Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Brad LeVeck

@bradleveck.bsky.social

510 followers 680 following 900 posts

political scientist at UC Merced Likes: 🌄📸, 🧠🔄🧠, 📊🧪 faculty.ucmerced.edu/bleveck

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · Nov 19

If I start replying to the papers you post with 📌, this is why.

Gregory Manni @gregory-manni.bsky.social · Nov 18

This feature hasn’t been built in yet, but a user designed a feed that you can pin to home that is essentially bookmarking. Comment 📌 on any post and it’ll get saved for you in the feed. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Chris Bail @chrisbail.bsky.social · 1d

Junior and senior faculty positions in computational social scientists at Bocconi, one of the world's best universiites: Assistant Prof: jobmarket.unibocconi.eu?id=841
Associate/Full Prof: jobmarket.unibocconi.eu?id=843

Job Market - Bocconi University

Recruiting, Faculty, Post-doc Grant, Collaboration Contracts

jobmarket.unibocconi.eu

21 22

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 1d

I hope so, though I’m still a little uncertain about how clumsy you have to be before these contradictions become apparent to most people.

Carr threatening Kimmel showed me there is a line though, which is good.

1 1

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d

Jacob Montgomery @jacobmontgomery.bsky.social · 2d

What people cannot seem to get through their heads is that the justifications the Trump administration uses to attack higher education is a *pretext* not the actual reason. There is no reasonable permanent compromise available, because their actual goal is control.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 2d

Danielle Allen fails the Lando test / lives out the Arrested Development meme: "A deal on the core principles in a compact could then become a framework for negotiating on legislation." Come ON. With this administration and this Congress?
therenovator.substack.com/p/why-im-exc...

3 13 94

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 2d

De Cecco enjoyers across the US must unite.

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 3d

I think the quoted tweet is so unclear about who the “majority” is or what is exactly being “rejected” that it’s basically meaningless.

1 1

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 4d

👇 Midwest correspondent for The Economist

Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 4d

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

32 75

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 5d

This is definitely making me question the “merchants constrained the king” theory I vaguely remember from political economy classes.

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray.bsky.social · 5d

Lmaooooo

16 280 1.5K

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Itai Sher @itaisher.bsky.social · 5d

I support institutional neutrality if autonomously adopted by universities.

But making it a condition for preferential access to federal funding is very problematic. It effectively requires universities to avoid criticizing the government to be prioritized for support.

1 2 20

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Blake Emerson @blakeprof.bsky.social · 5d

UC Academic Council letter to UC Regents and President calling on them to “reject governmental demands that compromise institutional integrity and academic freedom.”

Personally, I’d say reject all demands, since the demands are being made unlawfully.

4 28 82

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 5d

New paper with @hjghassell.bsky.social and @michaelheseltine.bsky.social out in @bjpols.bsky.social.

We develop measures of voter perceptions of candidate ideology and candidate messaging ideology and find that perception's are related to what candidates say www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Plot showing perception of voter ideology of candidates overtime. It is separated by House and Senate. Republicans are drifting slightly to be more conservative, Democrats are mostly staying in one place.

Plot showing messaging ideology of candidates overtime. It is separated by House and Senate. There is increasing separation between parties over time, with Republicans becoming messaging more moderately during the Trump era and then shifting to the right during Biden.

1 17 31

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

UC Merced Political Science @ucmpolisci.bsky.social · 6d

Interested in @ucmerced.bsky.social's Political Science Graduate Program? Connect with our Political Science faculty and learn about graduate study opportunities during one of the upcoming 1-hour webinar/Q&A sessions.
Register for a session here: polisci.ucmerced.edu/grads

2 1

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Sam @samd.bsky.social · 8d

If you live in California, stop what you’re doing and take 2 minutes to call Newsom’s office in support of SB79. Building more housing near transit is good.

Brian Hanlon @hanlon.bsky.social · 8d

Please call the Governor and ask him to sign SB 79!

(916) 445-2841

11 96 430

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Maggie Fritz-Morkin @emeffem.bsky.social · 10d

The cinematography!

WuTangIsForTheChildren @wutangforchildren.bsky.social · 10d

ICE Nazis in Chicago tried to kidnap a food delivery worker but my man was too fast for those slow bastards

1 6

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 10d

WhatsApp deactivation experimental results in Brazil, India, and South Africa mirror those from prior social media studies: big changes in content exposure -> minimal changes in attitudes, decreases in political knowledge, increases in subjective wellbeing www.venturatiago.com/talk/vmtn_wh...

1 14 53

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Grace @gracekind.net · 10d

This is why I say patience is key when working with language models. If the output is directionally correct, or even just wrong in an interesting way, let it keep iterating and see where it goes!

scottaaronson.blog?p=9183

8 6 83

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 11d

It’s not the worst thing about education polarization and GOP war on the abstract concept knowledge obviously, but it does suck that it makes it harder to critique or address trends within/parts of academia that like geniunely could use some reform, because it feels like helping the book burners

9 9 150

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 11d

Better than the first one?

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 11d

Measurement error rules everything around me.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 11d

Conservatives have much better self-reported mental health but if you ask about “mood” instead the gap vanishes which raises the question of whether we’re just seeing a gap in comfort with mental health talk.

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 11d

I do remember having to manually set the white balance on my phone's camera so I could show people what this actually looked like.

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 11d

The best. Pretty sure that was the last game I was willing to make a boot disk for.

Reposted by Brad LeVeck

Sam Khan Jr. @skhanjr.bsky.social · 12d

ACC football

a man in a green shirt is blowing his nose with a paper bag while sitting in front of a lamp .

ALT: a man in a green shirt is blowing his nose with a paper bag while sitting in front of a lamp .

media.tenor.com

1 13

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 12d

Scientists have actually done a lot to raise the bar on what findings are published. But, we don't have similarly rigorous norms about how we discuss research online and in the media, probably because that's harder to do while respecting academic freedom and free speech.
bsky.app/profile/brad...

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 12d

What potential solutions do you have in mind that are being ignored?

There has been a lot of recent work on creating new norms and standards that make it harder to publish low quality research in journals. E.g. requiring pre-registration of hypothesis tests and replication materials.

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 12d

I would frame this more in terms of how we promote and discuss certain findings, rather than the quality of the work itself.

What I've seen is that researchers are much more likely to promote lower quality findings or tenuous interpretations of quality findings when we agree with them politically.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias.bsky.social · 12d

To try to be restrained and persuasive:

1) Academic work (like most things) is of varying quality

2) There is an enormous leftward ideological skew to the lowest-quality work

3) 1 + 2 makes it hard for credentialed "expertise" to be credible even when most experts are good

Brad LeVeck @bradleveck.bsky.social · 12d

Public perception hasn't caught up to the fact that gaming now dwarfs Hollywood and the music industry in terms of $$$. It is basically like buying a major movie studio 20 years ago.