Write as if you know someone will be running it through Pangram.
Andrew Little
@anthlittle.bsky.social
Prof at UC Berkeley. Formal theory, political beliefs, democracy. Associate Editor at @ajpseditor.bsky.social https://anthlittle.github.io/
If beardos, weirdos, and radicals were bad warriors you think winning a war with Iran would be pretty easy?
Two tricky things here. 1 it’s very hard to tell the difference between someone inputting their own notes to an LLM and “one shot” asking for a review based on a paper upload. 2 one shotting will topically produce a mediocre but not terrible review on content.
When you get a peer review that is clearly AI-generated, do you just immediately notify the editors of this? Do you address any reasonable points the AI made? Having my first experience with a clearly AI generated peer review.
Studying bias with math (stats, formal, etc) is good at forcing you to always think “biased with respect to/compared to what”?
Thinking that only agents can be biased is a real obstacle to recognizing and addressing a lot of the ways that society is unfair, and I’d rather not reify that way of thinking in the language we use to talk about LLMs
All of the serious evidence shows that prediction markets are in fact predictive and human experts are the ones who are bad at prediction. (More work on this soon 😉)
Prediction markets are not predictive and should not be covered as news
If you're UC faculty, I'd encourage you to sign this letter in support of the University of California reinstating the SAT in admissions. ucstudentsuccess.org
UCStudentSuccess
ucstudentsuccess.org
Thrilled to share that my book, No Option But Sabotage, was reviewed in @prospectmagazine.co.uk Roberts engages with my book and highlights the dilemma facing eco activists in a world of rising climate pressures and policy failures. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7363...
The great schism in eco-activism
Some want the movement to have broader appeal. Others want a return to the violence of the past. Will one side win out?
prospectmagazine.co.uk
Seems like the natural next step in the gerrymandering wars is targeting specific members of congress and breaking up their district. Why shouldn’t NY target Stefanik?
Parallel updating (plus floor effects) undefeated
New Pew on Trump job approval
Getting a PhD is a weird career choice if you aren‘t a curious person, and most curios peoples’ interests don’t lie nearly within a subfield of one discipline. (Not a knock on Paul’s answer I just find it odd that people ask this question.)
My friend is teaching to his Economics Ph.D. students and explaining why they should be interested in topics that are not in their subfield. The friend asked for statements about why learning from other fields is good. Here was my answer: " Five things:
Dunno what’s more surprising this or conservatives getting shrooms
Amazing that in the national divorce the libs are getting the NFL, butter and cooking oil, being attracted to adult women, standup comedy, Bud Light, and now also Catholicism
Great to see some fun coverage of @carleton.edu, but "BREAKING" may be a somewhat exaggerated way to describe a house where students have been making cookies for 40+ years.
BREAKING GOOD NEWS: There is a house at @carleton.edu where you can bake cookies at basically any time. I spent 12 straight hours in the kitchen and came back for breakfast the next morning: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/d...
Judging by the (non)response to this, I should admit I was wrong. The democratic pessimists would not have said Orban losing would be evidence against their position. Rather, there is nothing that they would admit is evidence against their position 🤷♂️
Something I would like to hear from people who are confident the world is getting less democratic is what evidence or events would lead you to revise that belief? Part of what I'm getting at here is I'd bet a common answer a few years ago would have been "Orban losing" bsky.app/profile/anth...
Something I would like to hear from people who are confident the world is getting less democratic is what evidence or events would lead you to revise that belief? Part of what I'm getting at here is I'd bet a common answer a few years ago would have been "Orban losing" bsky.app/profile/anth...
One case is one case but it is remarkable how we just saw another wave of reports about the dire state of global democracy, and the poster child of this purported decline just lost a competitive election.
Don’t totally disagree with this, but peacefully conceding defeat is important! And many figures similar to Orban did not do this. Unclear how much of this is a difference in authoritarian goals vs just losing by so much that trying to fight it was futile.
A lot of Orbán's American fans are saying that this election proved he was never an authoritarian in the first place. This is completely wrong — and, in fact, betrays a complete misunderstanding of both Hungarian politics and modern authoritarianism. Here's why.
One case is one case but it is remarkable how we just saw another wave of reports about the dire state of global democracy, and the poster child of this purported decline just lost a competitive election.
Reuters says Tisza has at least 135 seats: 133 is the constitutional supermajority! Live by highly disproportional electoral systems (which Orbán made even more disproportional with the extra compensation votes awarded to winners), die by highly disproportional electoral systems.
now we have to hope Magyar gets that 2/3 majority 🤞
Looks like we have entered the AI-generated email audit experiment era
It's almost like there is a trade-off between loyalty and competence 🤔
Great articulation of my main worry about AI use among researchers (including myself!) Among current students, a hugely beneficial trait will be the ability to force oneself to sometimes do hard stuff on their own to really understand it even when AI is faster. ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
ergosphere.blog
Excited to share new paper w/ @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social: "Veiled Power: How Rosenwald Teachers Quietly Shaped the Civil Rights Movement" The puzzle: did ~5,000 segregated schools built in rural South emphasizing “manual labor” strengthen or weaken Jim Crow? 🧵 omarwasow.com/wasow_grumba...
From our FirstView articles: A Precolonial Paradox? Rethinking Political Centralization and Its Legacies by MARTHA WILFAHRT. doi.org/10.1017/S000...
At least we know that the war does have a concrete and achievable goal (creating insider trading opportunities)
Lots of suspicious trades in oil/equities just ahead of Trump tweets backing off his ultimatum. Sure looks like somebody close to Trump knew he was about to TACO, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits From @pkrugman.bsky.social: paulkrugman.substack.com/p/treason-in...
Trump admin violating domestic law, international law, and now the law of total variance
Do you know how hard you have to fail to go backwards in this number over three weeks
New paper with Stephanie Zonszein! Political news is more important than ever, but local papers are shuttering across the US. In recent years, innovative community-centered outlets led by journalists have taken to WhatsApp and social media to reach groups such as immigrants. What are their effects?
DebunkBot is live on BlueSky! Tag @debunkbot.bsky.social in reply to any post to get the facts
Very nice paper, to be more spicy I would say it shows how both sides of the "is moderation good" debate misread the implications of spatial models of political competition (or, if you must, the "median voter theorem")
New short paper w @jkalla.bsky.social ! Candidates gain from moderation, but less than many theories expect. Many conclude voters must not care about issues. This is wrong. Small *average* effects mask large effects on specific issues & are consistent with widespread issue-based voting 🧵