iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Twenge being all "causal identification is very difficult and we wouldn't want to jump to premature conclusion, especially not on a major social issue" is... interesting

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 07/10/2026

Basically, AI makes some types of social science easier: observational data collection and analysis, and purely positive mathematical theory. But survey and experimental research is largely harder.

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Connor Ewing @cmewing.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

"Many, many people are surprised to learn" this principally because it isn't true. Montesquieu is cited more times (11) in more essays (4) than Plutarch (3, 3). Heck, the Abbé de Mably is cited as often as Plutarch. And what do citations even tell us? Locke isn't cited at all...

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 07/10/2026

Still upset about that highly cited paper in Psych Science you consider deeply flawed? Now is your time to shine ✨

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Tim has been developing digital tools for decades. At a minimum, he would be able to effectively supervise/check the output of coding agents

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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

science.org

‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences research

Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year

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Dr. Devon Cantwell-Chavez @devoncantwell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Attended my first meeting as an Editorial Board member for @pspolisci.bsky.social yesterday! I remember back in my first semester of grad school reading pieces from this journal and how much they shaped my socialization into the profession.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Daylight savings = perennial hot topic. But what I find interesting here is how invested the survey org (Minn Poll) was in respondents enjoying the survey. Respondents were expected to find taking a poll a bit of communal fun, not an unpleasant civic obligation or something done for a bit of cash

Our opener this month is our all-time favorite opener, accor-
ding to veteran interviewers. No question seems to get a
respondent more in the mood to be interviewed than questions about daylight saving time. We hope it's as popular this year as it has been in the past.

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Christoph Nguyen @cgnguyen.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And we are hiring: We’re looking for a Postdoc to join the project from March 2027 at the University of Bamberg. Applicants need German at C1 level and we are looking for experience with surveys, survey experiments, and/or digital lab experiments. Please Share: www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/ab...

uni-bamberg.de

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Eric Pazdziora @ericpazdziora.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Opera doesn't make money. Opera’s what you spend money *on*.” “But . . what do you get out of it?” “You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,” said Salzella wearily. --Terry Pratchett, 'Maskerade'

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Happened to us at PLOS: I never got anything other than a copy & paste response of the same thing. Talking to an AI would have been a vast improvement

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Implicit here is the other thing that New Yorkers can agree on: how much of a dick Cuomo is

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It's all so dispiriting. So much human labor goes into this and outcomes like this are so demoralizing. Same for receiving clearly 90%+ AI reviews, response memos, appeals [sic!] :(

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You're writing on Milgram, I take it?

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

"Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least they spoke a European language"

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

1) Just intellectually, I think this is interesting in terms of how (pure) LLMs can do arithmetic, especially since this was just making the rounds. 2) Every time Mitchell shows up on here she's both very insightful & very intellectually generous.

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Kevin Riggle @kevinr.free-dissociation.com · 04/10/2026

It has occurred to me that copyright wasn’t really necessary when a book cost as much as a house, and had to be copied by hand by trained professionals. So the direction of travel is that as copying gets easier, copyright gets more important, not less.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Some good notes on the clear, statutory requirement for NSF to fund social science research in the thread

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Elizabeth (Bit) Meehan, PhD @elizabethbitmeehan.com · 03/10/2026

And of the grants that were made in SBE, the VAST majority went to cognitive & behavioral science. Very, very few went to to social and economic sciences. #polisky

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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."

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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses...

The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yeah, I think 5 is a hard ceiling, 3 is probably good in disciplines like soc and polisci with long, rich papers. I'll say that people ignore that these aren't average. Most (!) folks who I see submit >1 paper/year haven't submitted for some time before that.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is amazing. I collaborate on a bunch of surveys and implementing revisions used to be such a pain. Now I just hand the skill the google doc with revisions and I'm done. T

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

On the plus side (I think), he did actually cite the bible and not Tarantino this time around.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I know several journals who are considering this (with much lower annual limits), yes. What do you think would be a reasonable submission limit/year for a journal?

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SocArXiv @socarxiv.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

SocArXiv now has a limit of two papers per week. If authors submit more than that we assume they are LLM-generated and reject them all. Normal humans who need to upload a batch of papers, which sometimes happens, must make arrangements. Also today, ArXiv set a two papers per month limit.

blog.arxiv.org

Fair Moderation, Equitable Access, and AI: arXiv’s Updated Rate Limit Policy

arXiv, and the scientific community at large, are facing a watershed moment. Scholarly publishing is currently changing at a rapid pace, and we are seeing a…

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The Max Weber postdoc program at @eui-eu.bsky.social has its deadline 16 October, for a September 2027 start: www.eui.eu/en/academic-...

eui.eu

Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies

Making a Difference in Global Academia

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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

For my new research unit Politics of Democracy at the Berlin Social Science Center @wzb.bsky.social, we have 3 open research positions. 2 postdocs: 4 + 2 years (100%) 1 doc: 2 years (75%) Starting date: 1 March 2027 (negotiable) Application deadline: 1 November

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Dr Hannah M. Rowland @hannahmrowland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago

I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody &everything.

Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

some descriptive statistics here on the civility industrial complex on college campuses that I haven’t seen analyzed before www.uncivilcollective.org/resources

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Most of the time it's broken in the past has been the arXiv API being down (it's working for me right now, though). Unfortunately nothing you can do about that, though you can try importing papers using their DOI instead (which has data coming from DataCite, not arXiv)

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

3. Campus police provide additional (sense of) security where mostly white upper (middle) class student populations live in poor, largely non-white surroundings (that's not Cornell, but historically Yale, Columbia, UPenn, e.g.)

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

2. Campus police help community relations by dealing w student caused nuisances (parties, mainly) that would be low priority for city.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It's politically easy enough to explain: 1. Campus police can prevent student contact w criminal justice system. They're more likely to deescalate. Chris Hayes talks about that in his book.

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Jeremy Freese @jeremyfreese.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

When it closed, the server was opened to reveal a little man who took a bow.

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GenderSci Lab @genderscilab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Our new paper was just covered in CNET! Check it out here: www.cnet.com/health/cycle... & www.bmj.com/content/394/...

cnet.com

Cycle-Tracking Apps Bring Substantial Risks to Users, New Analysis Finds - CNET

This includes apps that promote the practice of cycle syncing.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

You should not have a soft spot for YLS. Chicago, Michigan, maybe NYU are the acceptable top ten schools to like ;)

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The ways in which the WNBA shows up all over the place in 2026 politics are wild. So much gender.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's certainly possible something is wrong with your Zotero -- none of this behavior changes between 9 and 10, though, so not sure if updating will help. Undo retrieve is still there, too. You can see that the Retrieve Metadata docs are 4 years old and it works exactly as described there.

Undo Retrieve Metadata in Zotero context menu

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The PDF on the right is still attached to a parent item (hence 'change parent item'). Retrieve Metadata only works on unattached PDFs. That's always been the case, though Zotero did at some point (Z7 I think?) start running retrieve Metadata automatically when adding a file on Desktop

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Agreed. I think we probably let some unprofessional stuff get through that shouldn't, but the bar is pretty high. Also, editors should generally ask reviewers to fix reviews if needed. Unilaterally editing/cleaning is usually a bad idea publicationethics.org/guidance/cop...

publicationethics.org

Editing or suppressing peer review reports

What is acceptable and unacceptable in a reviewer report? Read the COPE position to find out more.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

None of this changed, no. Retrieve metadata is still available on top level PDFs and has never been available on regular items. (Screenshot from the current Zotero 10 beta, but identical to current stable v10)

Right-click/context menu from Zotero showing "Retrieve Metadata" above Create Parent Item

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Is that so unusual at the top or just how wide the range is? There are 4 polisci profs (&1 sociologist) across the bay at UC Berkeley that make >300k, e.g. Given admin & athletics salaries, I really don't mind 'top' faculty in top departments and super expensive places making 300k.

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It does help that he counts Tuberville _and_ Kennedy as his colleagues. Hard to stand out in that company...

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Sebastian Karcher @adam42smith.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

In polisci, e.g., we have audited legislators to an extent that their staff will not infrequently spot audit study emails as such. That's really not OK.

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