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ceej @ceej.online · 3d

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 3d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · 4d

How is that what OP is implying?

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · 6d

It's likely buried in many appendices. Made one such analysis for an appendix recently and it's mostly this. Less issue-specific knowledge and interest, less formal education and, of course, the good old gender gap.

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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 8d

Unless the article is fully generated (not likely) this is a symptom of a much older problem, which is that people aren’t reading many of the sources they cite — just gesturing at them.

Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net · 8d

It's not the first time that I'm seeing this

I'm afraid that hallucinated citations is an issue that scientists and experts will have to deal with from now on

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.bsky.social · 8d

And here we go. I never wrote this article, and yet it is cited here.

www.liberalbriefs.com/geopolitics/...

And of course, it sounds so plausible, I seriously checked whether I had forgotten it, or the footnote was slightly wrong.

#AIisnotresearch

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Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 27d

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018).

People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

issues, and the results on immigration are
sobering. UK respondents dramatically overestimate how many immigrants there are and how many of them are Muslim. They overestimate what proportion of immigrants are from north Africa by a factor of 10, and from the Middle East by a factor of two, and underestimate how many are from North America. Respondents underestimate how many are Christian, and also underestimate the education levels and employment status of immigrants relative to the UK-born population. These misperceptions are not unique to the UK - they are common in rich countries.

People seem to answer proportion questions in log odds space, not probabilities. And when you know that, there seems a lot less substantive interpretation worth doing.

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · 25d

Any comparable data for Europe out there?

Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 26d

I’m going to need everyone who posts this poll to link to the actual study, which is not new, and shows that, on average, respondents overestimate the size of all small groups in surveys

today.yougov.com/politics/art...

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · Aug 25

First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)

G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · Aug 25

okay ryan, but does it raise or lower trump's approval rating among people who sign up to take surveys in a digital ad-testing production system? that is the only question that matters

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · Aug 22

It’s been a very helpful paper for me personally. Part of me still thinks that if you don’t have a somewhat credible causal design, you just shouldn’t go the quantitative route at all, but this approach is a good middle ground.

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Thomas Lumley @tslumley.bsky.social · Aug 14

I wrote a thing about substituting LLMs for survey respondents
notstatschat.rbind.io/2025/08/15/i...

Interviewing your laptop - Biased and Inefficient

notstatschat.rbind.io

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Andrea Vik @andreavik.bsky.social · Aug 12

If the articles from my PhD were my children this article now published in @bjpols.bsky.social is my favorite. Written together with truly amazing supervisors and mentors, Pieter de Wilde, Oliver Treib, and Lene Aarøe, I had the support I needed in bringing this baby into the world. Summary below 👇

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Kristina Bakkær Simonsen @kristinabsimonsen.bsky.social · Aug 6

Now in an issue @psrm.bsky.social: I show that the 🇩🇰 Social Democrats could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms. Findings provide a central corrective to the popular notion that the Social Democrats were destined to go anti-immigrant 👇🏻

Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · Sep 24

👅Can moral language boost pro-immigrant messages and be as effective as anti-immigrant messages?

➡️ @kristinabsimonsen.bsky.social shows that pro-immigrant actors are not always bound to lose against the anti-immigrant side www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView #OpenAccess

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · Jul 25

Dangerous things are happening in Germany.
We know that a lack of trust is a significant factor in RR voting. Has anyone also looked at whether RR politicians trust the state? These people always seem to radiate intense hatred for democratic institutions. But maybe that's just for show.

Anna-Sophie Heinze @asheinze.bsky.social · Jul 25

Viel wurde über die "neue" Strategie der AfD gesprochen - ich bezeichne diese als "elektorale Ausdehnungsstrategie ohne inhaltliche Mäßigung". Letzteres fällt im öffentlichen Diskurs gerne einmal herunter. Mehr dazu hier (zu hören und zu lesen): www.tagesschau.de/inland/innen...

Der Weg ins Kanzleramt? Wie die AfD-Strategie funktioniert

Vor Kurzem wurde eine Strategie der AfD öffentlich, wie sie ins Kanzleramt kommen will - nämlich mit Kulturkampf und Spaltung. Das Auftreten der Partei zeigt: Sie hält sich auch dran. Von Benjamin Gro...

www.tagesschau.de

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Manuela Moschella @manuelamoschella.bsky.social · Jul 16

📘🇪🇺 Much more than a report
In our new @jcms-eu.bsky.social piece, Lucia Quaglia and I argue that the Draghi and Letta reports go beyond competitiveness - they mark a shift in the EU’s political identity. But this entails huge challenges!

Open access here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Much More Than a Report: The Search for Europe's New Political Identity and the Politics of Competitiveness

Click on the article title to read more.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · Jul 17

Nice but how about these 10 different methods from machine learning instead? 🙃

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Vicente Valentim @valentimvicente.bsky.social · Jul 16

It might be my own bias, but I think many of the individual-level dynamics of the rise of the far right are strikingly similar across Western countries.

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Vicente Valentim @valentimvicente.bsky.social · Jul 16

The Portuguese far right party CH has been growing spectacularly, shattering views of the country as immune to this phenomenon.

This has prompted a discussion about where their votes come from.

Some thoughts on this, prompted by newly released survey data:

Plot with the evolution of vote share for CH:
1.3% to 7.28 % to 18.06% to 22.08%

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Curd Knüpfer @curdknupfer.bsky.social · Jul 14

✨NEW PAPER OUT✨
“Far-right challenges to liberal democratic press norms: ‘indexing by proxy’ in a German immigration debate”
together with Lance Bennett & @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social in
@journal-of-comm.bsky.social.
Why do far-right issues keep making the news? 🧵⤵️
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...

Far-right challenges to liberal democratic press norms: “indexing by proxy” in a German immigration debate

Abstract. This study examines the mechanisms by which illiberal politics make the news by disrupting democratic systems. During the late 20th century, a li

academic.oup.com

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Ian Hussey @ianhussey.mmmdata.io · Jul 5

I am often told that public critique of published articles must also solve the issues found. I think this frequently enforced requirement hinders scientific self-correction.

Blog post:

mmmdata.io/posts/2025/0...

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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · Jun 15

A *null* result I'm very proud of!

Led by Rustam Romaniuc, 35 coauthors from all over France tested nudge interventions to boost voter turnout.

None worked, and we are possibly not surprised -- but a well-powered null result *is* a result!

Paper:

kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

The main figure from the voter turnout paper -- no effect of any nudge intervention on voter turnout.

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Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · May 28

Trade policy update.

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Frederik Hjorth @fghjorth.bsky.social · May 22

🚨 New publication 🚨 : Happy to share that my paper, "Losing Touch: The Rhetorical Cost of Governing" is now forthcoming at @cpsjournal.bsky.social. Short 🧵 about the paper here 👇 1/10

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Ted Schwaba @tedmond.bsky.social · May 20

Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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grand theft eigenvalue 🔆 @akhilrao.bsky.social · May 17

sounds like a great game tbh

I did Liberation Day tariffs in Victoria 3, and it all went well until the famine in Colorado, the 2 lost wars with Canada, and the president beating a man to death with a stick

But apart from that, would recommend.

www.pcgamer.com

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Manuel Müller @manuelmueller.foederalist.eu · May 14

Interesting how security is nowadays framed as a "core task" of the EU 🙃

(In reality, of course, Flanders simply has a centre-right(ish) government that wants the EU to focus on centre-right goals. But since EU policy is traditionally framed in functionalist terms, they talk of "tasks" instead.)

The Brussels Times @brusselstimes.com · May 14

Flanders wants EU to focus on core tasks - security, competitiveness

Flanders wants EU to focus on core tasks – security, competitiveness

www.brusselstimes.com

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Paul Meiners @pmeiners.bsky.social · May 9

@mattblackwell.bsky.social & Olsen also have a nice paper on this problem and how to fix it: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Reducing Model Misspecification and Bias in the Estimation of Interactions | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core

Reducing Model Misspecification and Bias in the Estimation of Interactions - Volume 30 Issue 4

www.cambridge.org

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