mthompsonbrusstar.com
history and bureaucracy in the sinosphere
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I was anxiously early to everything before the COVID lockdowns and now I can't even find my keys until holy shit I'm supposed to be on campus in 7 minutes! where is my briefcase???
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my pride "month" (43,200 minutes) is distributed across the year in the form of being 10-15 minutes late to everything
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š this chronically late homosexual appreciated it, but i get it
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I think if we're going to be requiring editors to do these weird posts, we should ask them to describe their theory of how social science as an enterprise works rather than the editorial standards for the journal. That would be more useful _and_ more interesting.
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I definitely think e.g. a lot more 'micro-journals' would be an interesting competitor to the existing ecosystem in political science. It would definitely force a lot more reading of papers and less use of journal rank as shorthand. The problem, as ever, is who expects to _lose_ in that change.
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I am open to being proved wrong, but I just find it unlikely that the same people who say "there's nothing wrong with the excellence science of a one-contribution article, you just can't publish it in AJPS" would actually read a single-contribution paper published in, say, PSQ, without dinging it.
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coming at this from the outside, i do not really expect there to be a huge difference in the demands of reviewers at AJPS/APSR from the ones at CPS or World Politics (or larger than the sampling variation from the reviewer pool)? maybe that's naive? these are all hard to publish in!
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ofc not to mention
bsky.app/profile/kjhe...
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i don't know the admin history of the UN very well, but the d. of technical cooperation for development only lasted until the 1992 reorg. so it would have been a successor office that got into ICT4D
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that comes later, mid 1990s I think? i'm mostly stuck in the 1980s for now
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real sicko shit
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digitallibrary.un.org/search?f1=au...
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yep, one of the things eventually wrapped into UNDP. Department of technical cooperation for development.
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I am trying to write a piece about the 1980s Chinese state and it keeps accidentally becoming a history of the UNās missionary advocacy for administrative reforms, littered with references to Hoover reports and PPBS
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as Kevin points out, that includes the āliberalsā in various places, donāt @me
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The synchronized laughter in A2 must have felt like a minor earthquake
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Maybe I should just insist on the Chinese guan å® like a midcenutry anthropologist
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gonna need to start being precise about āofficialsā vs ābureaucratsā but ā¦ not today
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Chekovās shaun
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Our conclusion: Apparently "spontaneous" or "emergent" dynamics are observationally equivalent to data leakage.
That is, what looks like emergent behavior may be LLMs drawing on their pretraining data.
Read the full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.23796
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as for where they would go next, based on comparison, Iād need to think more. military a big Q. firing civilians is comparatively easy. who is going to gut the army logistics dept? Thereās been a lot of cuts at DOD and NSC etc but Iām not sure how involved DOGE has been, need to read more.
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v good q, and why Iād want to do both the comparisons. I think the tldr is likely: bracketing courts (lol), while DOGE has top support they will mostly steamroll. if they will break something that fractures support (or if a fracture for other reason), then what? in China, largely rollback.
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@hdoshay.bsky.social , @ktai.bsky.social please stop me from writing something about contemporary events.
i am not built for this. but this idea will not go away
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there are many more reasons students might say the things that the quoted post attributed to a senior that are not damning indictments of education in general or of writing and the liberal arts in particular. just because someone told Ed his writing sucks doesnāt mean he is right about āgen edsā lol
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finally, the interpretation of that post is evidence that this person could have used moreā not less ātraining in writing and thinking.
some questions:
what other explanations might produce those same student sentiments?
how many jobs have 19 year olds had in ātechnicalā fields?
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no one has tried to explain why the liberal arts or learning to write are necessary to contemporary college students? did you know that Google still works? ten billion articles doing that are written every hour these days
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this has got to be among the stupidest things that I have read in my feed in a long time and that is saying something.
learning to write has nothing to do with communication? are you kidding me?
technical fields donāt need good writers? have you ever talked with a senior engineer?
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more than 40 š¤Ø
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what would you assign a motivated undergraduate to help get them ready for this conversation?
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open.undp.org/about-us/open , which is excellent, appears to only contain data after 2011
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if only he knew someone who had been there ... all day ...
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ew! thank you!