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Dean Shamess

@deanshamess.ca
1.4K followers 612 following 36 posts

deanshamess.ca Ph.D. Candidate at JSGS USask // Science Policy, Science of Science, Science and Power and Popul(ar)ism // econ, policy, polisci… whatever works

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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 24/09/2026
I mean…. Come on. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
A quote from Jensen Huang: “ But it turns out that's not society's problem, that's my problem. For society, what they should know is this: We're going to build our company, we're going to build our technology, I'm going to do my work so incredibly seriously that what they get to enjoy is my optimism. I do the same with my
children. I do the same with my family.”
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Ugh. Neither is further institutionalization what metascience needs as a field nor is a centralized metascience that issues science-wide mandates what sciences need. This kind of thing is something I've been strongly against even without an office of metascience at NSF. But I could see it coming.
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The interventionist, top-down, efficiency-driven approach to science policy depresses me even without that power being abused by an authoritarian government that is deeply scared of science and scientists but is aware of and needs to exploit its rhetorical power in society.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
shades of
Batman interrogating Joker meme. Batman in top panel saying "Why would you ruin your career?" Joker in bottom panel saying "I'm an academic".
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Quantian @quantian.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Dancing very very VERY close to saying “OpenAI stole our almost-complete proof of Navier-Stokes from internal access to our ChatGPT sessions because they were desperate to scoop Anthropic” which is absolutely 100% a believable thing OpenAI would do right now cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...
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ICPSR Summer Program @icpsrsummer.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Visit us at booth 316 at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Conference in Boston September 3-5! The swag is choice, and the exhibitors are nice! 😉 #SumProg #ICPSR #APSA2026 #PoliticalScience #SocialScience
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Zander Furnas @alexanderfurnas.com · 03/09/2026
New preprint w/ Jian Gao, @yianyin.bsky.social & @dashunwang.bsky.social. We link campaign finance, faculty rosters, voter files, a ~7,000-scientist survey & bibliometrics to ask if scientists' politics show up in the science that gets made & used. 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...

Scientific institutions are designed to produce and evaluate claims through shared evidentiary and disciplinary standards, yet they are embedded in an increasingly polarized society. This fundamental tension raises the question of whether scientists’ partisan alignment is associated with the production, circulation, and uptake of scientific knowledge. Here we integrate campaign-finance records, faculty rosters, voter-registration data, an original survey of approximately 7,000 active U.S. scientists, bibliometric data, and measures of uptake in policy documents, patents, and news coverage to map the partisan composition of the scientific workforce, the knowledge it produces, and its uptake within and beyond science. We find that U.S. science is politically asymmetric without being ideologically homogeneous: scientists who make political contributions are overwhelmingly Democratic-aligned, and this asymmetry has widened over time, yet the broader workforce includes many Independents and substantial ideological heterogeneity within partisan groups. Among scientists with strong, behaviorally observed partisan alignments, Democratic- and Republican-authored papers are systematically distinguishable in semantic content across all fields, even after conditioning on fine-grained topic and year. Differences in total scientific citation rates are modest and have narrowed over time, whereas citations occur more often within the same partisan author communities than expected under topic- and year-preserving null models. Uptake beyond science also varies by partisan authorship and domain, with the clearest directional selectivity among ideological think tanks. These findings reveal an uneven profile of partisan association across U.S. science, visible in published content and directional attention, but comparatively limited in aggregate scientific recognition. party composition of donors from 1980-2022voter registration (E) and partisan self identification from a survey (F)
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Angela Potochnik @apotochnik.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Who counts as a scientist, who gets to decide what counts as scientific, and are academics relevant to public engagement? Check out this Metascience symposium on Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project. 1/ @mjacquart.bsky.social @metasciencejournal.bsky.social #philsci #scicomm �
link.springer.com
Book symposium: Public Engagement with Science: Defining the Project (Angela Potochnik and Melissa Jacquart)
Angela Potochnik and Melissa Jacquart. 2025. Public engagement with science: defining the project. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book is the ...
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Dietram A. Scheufele @dietram.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
“[LLM] use has increased rapidly and is associated with proposals that are less semantically distinctive from recently funded work. At NIH, such proposals are more likely to be funded and to yield more publications.” #AI #scipol #scicomm #trust www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
pnas.org
The rise of large language models and the direction and impact of US federal research funding | PNAS
Federal research funding shapes the direction, diversity, and impact of the US scientific enterprise. Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly diff...
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 05/08/2026
Got an R&R at a good journal on a project that, at various times, has been described internally as “cursed”, “unfathomable disaster” and “definitely still cursed”. I assume by posting this the curse will return / the gods will punish my hubris. So that’s fun!
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 29/07/2026
Former climbing guide - this is one of the most important and difficult parts of climbing/guiding. There is a deep, inherent tension when climbing becomes a “service” that is 99.99% of the time well handled by clients, it all comes down to safety. The other times are horrible situations for all.
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 29/07/2026
I dunno man, if I ran a $200bn business that largely sells tshirts, I probably wouldn’t mouth off about destroying democracy and equal rights… but ymmv I guess 🤷‍♀️
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Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
The portal to Hell has been opened. End Times are near…
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Jeffrey Lin @jeffrlin.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
We develop a spatial competition model to explain spreading out: inventors ("you", below) choose locations in idea space. As the frontier expands and entry costs rise, they spread out — capturing larger territories, raising R&D investment and invention quality even as knowledge spillovers attenuate.
Diagram showing circular idea space and location of inventor ("you")Diagram showing how innovation expands the frontier
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 23/07/2026
6. On a more serious note, I work a lot in the science of science. The report prominently claims that scientific breakthroughs are far rarer than they used to be, and concludes that this somehow the fault of the funding system. Such claims are egregious misrepresentations of the cited research.
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Jennifer Robson 🇨🇦 @jrobson.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I deleted my earlier estimate after finding an error in the code. The long list (18 pages) of affected goods is equivalent to just under 5% of Canadian goods imported into the US for consumption. That's not nothing, but it's not everything. Source for USTR data: dataweb.usitc.gov/trade/search...
dataweb.usitc.gov
DataWeb
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Daniel Munro @dkmunro.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
“To accommodate the expected funding withdrawal, programme officers…are being required to pull back proposals that have already passed peer review and have been recommended for funding….[M]any of the researchers who submitted those proposals had already been informed” www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative
A proposed clawback of already distributed research funds comes as the US agency struggles with a squeezed budget and a backlog of grant applications.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 06/07/2026
challenging to phrase this exactly right because it'd be in bad taste to use this as a gotcha against all his supporters, but the journalists who very explicitly framed Platner as a rejection of stuff like "HR Lady Politics" or (ugh) "smoothgroins" should take a long, hard, look in the mirror today
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
"The more phil of science I read, and the more familiar I became with different pockets of the metascience community, the more I came to realize how little consensus there is about how to evaluate science. But I don’t blame those who default to thinking the metascientists have figured things out.
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Yet again www.nber.org/papers/w3535...
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🍅🥔🫐🌽 hoopy frood 🌶️ 🥑🍫🌵 @huwupy.kawaii.social · 13/06/2026
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Wonderful news! Journal of Research on Research is launched. "if you are a researcher who researches any aspect of research, then this is the journal and community for you." Worth reading the whole editorial for a transparent and thoughtful account of this amazing community-driven effort.
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Jaap van Slageren @jvanslageren.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Job opportunity!! Are you interested in studying new politicizations of science? And are you interested in how these politicizations could meaningfully be addressed in university education? Then we are looking for you! 🗓 Application deadline: 27 July 2026 www.uu.nl/en/organisat...
uu.nl
PhD: Understanding the politization of university knowledge and education
Are you passionate about understanding the growing politicization of science and how to address these topics in university education?
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Just now learning that raccoons are *legally permitted* to go through your trash
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Elizabeth Taylor @elizabethtaylor47.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Even knowing of the existence of Twitch streamers is an unfortunate state of being, to be vulgar enough to 'debate about them' on Bluesky.app takes one from tragedy to farce
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/06/2026
walking is low key my favorite activity
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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
I watched John Wick and I discovered that labour is capital’s dead wife. open.substack.com/pub/rottenan...
open.substack.com
Things I like about watching John Wick in chronological order
This does not quite do what it says on the tin but it’s close
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
"Science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized....The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery." Excellent essay! ⬇️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Progression without progress
Progress in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance scientific discovery has made it increasingly realistic to envision automated “end-to-end science” (ETES) systems: integrated pipelines t...
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Daniel Munro @dkmunro.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Canadian scientists: I’m taking a look at how Canadian science and regulation (e.g., food safety, disease control, drug development & assessment, etc) relies on American science and how that’s changing. Please send me stories of how you use/used American science and how that’s changed/changing.
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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Experts aren't always right. That's why I put my faith in morons who are never right
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 14/05/2026
This isn't dollar for dollar, at all - the comparison has lots of little issues (and some big ones too). But... Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2024 budget: $1.4bn CAD NIH: $47.1bn USD University of Toronto 2024 R&D: $1.5bn CAD John's Hopkins U: $4.1bn USD
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Timothy Caulfield @caulfieldtim.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
Love this image! I need this "isolator machine" for writing my next book. FOCUS UP! Interesting article: Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says www.nature.com/articles/d41... “...a huge disconnect between what we feel like is happening and what is actually happening."
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
There are a few more metascientific implications I'd like to highlight. 1. When reporting replicability rates, there are multiple levels of uncertainty that needs to be modeled in a hierarchical way, and metascientific practice flattens all to the lowest level, masking much of it in the process.
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 27/04/2026
Certainly overkill in response to me switching to Telus after their customer service was so bad last week…
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
My story on the NSB terminations:
nature.com
Entire NSF science advisory board fired by Trump administration
Members of the National Science Board, which the US Congress founded in 1950, were given no explanation for their termination.
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Science Magazine @science.org · 25/04/2026
U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. scim.ag/4cxQWhl
scim.ag
Trump fires NSF's oversight board
Dismissal of the National Science Board is widely seen as latest move to erase NSF’s independence
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 23/04/2026
How it started / how it’s going — Jay Bhattacharya edition. 2025: “We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree" 2026 : Bhattacharya “has canceled the publication of a study that found that the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits”.

foxandfriends
Follow
"We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree": Director Jay Bhattacharya reflects on his pandemic-era censorship experiences & outlines his commitment to open scientific communication at the NIH.
April 1, 2025A Health Department official said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had met with the study's authors but that they had not wanted to change its design. Eric Lee for The New York Times
By Apoorva Mandavilli
April 22, 2026
The acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has canceled the publication of a study that found jthat the Covid vaccine sharply cut the odds of hospitalizations and emergency visits last winter, a Health Department spokesman said.
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Daniel Munro @dkmunro.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
My friend, Dan Breznitz, begins talks about innovation by asking “What exactly do we want from innovation?” I follow up with “Who gets to be part of the “we” in that conversation?” Here’s our pal, Tom Goldsmith, offering a good answer to both.
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Dean Shamess @deanshamess.ca · 16/04/2026
You should fill this out, if for no other reason than to try to figure out what your own thoughts here are
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself: If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Epistemic Virtues for Scientific Inquiry — Community Survey
In Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino proposed six literary virtues he felt should be preserved and cultivated in literature regardless of how the world changed: lightness, quickness, exa...
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 29/03/2026
And posing a good question is hard in basic science not because we don’t know what good questions are (though in emerging fields that can be a constraint), but because a good question is one that can be answered definitively with data that can be realistically obtained.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 29/03/2026
The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
You're a rent seeker
It's an economist insult. It's devastating.
You're devastated right now.
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Last word: History of science exists. Philosophy of science exists. Science and technology studies exist. There is no excuse for writing about science in complete and utter oblivion about vast scholarship that has produced a lot of knowledge and understanding about what science is and how it works.
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nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Huge result here and the CA jury still deliberating. The idea that social platforms are defective products is going to pick up a lot of steam: www.theverge.com/policy/89991...
theverge.com
Meta misled users about its products’ safety, jury decides
The jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in penalties.
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Foucault's Pudendum @kaitave.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
All the Saxon Musk posting reminds me of one of the all-timers
Dr. Herb Risotto PhD 🇵🇸
@MildCuthbert
My son just looked at the television and said "Daddy, do you think these rioters will register to vote?" He's a 46 year old Vox journalist and I hate him so fucking much.
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Shahan Ali Memon @shahanmemon.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Anthropic doing what it does best: hype this as large-scale qualitative study. Qual research is not evaluated by scale but by depth, context, and human interpretation. Stop assuming that “hand-wavey-ness” is a qual problem just because qual work doesn’t look like large-N quantitative analysis.
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ben @vtben.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
What if in 20 years an actor named LeBron B. James comes along and people spend weeks arguing about whether him or Michael B. Jordan made better films
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