Would you like more than one? I don’t mind.

Steal away!

Here's the idea.

Someone pops into your office and says "Hey, can you tell me about X?" You say sure--you give a 10 minute pitch. You describe the motivation, basic idea, and suggested resources.

I want to write these short pitches down. Here's a first one on power.

An old boss once told me “each sentence should carry one idea and one idea only.” Good, Strunk and White-esque advice.

Love this. You clearly describe how much writing is a *struggle* relative to the often-used description “write it up.”

Observations:
- A surprising amount of good ideas emerge from the small groups. That’s where the magic happens.
- Students who tend to avoid talking to the whole class seem to share more freely after building confidence in the small groups.

Related to this new paper, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

GitHub: github.com/ArthurSpirli...

Gated JOP: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

But to your point, we should require “careful research design” of both descriptive and causal papers. Certainly designs for causal claims have tricky parts, but designs for descriptive claims are not trivial.

But different designs are required to defend causal and descriptive claims (and least to defend them well)—descriptive and causal papers must (usually) use different methods.

(And by “the empirical design,” I don’t think they mean the presence/absence of inferential statistics.)

I think we agree then!

What’s your preferred label for the claim “affective polarization has increased in the US over the last 20 years”?

I’d call that a “descriptive” claim. What do you recommend instead?