Profile avatar
stephenvaisey.com
Professor at Duke University. Cultural evolution, political attitudes, social change, nerdy stuff in R. YNWA. https://vaiseys.github.io/
143 posts 2,937 followers 686 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

In October I'll be giving a 2-day workshop at @stathorizons.bsky.social about how to make beautiful websites with #QuartoPub! Learn how to make and deploy personal websites, research websites, an course websites all with minimal HTML/CSS

📣 July 22-25 I’ll be teaching an online short course on how to read and understand statistics commonly found in medical literature — tell your clinician friends! @stathorizons.bsky.social statisticalhorizons.com/seminars/und...

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years. NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

"Learn to code" was always bad advice, unless you actually like to code. College students have the best chance of professional success if they major in topics that interest them. Today in @startribune.com. Please tell high school students and parents. www.startribune.com/what-should-...

Most literature reviews miss the point.
 Not because they’re sloppy. 
But because they treat the literature like a box to tick. In my latest Respect the Marble Post, I carve out a 6-step process to writing a meaningful lit review: catherineeunicedevries.substack.com/p/most-liter... 🧵

Everything @mayasen.bsky.social says here. It doesn't matter if you, say, want Harvard to promote viewpoint diversity more. These threats are unlawful. And giving in to them sets an unacceptable precedent for academic freedom and democracy itself. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/u...

a new article in Political Psychology: osf.io/rhf4q we argue that studies of belief change have an identifiability problem much like the APC problem: the composition of change (who changed or how much they changed) is observationally confounded. with @pablobellode.bsky.social & @stephenvaisey.com:

Learn how to apply #Bayesian reasoning to qualitative research in "Bayesian Analysis for Qualitative Evidence" with Tasha Fairfield (Aug. 26–27). Watch the first hour now and see how this method can improve #inference and clarity in your work.

"My research sits at the intersection of..." Yeah most fatal accidents happen at intersections

Reading anti-AI posts, it’s clear many people assume the point of a language model is to write *less.* This is why they perceive a response like “writing is thinking” as a compelling critique. But when models are used as interlocutors, I find the process actually involves *more* writing. +

#nokings in Durham. The energy here was so positive!

Some thoughts about the military parade in my hometown of Washington DC today -- specifically, the route. Military parades in DC are quite rare. But when they happen, they have always begun, symbolically and geographically, at the Capitol and moved outward. 1/

I'm trying to find someone to teach a short course helping SAS users (specifically) transition to #Rstats. If you are such a person or are willing to recommend someone, my DMs are open!

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

Request: Does anyone have a copy of "The 'big three' of morality (autonomy, community, divinity), and the 'big three' explanations of suffering"? I've looked everywhere online but can't find it. Also: this chapter is strangely well cited for something so hard to get!

We have a lovely new paper out, showing that even ignorant people can be very good at recognising who's knowledgeable based on minimal cues

🚨 Big milestone for Rdatasets 🚨 The web archive now hosts 3400+ free and documented CSV datasets. Fantastic for teaching and testing! And {Rdatasets} is a new #RStats 📦 for easy download and search Web archive: vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets R 📦: vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasetspkg

There’s much to like in the new AJPS guidelines. Thanks to the Editors for their work—it's a tough job! One thing I'm less keen on is the requirement(?) of simul theoretical and empirical innovation. It pushes us toward endless 1-off theories, tested once with bespoke (oft underpowered) test. 1/2

I agree that being a dick is bad. And I recognize that the baseline norms are very different in philosophy ("meaner") and sociology ("nicer"). At the same time, I think we need more public criticism of bad work in sociology. Too much of our criticism takes the form of insider gossip.

guess what, folks: it's GSS 2024 time! as @stephenvaisey.com says, this is the Hubble Telescope of Sociology (hope it remains as it is!):

I just published a new #Rstats notebook to celebrate the release of {marginaleffects} 📦 0.26.0: Survival Analysis in R Please send me feedback, and don't forget to update the pkg for important bug fixes. Thanks to Robin Denz for his amazing work on this! marginaleffects.com/bonus/surviv...

Exactly correct about the motive. But this motive is strong enough to survive 1000 debunkings. Argument is powerless here; what will change minds is gradual roll-out of new uses, and frankly, generational succession.

Amidst all the posts about how NSF funds the basic science that (eventually) leads to marketable products, its role in funding data infrastructure is getting lost. The GSS (1972), ANES (late 1960s), and PSID (1968) are rounding error in the discretionary budget but vital national resources. 1/6

You might think that, in 2025, we would already have an open archive with clean digital texts of millions of public-domain books. But we don't. It's a huge obstacle for students & researchers, and I really hope projects like IDI can start to address it. institutionaldatainitiative.org