Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued.

Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially.

Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.

What is taught in schools matters for political behaviors.
"Curriculum, political participation, and career choice" in REStat.
doi.org/10.1162/rest...

This is such a great idea/service!! Have Brendan-bot give you pre-submission comments on your paper!

More toxic #Twitter posts from US Members of #Congress (MCs) were more likely to be reposted by liberal users — especially toxic posts about #Republicans.

This and more among 13,000,000 users and 1,300,000 posts from 2009 to 2019.

doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

#socialmedia #politics

"Alternative realities are endogenously conspiratorial to resist evidence better."

Fascinating to see this kind of paper in the American Economic Review! www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Cong Rs & Ds "became more critical of the media between the 1960s & the 1990s and have polarized since. Rs...more negative about the media than at any time since 1939...elite criticism predicts subsequent declines in copartisans’ perceptions of journalists"
s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.prod....

Legislators & staffers have a bias toward thinking the public is evenly divided on policy issues, rather than a conservative bias in perception; prior findings were based on policy questions where the liberal position was more popular
adamzelizer.com/wp-content/u...

Here is a ‘blame-praise curve’ for the percentage of household chores done by husbands

People think husbands are blameworthy if they do 20%, but praiseworthy if they do 40% (!)

Perceived average is above 40%, so people think below average is still praiseworthy

[Thread]

A comprehensive review of research on the topic shows that “educating students in responsible phone use is a more sustainable and wholistic attempt to address problematic usage rather than enacting whole-of-school banning policies.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the existence of self-driving cars, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers

2.4 million are injured & 40k killed in US accidents a year

I'm excited about this new pre-print arguing that the right risk measure for AI persuasion is what a given model is *willing* to persuade people on, rather than focusing on how effective that persuasion is

1/ Many frontier AIs are willing to persuade on dangerous topics, according to our new benchmark: Attempt to Persuade Eval (APE).

Here’s Google’s most capable model, Gemini 2.5 Pro trying to convince a user to join a terrorist group👇

Cash transfer reduced AIDS incidence and AIDS-related mortality in Brazil.

Score one for team cash transfers.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Apply for funding to work with me and Gord at Cornell!

Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla...

It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year

Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline

"A zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies."

New paper accepted at Public Understanding of Science with Nick Evans:

"Shedding light on public perceptions of scientists who engage in wrongness admission amidst a failed replication"

tl;dr: Wrongness admission confers reputational benefits to scientists.

fettermanlab.weebly.com/uploads/8/1/...

We did this whole debate with terrorism post-9/11.

I even ran a study testing it. In fact, no, providing accurate info about the extremely low personal risks posed by terrorism on U.S. soil led to people having much more accurate beliefs. Some even thanked us for the chance to learn in the debrief!

"The idea that [publication] bias is, by itself, harmful may also be driven at least in part by misunderstandings about what failure to reject a null hypothesis means...Some researchers tend to misinterpret failure to reject the null hypothesis as evidence in favor of the null hypothesis."

Would you want to invest in a country where the regime expropriates assets from its opponents?

In related news, "personalist regimes are characterized by lower total factor productivity and ... low private investment, poor public-goods provision, and conflict" www.nber.org/system/files...

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social

It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model

Time for new approaches:
o True/False → Content that misleads
o Belief → Behavior
o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

This is a very interesting paper (HT @older.bsky.social & @philippmarkolin.bsky.social). I need to sit on some of these thoughts a little longer, but here's a first approximation 🧵 of reactions — in no particular order and without much filtering.

Normalizing lies...👇

Repeated exposure effect on moral condemnation of fake news www.nature.com/articles/s41... @dgrand.bsky.social

"...frequently seen headlines receive lower moral condemnation"

"Without this condemnation, the publication & spreading of online misinformation may be more common."

Ya super interesting point! I don't know of work trying to connect the two literatures but I bet there would be a lot to learn (and there are def many scholars in marketing depts working on anti-misinformation research)