iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 10/06/2026

@pstaniland.bsky.social I appeared on Grand Tamasha 🎙️ with @milanv.bsky.social to discuss our new book on Indian public opinion. Check out the episode here: grand-tamasha.simplecast.com/episodes/wha... And the book is free to download until June 15: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

054

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 05/05/2026

Book Alert! @pstaniland.bsky.social and I have a new Cambridge Element out now — and free to download through May 18. It's the result of nine years of digging through historic survey data on how the Indian public thinks about major powers. Read it here: www.cambridge.org/core/element...

12313

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 19/03/2026

Good reminder for Iran today from Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Betting on “self regime change” is something the U.S. has done before, and lost.

Quote from The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll

Bush administration planners considered an insider coup carried out by military officers to be most likely and most desirable—a quick change of regime that would leave Iraq in the hands of a more manageable strongman. “We made some very overoptimistic assumptions,” recalled David Mack, then at the State Department. “We assumed the chances were great” that military officers would move against Saddam.[19] C.I.A. analysts judged the revolt that spread across the south in early March to be Saddam Hussein’s “most serious political challenge in more than twenty years of power.

041

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 04/03/2026

Thinking a lot about this quote from Phil Klay's Missionaries this week.

Quotation from Phil Klay's novel Missionaries:

"An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanism of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Phillips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”

000

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 02/01/2026

Submit your papers *by 1/7* for SoWEPS-10 at FSU. www.soweps.org/call-for-pap... SoWEPS is a great chance for advanced grad students and junior faculty to get feedback on developed projects. We'd love to see you in Tallahassee this March!

screenshot of the home page of soweps.org

020

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 02/12/2025

Last class of the semester so grad students get to take it easy with questions like: - What does ethical research (not) look like? - What is professional responsibility? - What is the nature of goodness?

030

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 04/11/2025

🚨 New in @bjpols.bsky.social : “Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records.” By Bertolotti, Milliff, Christia & Jadbabaie. We use 12 billion call records from Yemen to measure the civilian consequences of drone warfare. 1/6

1123

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 19/09/2025

Very short summary of this paper:

Dr Strangelove "it could easily be accomplished with a computer" meme rewritten to say "it could be accomplished with a computer if you are careful."

071

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 17/09/2025

It's important to remember the 🐺 Wolf Number 🐺 In 2021 @today.yougov.com found that 12% of Americans said they'd beat a wolf in an unarmed fight ⁉️ When you see a survey response split 85/15, remember: 12% of people will say literally anything on a survey. today.yougov.com/society/arti...

Chart showing what proportion of survey respondents think they could beat various animals in unarmed fight. 72% say they could beat a rat, 23% say they could beat a large dog, 6% say they could beat a grizzly. Original here: https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/35852-lions-and-tigers-and-bears-what-animal-would-win-f

050

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 11/09/2025

Modest #APSA2025 proposal: Move all panels, receptions, meetings, etc. to Stanley Park. Just describe the tree you are meeting under, and count on everyone to find you.

0100

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 06/09/2025

🤔 (I really don't think India is interested in the opportunity to be a treaty ally with the US if they have to drop historic partners who aren't currently imposing tariffs on their exports to do so)

000

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/09/2025

Syllabus plug! Here's what I assign on how to give feedback (of which peer reviews are a special type, imo)

• Blattman, Chris. “The Discussant’s Art.”

• Humphreys, Macartan. “How To Critique.”

• Miller, Beth, Jon Pevehouse, Ron Rogowski, Dustin Tingley, and Rick Wilson. 2013. “How To Be a Peer Reviewer: A Guide for Recent and Soon-to-be PhDs.” PS: Political Science & Politics” 46(1).

• Nyhan, Brendan. 2015. “A Checklist Manifesto for Peer Review.” The Political Methodologist 23(1).

2164

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 20/08/2025

Drones cause major disruption, even without civilian casualties. • Nearby mobility jumps 24% on strike days • 5.3% of exposed people leave their homes • 1.2% remain displaced for over a month Drones cause more displacement than similarly-deadly suicide bombings, gun attacks. 🧵: 2/3

Average distance from home location, -7---56 days after a drone strike. Baseline period t=-2.

Average daily distance travelled, -7--21 days after a drone strike. Baseline period t=-2.

110

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 20/08/2025

🚨 Just accepted at @bjpols.bsky.social! Paolo Bertolotti, Fotini Christia, Ali Jadbabaie, and I use 12 billion Yemeni cellphone records to study the effects of U.S. drone strikes on civilian mobility and displacement. We Find: 🧵: 1/3

Screenshot of title page of article. Download pre-print version here: https://aidanmilliff.com/publication/estimating-the-impact-of-drone-strikes/BMCJ_Drones_20Aug25.pdf

1133

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 19/08/2025

How amazing is ChatGPT! I just tried turning publishers' citation manual PDFs into .bst files. It's a super efficient way to make all your LaTeX citations show up like this: The future is amazing.

Screenshot from LaTeX compilation reading:

or "blowback" violence (??????), while others identify short term violence spikes (?) or violence diffusion due to degraded militant command structure (??).

140

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 23/05/2025

I think the subgroup results in A3 (STEM vs. non-STEM) is consistent with the possibility that some of this effect is driven by things like SB 266 (affects some fields more directly than others) rather than PTR (universal)

130

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 11/03/2025

It's unclear whether university administrators have realized the importance of "hanging together" to protect research and education. Until they do, one thing individual faculty can do is join organizations like @aaup.bsky.social, *AND* their unions (if they exist).

Email thanking the OP for joining AAUP, "the premier organization dedicated to uniting faculty to protect academic freedom and quality higher education"

030

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 13/02/2025

Just for context: Historians estimate that over 15m people fled their homes in partition. Around 1m of them died. www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

000

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 08/02/2025

Finally, what communities does this hit the hardest? The ten universities that will see the biggest shortfalls (as a percent of univ. budget) are in: - TX - PA - NC (x2) - MO - CT - IL - NY - MD - CA (univ. data from most recent find-able public budgets and F&A costs)

Table showing the "shortfall" in NIH Indirect costs among the top 25 NIH-funded universities in FY24. This subset of the table shows the ten universities among the top 25 who are most impacted (vis. total university or medical center budgets).

Baylor, Pitt, Duke, WUStL, Yale, Northwestern, NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, Hopkins, UCSF

32113

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 08/02/2025

Here's a good infographic from AAUP on what indirect costs fund. It's a lot of important things!

Breakdown of the costs of research by direct/indirect costs.

25638

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 08/02/2025

Cuts to the NIH are a strategy to strangle research universities not “reduce waste”

Graphic from United for Medical Research showing that NIH funding produces $2.46 in economic activity for every $1.00 awarded

Graphic from United for Research showing that NIH funding produced over $92B in economic activity in FY 2023

Graphic from United for Research showing that $914M in NIH grants to Florida institutions supported 14,688 jobs and produced $2.78B in economic activity

27795295

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 28/01/2025

Planning to write to your reps or university leadership about illegal NIH/NSF/DoS/etc. funding freezes? Make sure to include local data showing how important federal funding is to your local economy. NASEB neat little charts for every state and cong. district : www.faseb.org/science-poli...

061

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 16/01/2025

Incredible but not super surprising! India-Russia ties have very deep roots and the Indian public generally thinks quite highly of Russia. Indians' approval levels are similar-ish for Russia and US over multiple decades. (these are from a project with @pstaniland.bsky.social)

Over-time favorability toward the US, China, and Russia among Indian survey respondents. Approval of the US and USSR is consistently pretty high from 1950s through 1990s, approval of China much lower.

Indian public attitudes toward the US, Russia, and China in the 2000s and 2010s. Attitudes toward the US and Russia are not substantially different across regions of India.

073

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 06/01/2025

Me: "This paper is solid, I'm feeling like it'll place." Editorial Manager: "You have said that to me before at this journal, and uh..." Me: 😐

Editorial manager screen showing two previous "submissions with a decision"

011

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 25/11/2024

Returning to Michael Burawoy's American Sociological Association Presidential Address after first reading it a decade ago. I think it's a great read for political scientists feeling a lack of purpose. Also, I forgot about the epigraph, which is great: www.jstor.org/stable/41453...

Thisis howonepicturestheangelof history.His face is turnedtowardsthepast. Whereweperceive a chainofevents,he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckageand hurls it infront of hisfeet. The angel wouldlike to stay, awakenthe dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has gotcaught in his wings withsuch violencethatthe angel can no longerclose them.Thisstormirresistiblypropels himinto thefuture to whichhis back is turned,while thepile of debrisbefore himgrows skyward.Thisstormis whatwe call progress. -Walter Benjamin

030

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 17/09/2024

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #93,086! Lol.

010

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 27/08/2024

How do you design credible, interesting social science research about politics? I dunno. But hopefully some of the pieces on this (brand new) syllabus have the answer! www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7m5mj...

060

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 26/02/2024

Oxford UP should sell these as the "what the h$*l did we do?!?" boxed set.

Covers of two books, against an office-style background
On the left: "Death Dominance and State Building" by Roger Petersen
On the right: "The American War in Afghanistan" by Carter Malkasian

010

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 21/02/2024

Making a cross-walk file for the names of Afghan Districts in two different USG datasets and wondering...might we have lost the war because we didn't know where we were at any given time?

Different spellings of Afghan districts in various US datasets.

130

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 05/02/2024

This quote from Feldman Barrett et al. (2007) is about affect/emotion research, but it feels like good advice for a lot of the phenomena that polisky studies. Identifying the causes of X does not substitute for understanding how X is experienced!

A screenshot with text reading:
“Consequently, knowing the causes of emotion is presumed sufficient to answer the question of what the experience is. While expedient, this scientific approach leaves out an important aspect of reality: people feel something when they experience emotion. Describing how emotion experiences are caused does not substitute for a description of what is felt, and in fact, an adequate description of what people feel is required so that scientists know what to explain in the first place.”

010

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/02/2024

I use some cool new ML tools to measure people's appraisals (interpretations) in oral history text in both English and Punjabi, and find support for my argument: People's appraisals are *strongly* connected to their strategy preferences.

Figure 4 from the paper available at ow.ly/EUHQ50QuZHf with a better caption!

100

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/02/2024

I argue that specific dimensions of perception (appraisals) are used for comparing survival strategies. They are: 💪: Your sense of how "in-control" you are vs. violent threats 🔭: How "predictable" or foreseeable you think future threat development is (Fig 2: the argument)

Fig 2 from the paper: A table with predictability on one axis and control on the other; showing that high/low assessments of each predict a preference for one strategy of survival.

Low predictability, Low Control: Fleeing
Low predictability, High Control: Fighting
High predictability, Low control: Hiding
High predictability, High control: Adaptation

100

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/02/2024

I developed a theory that links perceptions to "survival strategies," things civilians do to stay safe. Basically, I argue that the "typical" choices people have during violence look more or less attractive depending on how you perceive your environment (Fig 1: the options)

Figure 1: What are the dimensions of difference that distinguish different survival strategies.

100

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/02/2024

During violence--but really all the time--we are constantly trying to make interpretations and judgments about our environment. We have to do this, because facts don't speak for themselves. This idea ain't mine, and it wasn't Bob Jervis', but I like the way he puts it👇

Quotation from the preface to the second edition of "Perception and Misperception in International Politics" by Robert Jervis

"The world is so complex and contradictory that the “evidence” alone
cannot yield any coherent picture. We are sense-making animals: we are quick to reach interpretations, to tell others (and ourselves) stories about what is happening, and to explain puzzles as soon as we can."

100

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 01/02/2024

Really happy to share this article about how civilians weigh their (bad) options when facing political violence. I hope you will consider reading it, citing it, or assigning it to your polisky students. I'd be very grateful. Here's the paper: ow.ly/EUHQ50QuZHf And here's what it's about 🧵

Abstract of Making Sense Making Choices, available at this link: https://ow.ly/EUHQ50QuZHf

150

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 24/10/2023

Really pleased to share that "Making Sense, Making Choices: How Civilians Choose Survival Strategies During Violence" is accepted at the APSR. @apsa.bsky.social You can see the accepted version here! I'll post more about the paper once it's up on FirstView. aidanmilliff.com/media/Millif...

Cover page of "Making Sense, Making Choices" See here for text version: https://aidanmilliff.com/media/Milliff_JMP.pdf

13610

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 05/10/2023

The aftermath of "Kalyvas in 35 Minutes"

Hand-drawing of the chart on Page 205, but way uglier

050

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 21/09/2023

Still very excited about using some ⭐cool new ed-tech⭐ in classes this semester. Not so excited about my role as cool new ed-tech-support.

DJ Khaled meme: "Congratulations, you played yourself."

010

Aidan Milliff @aidanmilliff.com · 13/09/2023

Florida State Polisky just posted an open-rank IR search on e-jobs. Happy to field questions...and get you answers from my lovely colleagues who have worked here more than a few weeks! www.apsanet.org/CAREERS/eJob...

A fountain in front of a university building at FSU.

020