Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 21h

The best version of this song is not in Spotify. You're welcomed.
youtu.be/OQKyMZ8gsPI?...

The Damned - Jet Boy Jet Girl

YouTube video by whammo64

youtu.be

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 22h

There’s always gonna be the temptation to rely on some kind of visual prop that does the thinking for us.

The “stargazing” stuff with statistical tables is another example!

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 1d

That’s not what the word book means

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 1d

It's fine that universities ask for research statements, but they should also ask to see the folder of random half-baked projects that everyone has.

That's were the real potential is 😉

3

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 1d

This besides the point, but there is too much hot dog energy in this title: "Harvard students skip class and still get high grades, faculty say"

2

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, no, you're right. I'm just using "iconic" in the more narrow sense implied by John Mohr in 1998, which I think carries over to "cultural cartography."

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 2d

For example, word embeddings are not "iconic," they’re not supposed to “look” like what they represent.

It’s impossible to visualize a K-dimensional vector space.

And very few articles these days strive to present a 2-dimensional map of "culture" and then proceed to interpret it.

1 1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 2d

IMO, one of the big differences between early and contemporary formal analysis of culture is that we are starting to move away from visualization as a form of explanation.

What John Mohr called "iconic."

1 1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 3d

"The definition of the definition of the situation" is an article I would read 😅

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 3d

"The guts of institutions is that somebody somewhere really cares to hold an organization to the standards and is often paid to do that."

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 3d

We have institutions in place to address both of these problems, but they require people who swore oaths on Bibles to the country & Constitution to do their damn jobs.

Bart at board: The institutions are not self-enforcing

1 2

Reposted by andrés castro araújo

Fidel Cano Correa @fidelcanoco.bsky.social · 3d

Quien dialoga, lejos de negar la humanidad de su opositor, entiende que ambos hacen parte de una misma comunidad deliberativa y que gozan de iguales derechos: Rodrigo Uprimny www.elespectador.com/opinion/colu...

Polarización, discusión, desacuerdo y democracia

“Lo valiente no es polarizar, sino dialogar con quien piensa distinto”: Rodrigo Uprimny

www.elespectador.com

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 3d

My hottest take is that many social science subfield should be doing something more akin to conceptual analysis.

Let’s agree first on what exactly is it that we are trying to measure.

Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 3d

My hottest academic take is that we shouldn’t be using statistics in the vast majority of papers.

2 2

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 3d

👀

Ezra Klein @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social · 5d

Today’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show.

The musician and record producer Brian Eno delves into his experiments with ambient music, his thoughts on generative A.I. and his deep gratitude for the uniqueness of human life.
open.spotify.com/episode/1Dio...

youtu.be/AfYY9v0Q0X4?...

Brian Eno on How Machines Can Make Us More Human

YouTube video by The Ezra Klein Show

youtu.be

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 3d

taps the sign

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · Aug 27

for the love of god, please stop saying that "the purpose of a system is what it does"

1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 4d

eric clapton is so boring omg

2

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 5d

Ah, I see someone else in the comments beat me to it.

1 1

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 5d

I think the difference is that addiction implies the possibility of you “wanting” something without “liking” it.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissoci...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

1 2

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 7d

It’s called the Hippocratic Oath.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7d

Vance: "If you're an American citizen & you've been to the hospital in the last few years, you've probably noticed wait times are especially large & very often somebody who's there in the ER is an illegal alien. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?"

3

Reposted by andrés castro araújo

Thomas Lin Pedersen @thomasp85.com · 7d

🎨 Theming got a huge overhaul with the latest #ggplot2 release. In honour of that @teunbrand.bsky.social has written a comprehensive deep-dive into styling your plots, covering both old and new functionality. Grab a coffee and dive in!

#rstats

ggplot2 styling

This post discusses one function in ggplot2: `theme()`. Find out about the glamour of graphics in this deep-dive article.

www.tidyverse.org

42 140

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 8d

"Movements that abandon their core supporters in pursuit of mythical moderate voters often end up with neither."

Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 10d

Kept thinking about the debate between Klein and Coates and wrote down some thoughts.

6

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 10d

The same applies to people embracing "local" knowledge over more "general," or "standardized" forms of bureaucratic organization.

Jeremy Levine @jeremylevine.bsky.social · 10d

It’s a remarkable blind spot, I learned while engaging with activists when I wrote my first book. Just a fundamental ignorance to the fact that “the community” *also* means NIMBYs, Moms for Liberty, lynch mobs etc etc

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 11d

there's a tendency in parts of the left to believe that 'community' is the answer to everything but communities are often horrendous!

5

Reposted by andrés castro araújo

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 15d

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review

Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

www.bostonreview.net

200 1.9K 6.7K

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 13d

I'm bringing back the diaeresis to distinguish words in which two adjacent vowels do not combine into a single sound.

coöperation, boat, zoo, zoölogy, naïve, chair, etc.

English speakers dropped the ball. Someone must bring order to this chaos.

4

Reposted by andrés castro araújo

turgut keskintürk @tkeskinturk.bsky.social · 14d

I believe that the experimental paradigm in "polarization research" should receive strong criticism for its thin conception of political culture. I make this argument in a new blog post.

Experiments Can’t Reduce Partisan Animosity
tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/experiments

The Question of Manipulability

I believe that this is a long-overdue correction for a reason. Much of the literature on polarization has operated under a tacit assumption: that political attitudes are malleable.

If you frame an issue one way, you can shift people’s support for particular candidates. If you “humanize” out-partisans, animosity declines. If you push people into a room and make them discuss a question for 15 minutes, you see that ideology is more moderate than it would be1. The implicit theory of political culture operating here is that people’s ideologies are weak, malleable, and ready to be channeled into something “good” if only we have the “right” intervention.

1 That is, they are more likely to be 2, 3, or 4 in a Likert scale than being 1 or 5 on a 5-point scale.

6 15

andrés castro araújo @acastroaraujo.bsky.social · 13d

John Gardner on the asymmetrical interpretation of the rule of law:

The rule of law entails, in other words, an unequal struggle between officialdom and the rest of us. It places burdens on the law and on its officials that it does not place on ordinary folk. We need not be on the right side of the law ourselves to be able to insist, under the heading of the rule of law, that the law and its administrators and enforcers stay on the right side of the law, and indeed give us every assistance in using the law against them when they do not. They, on the other hand, promptly jeopardize their moral standing to use the law against us every time their handling of the situation slips below the standards that the rule of law sets, including when they resort to illegality in their own actions. I will call this the ‘asymmetrical interpretation’ of the ideal of the rule of law. It has the implication that judges and other officials are often morally bound to uphold the law in their dealings with us (including, for example, in punishing us for its breach) even though, as they well know, we were not and are not morally bound by the same law ourselves. Some people find this implication uncomfortable. I, on the other hand, regard it as an independently attractive conclusion, and count the yielding of it as a point in favour of the asymmetrical interpretation.

1