OK, I mostly took a break from BlueSky after the 2024 election because it was really depressing but I'm going to give it another shot. Hey, did anyone say anything about AI while I was gone?

Fantastic, and published just in time to add to my grad Media & Politics syllabus.

Jonathan Ladd@jonathanmladd.com · 2w ago

I'm happy to report that the mini-book I co-authored with an outstanding team, is now published online in the Cambridge Elements series: "American Presidential Campaigns in the Attention Economy." It combines our original polling data and media content data to look at how Trump dominates attention

New article with SU colleague Sarah Pralle. We randomly assign TikTok style news videos portraying a public policy (e.g. Clean Water Act, No Child Left Behind) as a success or failure. Both raise issue importance, but the failure video reduces trust in govt. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New article with former SU grad student @emmadreher.bsky.social: read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl.... We randomly assign people to recall in detail either interactions with their doctors or interactions with their insurance providers, and find no effect of either on health policy attitudes.

Brendan, Jaime, Magdalena, Olivier and I have been working on this paper for six years and it is finally out. Brendan summarized the findings but I wanted to speak to the process/design. We started off wanting to reduce misinfo exposure -- BUT that is challenging because...

Brendan Nyhan@brendannyhan.bsky.social · 3w ago

🚨New Science Advances🚨 Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... -Exposure very low but highly concentrated -Reducing exposure by ~70% for months had no measurable effects *even among frequent consumers*

Why doesn't the debate around declining test scores mention the switch to computerized (rather than paper) testing as a another cause? My kids find computer testing challenging, and research backs this up (e.g. direct.mit.edu/edfp/article..., www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Pencils Down? Computerized Testing and Student Achievement

Abstract. Computer-based testing (CBT) is becoming an increasingly popular format of assessment in educational settings. If students face a digital divide in terms of access to computers at school and...

direct.mit.edu

My first PhD advisee, Sarah Elizabeth Hogenboom-Jones, has successfully defended her fantastic dissertation. Sarah developed and validated new measures of short video platform usage (e.g. TikTok and IG Reels) and investigated how those platforms can reinforce social identities.

ENDORSE. It is very frustrating as a reviewer to spend so much time checking for fidelity -- this takes away from time I could be spending giving more substantive feedback.

Brendan Nyhan@brendannyhan.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Journal editors - the status quo on preregistration is not working! You need to check submissions vs. preregistrations before sending articles out for review. *56%* of experiments I reviewed in last year have severe problems with non-disclosure, undocumented deviations, & more - see Claude summary ↓

I put together this "experiment checklist" for the grad students in my experiments class -- practical advice for experimental design. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lwbco...

This semester I asked my class to tell me all the ways they might use AI to help them with their final paper. I wrote them all down, and now am evaluating each potential usage on two dimensions: (1) does it do a good job and (2) would using it negatively impact their learning.

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

Can anyone point me to a credible estimate of how much ICE operations are costing taxpayers per day? Either in general or Minneapolis-specific.

The 7yo and 9yo are totally enthralled by William Steig's "CDB!" A true classic.

Love a concise Amazon review.

Guys today is a red-letter day for bad survey questions. Look at this lovely double negative that just rolled in!

for everyone teaching survey design this fall, great news: a new terrible question example just dropped! (this is from a real survey I just took) 😱

From a Washington Post reader survey I just took. What a bizarre list of job titles. Also I love the idea that it's critically important to distinguish between the Presidents and Vice Presidents among their readership. TOTALLY different news preferences.

great call — more experiments and within-subject panels / less emphasis on what the national topline happens to be today while worrying about whether it got the sample right feels like a worthwhile trade for the public polling industry

G Elliott Morris@gelliottmorris.com · last yr.

Rare for a public poll, we did a survey experiment to test whether priming respondents about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia impacts support for Trump's broader immigration agenda. It does. Support for blanket deportations fell 20 points after hearing about Garcia's case.

I'm pretty over the doomsaying/complaining about AI and student learning and interested in moving on to the "solutions" part. In-class writing (by hand!) exercises, non-generic paper topics, etc. We can adapt! It might even be fun!

There is NOTHING on the front page of Fox News about the stock market crash. Nothing at all.

Pretty horrifying how well the "need for chaos" survey battery describes the Trump/Musk administration's current approach to governing. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is why every political scientist you know has been in a state of panic for the past week. This isn't about policy disagreement, it's about the Constitution being destroyed before our very eyes.

Julian Sanchez@normative.bsky.social · 2y ago

My depressing thought for the day: it seems increasingly inevitable that quite soon, Trump decides to simply disregard a court finding that some of his actions are illegal or unconstitutional. Impeachment is attempted & fails thanks to loyal Republicans. At which point there are no good options.

Imagine: in his first week in office, Biden issues an executive order to cut all military R&D. He tells George Soros to carry it out, giving him access to the personal financial information of all military employees. Thousands of soldiers and contractors lose their jobs. This. Would. Be. ILLEGAL. 🧵

This is one of the reasons even “unlikely to succeed” resistance moves (protests, law suits, etc) have value at the moment.

Emily Thorson@emilythorson.bsky.social · 2y ago

The authors outline some strategies for overcoming indexing and getting the media's attention: (1) outsider counter-spin: protests, personal stories of how this affects Americans (2) on-the-ground footage (aka recordings of Elon's goons/USAID chaos) (3) investigative reporting/leaks.

"When the Press Fails," published in 1990, predicts exactly the situation we're in now. Because the Democrats are largely silent about the Billionaire's Coup, the media don't have "two sides" to cover and so default to repeating whatever line the government feeds them. This is called "indexing."

The sparse news coverage that exists of the Billionaire's Coup is, frankly, incomprehensible to a lay audience. "Treasury payment system" is meaningless jargon to most people. Tell people in plain language "Here is what Trump and Musk are doing, and here is how it affects Americans."

Hey Republicans in Congress: it’s your very last chance to go down in history as heroes, not villains. Get on the group chat, make a plan, stick together, turn this around.

Trump is openly violating the law on a vast and unprecedented scale and everyone is acting like it's normal. NPR had a long story about finding a rare shrew. NYT said he was disregarding "legal niceties." This is an attack on the Constitution as profound as the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Ok, thread time. Closed-ended survey responses are efficient and easy to analyze, but limit what respondents can say. Open-ended responses are useful for letting respondents answer with more depth in their own words (as opposed to yours).

Jon Green@jongreen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Online/open access in @polanalysis.bsky.social w/ @willrhobbs.bsky.social: a theory and method for inferring attitudes in open-ended survey responses www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

An elegant and engrossing summary of the Lippmann/Dewey debate and its implications for democracy by @danwphilosophy.bsky.social www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/the-world-.... Lippmann's insights are foundational to my book, The Invented State: Policy Misperceptions in the American Public.

The world outside and the pictures in our heads

Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and the fundamental question of political epistemology: Can anybody understand modern society?

conspicuouscognition.com