrassing pieces of mathematics i have ever seen

you could basically predict the direction public opinion under trump if you took the view that a) the 2024 election was about inflation and b) "wokeness" wasn't especially salient nor was it especially unpopular.

Ofc I say this and personally put WAY too much effort into reviews. And then I die inside when my papers spend six months under review or get torpedoed because someone was not on board with my type of paper existing or are evaluated by someone who doesn't know how math works. So there's that...

Amanda Weiss@amandaweiss.bsky.social · last mo.

But that's not my only concern. A big issue with AI reviews IMO — hot take 🚨, maybe big Assistant Professor Energy — is that reviewing is good for reviewers. Like it's good to see new scholarship and know what is being submitted in your field! And good to keep sharp by doing constructive critique!

It’s a new @adambonica.bsky.social joint! data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-bulwar...

The Bulwark Killed an Investigation into Political Fundraising Spam After Its Publisher Took the Consultants’ Side

This is a story about the Democratic Party captured by its consultants, and about what happens when the pro-democracy press is asked to say so.

data4democracy.substack.com

America’s unions are proud to endorse @sbworkersunited.org’s boycott of stand-alone corporate Starbucks stores. Workers are fed up with unchecked corporate greed, and we’re standing with them in their fight for a fair contract. No contract? NO COFFEE! ✊ https://www.boycottstarbucks.net/

Data center opposition seems a pretty rational strategy to me even though I may not be totally on board. If you are feeling threatened + angry at new tech, why not contest it on turf you can historically win on & do so locally (NIMBYism) rather than directly try to fight a new technology (hard)?

What's most upsetting me as a journal editor is that many papers we receive where AI use is disclosed for editing and language refinement actually appear to have been ruined rather than improved by AI. We get what seem like promising underpinning studies, but totally obscured by over-complex text.

Very concerning the NYT killed this excellent piece at the behest of the scammy firms it exposes

Hakeem Jefferson@hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Must-read piece from @adambonica.bsky.social on how Democratic committees and consultants built a fundraising machine that runs on a captive pool of elderly donors. Bonica discusses that and more in this piece a bunch of lawyers for these committees didn’t want you to read. Incredible work, Adam!

Really excited to see that my paper with Erin Hartman on assessing non-ignorable nonresponse in survey weighting is (finally) out! doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

Corroborated by my own experience with other Big Publisher journal titles Yet we're more impressed on evaluation committees by 1st-author candidates for [things] who made it through the gauntlet. Let's vow to check that impulse & turn to our professional society titles when possible & independent.

Cory McCartan@corymccartan.com · 2mo ago

FWIW, I strongly do not recommend publishing with NHB. A very slow review process and a ton of time-consuming administrative steps post-review and post-acceptance, including micromanaging of language & outdated statistical rules that especially don't make sense for methods work. And OA is $$$!

Out yesterday at Nature Human Behaviour is my paper with @chriskenny.bsky.social on a unified way to measure individual & group harms in redistricting! Due to extortionate APC fees (~$13k) we did not publish open access, but you can read for free at rdcu.be/fyd95 !

Individual and differential harm in redistricting

Nature Human Behaviour - McCartan and Kenny develop a framework for quantifying the individual-level impacts of redistricting in the USA, showing its applicability for identifying partisan...

rdcu.be

Happy birthday to the Voting Rights Act. Complicated feelings on this particular anniversary.

Don't posit a theory that is only interesting because it implies X causes variation in Y, test for a statistical relationship between X and Y, but then say you are not interpreting causally. Of course you are interpreting it causally. That was the whole point of what you just did.

Mechanically, what this means is that it’s assuming fairly smooth interactions between covariates. So if you want flexible models of interaction you have to build them in yourself. Which is, after all, what you’d expect with BART.

This is definitely interesting. It’s probably worth noting in high dimensions that mixed sobolev spaces are much smoother than usual sobolev spaces. So think of this kernel as closer to a squared exponential than a Matern-1. But still rough enough that the paths aren’t analytic.

Noah Greifer@noahgreifer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Fascinating and clear paper by @corymccartan.com and @melodyyhuang.bsky.social, greatly enhancing our understanding of how Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) works and why it is so effective. A must-read for my fellow BART enthusiasts. #statssky #causalinference

Random tree features are also implemented in my 'bases' software! corymccartan.com/bases/refere...

Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) features — b_bart

Generates random features from a BART prior on symmetric trees. Equivalently, the features are the interaction of a small number of indicator functions. The number of interacted indicators is the dept...

corymccartan.com

Cory McCartan@corymccartan.com · 2mo ago

New WP w/@melodyyhuang.bsky.social studying the success of BART models, which regularly win causal inference competitions! We argue that BART should be thought of as a random features approximation to a limiting GP. This view helps understand BART & apply it in more places arxiv.org/abs/2607.28844

Fascinating and clear paper by @corymccartan.com and @melodyyhuang.bsky.social, greatly enhancing our understanding of how Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) works and why it is so effective. A must-read for my fellow BART enthusiasts. #statssky #causalinference

ArXiv Paperboy (Stat.ME+Econ.EM)@paperposterbot.bsky.social · 2mo ago

arXiv📈🤖 Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Gaussian Process Limit of BART By McCartan, Huang