Steven White

The rare song where I love the bass, guitar, and drum parts equally and can't imagine it without any of them

I think this is the median position of social science academics. It's just that having a middleground/uncertain position on something doesn't lend itself to enthusiastic posting. IRL conversations about AI seem much more balanced than online conversations among self selected enthusiasts/critics.

I've only ever experienced (previously as a grad student and now as faculty) departments that do in-person written exams in a controlled computer lab setting.

But how will I know if someone with an incredibly common name has been cited in a field I've never thought about before

Not sure this will exactly hurt her support among the Teamsters leadership

The historical political economy crowd is about to run one million difference in differences models, but not sure what it will mean, if anything, for more qualitative scholars.

The new Yoko Ono bot on chess.com is actually kind of a neat idea. Based on her 1966 art piece Play It By Trust, all the pieces are the same color. I guess that was meant to make an anti-war point, but in practical terms a lot of chess players can probably keep track of which is which.

I think the poli sci rediscovery of Reconstruction—in emphasizing the Radical Republicans/democratization of the South—has missed the role of finance & industry in the GOP coalition, which only became more influential as time went on. Federal occupation costs $$$ & they were the ones with the $$$.

Are you willing to talk a bit about how much what you've been doing with Claude costs? Obviously no worries if you don't want to share that info. I've only played around with the free stuff we have access to through our university (not Claude Code) and am a bit confused on the price structure.

Pascal’s day trader

I didn't really Shetland was still going in its post-Jimmy era. Guess I have 3 seasons to catch up on.

I'm impressed they at least got the square color orientation correct! It's almost weirder that they got *so close* to getting it right.

So close to setting up a chess board correctly, but the black king is on the wrong square

Update: almost immediately after I posted this, someone pulled a fire alarm so I got to ask @adam42smith.bsky.social these questions while we were standing around in the 15 degree weather.

Also thinking of the way coding used to work back in the day: you googled until you found someone doing something similar and just kind of...copied it and did some tinkering. But probably you didn't cite the post you got it from (though perhaps you should have?)

Andy Hall "coauthored" a paper with Claude. Obviously that needs to be reported. But if I ask it to remind me how to load a .dta file into R or debug something I wrote myself, that seems more banal. Lots of things in between these extremes obviously.

Having finally dabbled a bit with Claude, I'm curious what academic journal editors/etc. see as the line between AI use that needs to be reported (journals are increasingly requiring authors to report AI use) and what doesn't.

Basically I think most of your points are well within the norms of what might be said in a political science academic seminar room, so I was curious about the framing as "people aren't going to like this," etc

I saw this several days ago on X and was curious to see the Bluesky response, but it actually seems overwhelmingly positive or slightly-skeptical-but-in-a-constructive way. I think X and Bluesky both encourage us to focus too much on random outliers, making them "feel" more common than they are.

Apparently only about 25-30% of NHL players are American

Perhaps it's a bit grammatically weird, but isn't it more likely the author is referring to the no college degree part (as opposed to income, etc., being the metric)

It should be illegal to do this in 2026

Personally I think this might be a bit much

Typos caused by half paying attention to what I’m writing while waiting for takeout Chinese food.

I don’t live Bluesky and I think X remains better for some people things (like election forecasting). But I find it too unpleasant overall to use like I once did.

I think everyone would be better off with old Twitter, but that’s not returning. The single site everyone is on is maybe just a thing of the past.

They're gonna do betting odds during the Alex Honnold climbing the skyscraper thing aren't they

Do people just have different (higher) baseline expectations now than in the Carter/Reagan eras?

I think it's worth considering that being a "young Republican" is, in some ways, weird behavior. By contrast, it's normal to be a somewhat apolitical, vaguely conservative young person who ages into voting Republican after they get married and have kids. As this cohort ages, you'll get more of that.