Eric D. Knowles | Lightnews

Eric Knowles

@ericdknowles.bsky.social

1.1K followers 290 following 350 posts

Social and political psychologist. NYU professor. Music appreciator. Californian in Manhattan.

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Political science 30%

Psychology 27%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Eric D. Knowles

Philip Bump @pbump.com · 18h

The Department of Homeland Security and the officials who lead it cannot be trusted to provide good-faith, accurate information about what they are doing and any claims they make should be considered in that context. www.ms.now/opinion/kris...

Opinion | Kristi Noem and DHS do not deserve the benefit of the doubt

Philip Bump: The Department of Homeland Security and its leader have an honesty problem — and the numbers prove it.

www.ms.now

Reposted by Eric D. Knowles

Team Talarico @teamtalaricohq.bsky.social · 18h

James Talarico: When we win a Senate majority, we must launch a full investigation into ICE and haul these masked men in front of Congress so the world can see their faces.

This is the United States of America. We shouldn't be afraid of our government — our government should be afraid of us.

Reposted by Linda R. Tropp

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 1d

This was a paper with @lindatropp.bsky.social and Mao Mogami. 🙂

psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-...

APA PsycNet

psycnet.apa.org

Reposted by Timothy Snyder, Robert West, Rebecca Solnit , and 34 more Timothy Snyder, Robert West, Rebecca Solnit, Dorothy Bishop, Will Jennings, Samuel L. Perry, Tom Shakespeare, Valerie P. Hans, Henning Melber, Philip Nel, Peter Holmes, Joni Lovenduski, Trevon D. Logan, Robert C. Richards, R. M. Wilson, Gerald Friedman, Nazita Lajevardi, Scott A. Imberman, Michael H. Whitworth, Anne Norton, Eric D. Knowles, Michael Müller, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Daryl Adair, Mark Priestley, Kate Starbird, Pauline Stafford, Björn Heile, Umut Özkırımlı, Greg Linden, Tim Stephens, Christina Pagel, Colin Talbot, Markus Haverland, Jeannette Sutton, Virginia Sapiro, Jim McManus

Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 1d

For those keeping score, Bellingcat, The New York Times Visual Investigation Team, & Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the President & his cronies

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Jonathan M. Gilligan, Silvia Secchi , and 1 more Anna O. Law, Jonathan M. Gilligan, Silvia Secchi, Eric D. Knowles

Amy Klobuchar @amyklobuchar.com · 1d

By refusing to coordinate with local law enforcement, ICE is not making our community safe. It is making it less safe.

www.startribune.com/she-was-an-a...

‘She was an amazing human being’: Mother identifies woman shot, killed by ICE agent

Renee Nicole Good, 37, lived in Minneapolis with her partner just blocks from where she was shot.

www.startribune.com

Reposted by Eric D. Knowles

Philip Bump @pbump.com · 1d

In my book I wrote about research from NYU’s Eric Knowles and others into the “minority collusion” fear: that White Republicans in particular have a bizarre idea that non-Whites act collectively against Whites.

Knowles and his colleagues conceived of a way to measure what they dubbed the sense of "minority collusion," the idea that non-White Americans have a shared dislike and jealousy of Whites and that they work together to peel away power and resources to which Whites are entitled. They surveyed a nationally representative pool of White people multiple times from 2015 to 2018, asking them to respond to statements like "Minorities may disagree about some things, but one thing they agree on is that they don't like White people" or "Different minority groups are willing to cooperate with each other in order to take power away from White people." The research team also offered statements explicitly endorsing White identity politics like "Blacks, Latinos, and Asians often vote for politicians from their same racial group because that's who has their best interests in mind; Whites should not be criticized for doing the same thing"
"What we ended up finding,"
;" Knowles said, "was that there was a marked
increase in agreement with the idea that minority collusion is happening over the course of the survey." But, importantly, that increase "was driven only by an increase in this minority collusion belief among White Republicans."

Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social · 1d

Minneapolis public schools canceled classes officials after Roosevelt High School said armed Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders
www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Minneapolis schools cancel classes after Border Patrol clash disrupts dismissal at Roosevelt

Minneapolis schools closed for the week citing safety concerns after an encounter involving armed Border Patrol agents near Roosevelt High School.

www.mprnews.org

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 2d

The very first act of the next prez should be to abolish ICE.

Yes, I know it was created by an act of congress. So do to it what Trump did to USAID and the Education Department. Starve it out of any meaningful existence. Bury it.

Reposted by Robb Willer, Eric D. Knowles

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 4d

What if, and bear with me on this coz its going to sound radical, the Washington Post's Editorial Board could reach out to actual experts on this topic rather than rely on right-wing youtubers?
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/when-volat...

If policymakers who care about work were taking the long view, they would be especially cautious about restricting support for households with kids. Research shows that children who grow up with SNAP grow up to get more education, be healthier, and work and earn more.

In fact, every dollar spent on SNAP and other basic assistance programs has a return of nearly 10-to-1 on government investment, thanks to lower long-run health care costs, higher taxes paid, and less crime. That return is much higher than the “modest at best” return that researchers calculate we got from the 2017 tax cuts–the very cuts that policymakers have now slashed SNAP in order to extend.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[9]

lexichron is a work-in-progress but stable for many use cases. Check out the README and included Jupyter notebooks for more info..

I welcome your feedback!

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[8]

Analysis resources:

- Easily compute cosine similarities and plot temporal trends

- Track and visualize semantic drift for individual words

- Compute WEATs

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[7]

Training and evaluation pipelines:

- Hyperparameter tuning: architecture (SGNS vs. CBOW), vector size, context window, weighting strategy, etc.

- Model evaluation using similarity and analogy benchmarks

- Visualizations comparing model quality

- Regressions quantifying hyperparameter impact

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[6]

Purpose-built for HPC clusters and cloud-computing. Pipelines that take weeks on a laptop run in minutes or hours on a cluster. (Fewer cores? It'll work, just slower.)

lexichron truly shines with 30+ CPUs, 80+ GB RAM, and fast NVMe SSD storage.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[5]

Key features:

- Tunable preprocessing, including case normalization, lemmatization, stop-word removal, and spell-checking

- Vocabulary whitelisting for efficient filtering

- Bigram preservation, allowing retention of semantically interesting word pairs

- RocksDB databases for fast queries

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[4]

Both data-prep pipelines feed into a single word2vec training module (gensim's implementation) for training, normalizing, and aligning yearly models to capture semantic change.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[3]

lexichron implements two data-prep pipelines:

- Google Ngrams: download and filter 1–5 grams in 8 languages

- Mark Davies' corpora: process datasets from English-Corpora.org containing year and genre metadata (e.g., COHA, COCA; this requires a license and access to the corpus files.)

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

[2]

lexichron is for tracking conceptual shifts across years and decades. It efficiently prepares, filters, trains models on, and analyzes results from extremely large corpora.

Although it can be tuned for personal computers, lexichron is designed for parallelization on HPCs and cloud platforms.

Reposted by Robb Willer, Eric Hehman

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

For researchers interested in semantic change over years and decades...

I've created a toolkit — lexichron — for measuring long-term shifts in word meanings using Google Ngrams and other corpora (e.g., COHA, COCA).

Here's the public GitHub repo:
github.com/eric-d-knowl...

🧵

GitHub - eric-d-knowles/lexichron

Contribute to eric-d-knowles/lexichron development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

I think dominance drives Trump more than RWA; "world-as-competitive-jungle" > "world-as-impure/dangerous." He lacks the moral intuitions that emanate from the latter. But I also think he's an expert at leveraging voters' fear- and purity-based concerns to satisfy his dominance motives.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

I can't look at Marco Rubio without thinking of Faust/Gob.

Reposted by Elizabeth Saunders, David R. Miller, Layna Mosley , and 1 more Elizabeth Saunders, David R. Miller, Layna Mosley, Eric D. Knowles

[C][M][F] @chrispps.bsky.social · 6d

for me, the apparent absence of any serious policy process, clear thinking about the national interest or more concrete foreign-policy goals, or effort to look down the game tree is impressive even by Trump standards (1/n)

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d

“.. There is no evidence that anyone on the Trump team has thought about what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year ..

“.. we’re not even 24 hours into this .. Decades later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
fallows.substack.com/p/blind-into...

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

For me, the most important consequence of the methods revolution in psych is that I’m now more skeptical of my own findings. Everything, even well-powered replications, feels “initial” to some degree. I think it’s a healthy development and hope it’s common in the field.

Reposted by Elizabeth Saunders, Axel Bruns, David R. Miller , and 2 more Elizabeth Saunders, Axel Bruns, David R. Miller, Eric D. Knowles, David Darmofal

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 6d

Venezuela is about profit. Trump doesn't lift a finger unless it enriches him personally.

Reposted by Jennifer A. Richeson, David R. Miller, Eric D. Knowles

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 6d

Here comes the profiteering. How much does Trump take for himself and his family and associates? www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 7d

To say that they’re an unreliable narrator vis-à-vis empirical reality is putting it mildly.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 7d

The fact that anyone cares what the government of Israel says is one of life’s great mysteries.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 7d

My brother got me Master Of Puppets on vinyl and I love him very much.

Eric Knowles @ericdknowles.bsky.social · 7d

Yes, the fact that the man who controls the U.S. nuclear arsenal is PROUD OF BEING ABLE TO RECOGNIZE A CAMEL is a bad thing when you think about it.

Tea Pain @teapainusa.bsky.social · 7d

The fact the man with his finger on the nuclear button is constantly being asked to take cognitive tests should concern every man, woman and child on planet Earth.

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