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Someone compiled all of the Calvin and Hobbes strips about Calvin’s polls of his Dad, which is proof that good people do exist on the internet

imgur.com/a/poll-resul...

New publication! Unelected representation may influence how satisfied people are with democracy, opening up important discussions on the role activists play in shaping the legitimacy of liberal representative democracies. You can find out more below 👇

🛑 Chatbots are not fit for giving voting advice 🗳️

Latest study from @liberties.eu on the Hungarian election shows lack of transparency and reliability in the advice.

Our research shows that 10-15% by now use chatbots for advice, for young voters up to one quarter.

www.liberties.eu/en/stories/h...

Maybe he’s only talking about post-stratification?

My university: "Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered productivity service that uses large language models (LLMs) to help you create content, analyze information, summarize documents, and complete tasks more efficiently."

Microsoft: LOL

(9/9) Although many Europeans want direct elections of the European Commission, the lead candidate process is unlikely to improve legitimacy perceptions.
Without attachment to and engagement with procedural reforms, they might fall flat.

Treatment effects for both main outcomes. No large differences can be found

(8/9) Again, we find no evidence for strong backlash against overturning the lead candidate system.
Even when fully informed and after adding another procedural reform, respondents do not react strongly.

(7/9) As another procedural reform, we add a hypothetical primary in which respondents could choose their own candidate.
Then, we varied whether member state governments would refuse to accept the candidate chosen by the newly elected European Parliament, similar to the events in 2019.

(6/9) In order to differentiate between these explanations, we ran a survey experiment right before the European elections in 2024.
We showed respondents different scenarios how their vote might matter.

A: Marginal treatment effects on satisfaction with the process of the EC president selection, 95% confidence intervals. B: Marginal treatment effects on satisfaction with the way democracy works in the EU, 95% confidence intervals. We find no meaningful effects.

(5/9) Looking at survey data collected right before and right after, we find no evidence of a strong backlash. There are three possible explanations:
1. Europeans were not sufficiently informed.
2. The process is not important to Europeans.
3. Europeans were never attached to the candidates.

We examined Google search interest and Wikipedia page views for von der Leyen around the time of the 2019 European elections. There was a clear spike in attention when she was nominated.

(4/9) We argue that this came as a surprise to European voters. The sudden nomination of von der Leyen is our "unexpected event" that allows us to test how attached citizens are to the process. If citizens cared a lot, we would expect to see a negative reaction.

(3/9) We first take a look at the failure of the process after the European elections in 2019. Back then, von der Leyen was chosen by the EU member states to be their candidate for the head of the commission, even though she was never in the running during the electoral campaigns.

(2/9) The key idea here is that a lead candidate system increases the alignment between citizens' democratic expectations and institutional reality.
However, if these procedures are not followed through, they could have a negative effect on legitimacy perceptions.

(1/9) Can the EU be seen as more legitimate through procedural reforms? The lead candidate system for president of the European Commission was one such attempt.
In a new article, @acgoldberg.bsky.social, @pieterdewilde.bsky.social and I have sobering results:
doi.org/10.1017/S147...
#polisky #EUsky

Judging from what I've read, this is already the new norm.

(4/4) There isn't much data on attitudes toward aggressive or retributive economic measures (especially in Europe). It would be interesting to see how the situation develops as China uses its economic weight more and more.

Average treatment effects and 95% confidence intervals from a 2x2 factorial experiment. Only the high cost treatment has a (small) effect on support for trade sanctions against China.

(3/4) In a survey experiment, we tried a few framing alternatives, but they did not significantly affect the overall results.

Bar chart showing support for trade restrictions against China against support for trade with China and support for trade with the US.

(2/4) Despite ongoing geopolitical tensions between the US and China, Europeans may not perceive themselves as being on one "side" or the other. Even those who want to increase trade with the US do not necessarily support restrictions on trade with China.

Enter the trade war? European public opinion on trade restrictions against China This paper investigates how geopolitical factors shape individual preferences for export controls, focusing on EU–China trade in high-technology sectors. Supporters of a tougher stance toward China...

(1/4) Marius Dotzauer and I recently published a paper examining Europeans' attitudes towards trade restrictions against China.
In five EU member states, we find only limited support:
doi.org/10.1080/0969...

#polisky #ipesky #OA

Text from linked article “There's a much more important difference between clanker and hu-man. A human is a bottleneck. A human cannot shit out 20,000 lines of code in a few hours. Even if the human creates such booboos at high frequency, there's only so many booboos the human can introduce in a codebase per day. The booboos will compound at a very slow rate. Usually, if the booboo pain gets too big, the human, who hates pain, will spend some time fixing up the booboos. Or the human gets fired and someone else fixes up the booboos. So the pain goes away. With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late.

mariozechner.at/posts/2026-0...

Great overview. I assume exchangeability is important here, right (wasn't mentioned explicitly in the post)?

How to Estimate a Mean, and What It Means for Science | Computational Psychology Introduction If I asked you to estimate 30 means, you would probably compute 30 sample means. And you would be provably wrong (well.. maybe not wrong, but at least provably inefficient).

New blog just dropped!

This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓

haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

I mean, if you take away the CIs, it’s just low-tech EDA. Loop over all bivariate regressions, find the biggest R2 difference between linear and squared model.

'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:

www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Strictly speaking, a postdoc is just a doc who posts

I'm not gonna lie: Macron and his generals singing the Marseillaise to a nuclear weapon is a bit chilling.

Partially directed SWIG assumed to generate data for a cannonical 2x2 DID.

This could be an inspiration: arxiv.org/abs/2505.035...

A nicer print.data.frame method showing column types, as well as a subset of rows. Inspired by data.table's print method.

I think the main issue is that many people, quite reasonably tbf, don't like the default base data.frame print method...

But this is easy to override! gist.github.com/grantmcdermo...

Arendt suggests Eichmann is a clown *rather than* a monster. But why not both—a clown AND a monster? It seems to me a key part of the horror of fascism is precisely its pervasive clownishness. There's a mind-rending indignity in having to take seriously rulers who are fundamentally unserious.

The art of politics is not to do what people think. If it was, there literally wouldn’t be any politics. The art of politics is to convert public opinion in the direction of your policies. Not so subordinate your policies to opinion.