i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time
Like, sure. Elites engaging in pedophilia, rape, abuse, and enrichment is more the norm than not in the span of human history. But at some level I still don't understand how on earth the Epstein saga happened the way that it did.
And this - I don't even want to say lack of accountability, because it's closer to "lack of even the most minimal social sanction" - is presumably why these things just keep happening. A decade of revelations about decades more of unchecked pedophilia and rape and abuse and enrichment.
The fact of their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, which apparently spanned more than 30 years, does not come up in the first page of a Google search about them.
And I have morbidly(?) followed what has happened to them in the years since. But the answer is basically nothing. Their net worth has increased. Their philanthropy and political donations are written up in national publications. The husband has a speaker series.
As a newly-minted BA, I got a job offer to tutor the child of a billionaire and his wife.
(Which I turned down. In the interview, the wife asked if I was Jewish, then said "but you look Asian!" She also told me that my hourly rate was too high.)
That couple has been in every Epstein files wave.
I dug up a blog post that I wrote in March 2020, as an MSW student and an editor-in-chief of the Columbia Social Work Review, and I pretty much stand by what I said then: journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cs...
It seems like an expression of privilege, naivete, or inhumanity to say that COVID mitigation was not worth it.
Lockdowns have consequences and implementation sucked. I'm teaching that generation now.
But also - more than 1 million Americans died.
Designing survey recruitment materials right now and I feel like a walking/talking "Graphic Design Is My Passion" meme...
This makes me think of Bhaskar but I can't decide if he would be rolling over in his grave at the idea that philosophy could determine science in that way or whether he would actually be on board with the idea that methodologists are philosophers not doing the real work of science...
Maybe it would have been cleaner just to say that there is no formal reason that the human behavior is inherently less knowable/study-able than the cells inside those humans.
Hmm 'closed universe' may not have been the right language. My point was that we, like most scientists (excluding some theoretical physicists), operate as though the world is closed to the extent that we can - at bare minimum - predict the past without having to worry about mystical interventions.
The ultimate capsule wardrobe. Also imagining senior scholars at conference being followed by flocks of grad students in matching specially monogrammed lab coats.
Personally I'm okay with that modus vivendi! Folks don't all need to use the scientific method to have productive intellectual exchanges about politics.
My hotter take is that a lot of methods research (including some of my own) isn't per se science either, even though it's contributing to science.
Look, if the mass public felt that we needed to wear lab coats, I could be convinced. 😂
Interestingly, this kind of thing is part of why my department likes being 'Government' rather than 'Political Science.' Not everyone who studies politics identifies with the latter term.
IMO at least two big things are at stake:
(1) The standards that the field enforces for research.
(2) The type of authority that we claim when engaging in public discourse. E.g., philosophers, historians, & economists all contribute to public debates - but claiming very different mantles.
Ahem. Political science is the *best* science.
In all seriousness: Political scientists use the scientific method. And it's not like the political world is mystical/made-up. Assuming a closed physical universe, human behavior has some explanation - it's just hard to identify.*
*In all senses
I just learned that Cornell Govt grad students will lead a jeopardy game, featuring faculty trivia, at the end-of-semester party.
Learning this is how I also learned that Yale Poli Sci was probably unusual for having a student-written skit full-on *roasting* faculty at the department party...
I really like the idea of highlighting that nomenclature distinction. I have been fast-and-loose with those terms (see above!), and I'm convinced that it's a useful distinction.
But either way, I think that it's not just survey experiments that can fall outside the credibility revolution category!
I don't even know if I like that example of why we have to think carefully about what question a given experiment answers. It's exceedingly not-cute... But it always seems to get the point across that political scientists often want to test theories and only some experiments can support that goal!
I say often to students: If I were studying back pain, I *could* run a study where I randomly punch people in the back & *would* find evidence that punches cause back pain. But that answers the question "how do I cause more back pain going forward" not "what accounts for most people's back pain."
Cool post!
IMO the point recalls the effects-of-causes/ causes-of-effects debate.
E.g., some real-world RCTs do not aim to test a scalable intervention, but instead to test a theorized causal relationship. These studies are causal, but they seem distinct from the credibility revolution idea.
I would be grateful for school-level scaling of LLM management, if only to signal to students that they have to think about LLMs and respect different class policies. During my new faculty orientation, all the incoming APs could talk about was handling LLM use - but we're all on our own with it.
In general, I spent a lot of time at the start of the semester expectation-setting and discussing with the students why our particular course would not allow LLMs, and I've been pretty happy with how it's going.
This my approach for my undergraduate writing seminar - which is part of a Cornell series of classes explicitly supposed to teach students how to write. But it's definitely labor-intensive!
It's not like there won't be solutions. But it's a real interruption in the production of scientific knowledge.
This is an absolute crisis time for quantitative research on opinion and pol behavior.
If online survey pools are wrecked, the big surveys like the ANES are losing NSF funding, and the quality/availability of administrative datasets is falling off... well, that's a lot of the field.
@maxkagan.bsky.social I just dug into the politicsatwork.org site and it's so cool!
Political scientists have been letting sociologists dominate workplace research for far too long...
Screenshot of a Politico article. At the top, the Politico logo appears in red. Below it is a photo showing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speaking to reporters in a hallway, raising one finger while surrounded by microphones and journalists. The headline reads: “Jeffries backs Schumer amid fierce Democratic backlash to shutdown deal.” A timestamp says “41 mins ago.” The subheadline quotes Jeffries saying “Yes and yes,” in response to whether Schumer was effective and should keep his job.
I struggle to understand people who hoard power just to refuse to ever use it.
