iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

smh these companies bowing to political pressure

Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

It dawned on me today that Trump could (and I’m afraid likely will) try to run the 2028 Republican primary like a season of The Apprentice

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Reposted by Matt Blackwell

Alex Coppock @aecoppock.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Northwestern is hiring in quant methods (assistant level, tenure track) Please repost and share with those you think would be good candidates, thank you! polisci.northwestern.edu/about/facult... #psjobs #psjminfo #poliscijobs

Assistant Professor of Quantitative Political Methodology (Tenure-Track)
The Department of Political Science at Northwestern University invites applications for a full-time position in Quantitative Political Methodology at the rank of Assistant Professor, tenure-track, to begin Fall 2027. We emphasize methodology with a strongly applied perspective: successful candidates will maintain an active, independent research program that includes methodological contributions in their own right, while also teaching quantitative research methods courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and applying those methods to substantive questions in their area of expertise. We are especially interested in candidates whose work bridges data-driven/computational approaches with design-based inference, though we welcome applicants making cutting-edge contributions in either of these traditions or in other areas of political methodology. Successful candidates' substantive research agendas may be in any area of political science or may cross boundaries; as with all Northwestern faculty, successful candidates will be expected to provide service to the department, the university, and the profession.

Aerial photo of Northwestern's beautiful lakeside campus with political science's new building circled

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Feel bad but teaching my last stats/data science in fall 2023 was getting the last chopper out of Vietnam

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

“Cape Verde” is weird right? Either go full “Green Cape” or just stick with “Cabo Verde”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

university admin when faced with any problem

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I feel like “token czar” might be a hot new career path in the next few years

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

“The coverage levels are nominal” —my data scientist ass trying to sound like a NASA ground control engineer

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

I’ve added a new chapter to my User’s Guide textbook on confidence intervals, where I try to lay out my intuition for a thought experiment approach to deriving the intervals based on chance errors. mattblackwell.github.io/gov2002-book...

Excerpt from textbook chapter on confidence intervals

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Thinking about rewriting my life in Rust

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

My first reaction to this image was “why is Trump reviving Jeffrey Epstein?”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Honey are you feeling ok? You’ve barely touched your tokens

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Still using your own natural intelligence? ngmi…

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

slopguard (v.): to design an object or process to withstand the oncoming tidal wave of AI-generated inputs

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Me, losing an eye: well this fucking sucks. What the fuck. Me, discovering the land of the blind: haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Humans are like knives: you can accidentally cut yourself but you’ll probably keep the damage pretty limited LLMs are like machine guns: you can inflict maximum damage incredibly quickly. As blast radiuses increase, you need more safety procedures not less.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

To be fair, it might also be Tune Random Hyperparameters Until Number Go Up

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

The modern Dean+ species of academic appears more interested in chasing flashy trends to curry favor in nonacademic circles than in actually maintaining the university.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Coming in R 4.6.0 in April… maybe one of the biggest quality of life improvements to the language in years

• × ¿notin: table newly in base is an idiom for ! (× %in% table) and provided almost entirely for convenience and code readability, from an R-devel suggestion, after many years of private definitions mostly hidden in packages, including in R's tools package.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Interspersing either board work or coding into lectures was hugely valuable to my teaching. It slows you down to a more understandable pace. You also will vocalize some of those difficult-to-articulate ways that you work through challenges like coding mistakes or math errors.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

progress update at the co-author meeting

Tweet with the text “TRUMP SAYS "I THINK THE (IRAN) WAR IS VERY COMPLETE, PRETTY MUCH" - CBS REPORTER ON X, CITING AN INTERVIEW”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

Happy 1 year anniversary to this take!!!

Tweet with the text “Rates For Programmars Will Tank
Non-techies creating full-stack web and mobile apps will reduce demand for devs by around 15-20%
This will happen in ~ 3 months and will cause a massive drop in the TO for SWEs. Some elite engineers will still command a high compensation, but even that will last about 12 months.
If someone blindly recommends pursuing a CS degree right now, they are not thinking straight.”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

You see, this time we’ll definitely get it right

Wikipedia article on the 1953 Iranian coup

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

LLMs will usher in a democratization of intellect. Now you too can have a junior (AI) scholar that you can blame for errors and fraud. Previously, only the top scholars had access to that kind of power.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Deep irony about AI teaching/learning in universities: the most useful AI skills right now are essentially *people management* skills (for now!) which most academics (myself included) are pretty bad at.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

Maybe a good bet would help give clarity to the “AI will kill academic papers” debate: will someone get tenure at a top 20 social science department in the next 10 years with the majority of their work being something other than an academic article or book?

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Was thinking more about AI lit reviews, so I gave Opus 4.6 a shot to do a lit review I know well (marginal structural models in the social sciences). Looked pretty good until it credited me with a paper by @smtorres.bsky.social Unfortunately, Google AI overview confirmed by authorship...

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I know the AI hype can drive anxiety about academic productivity, but please remember that an additional paper can have negative returns to both society and your reputation.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Trump will do something insane this weekend just to mess with some poor economist’s shift-share design

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

Say what you will about subjective Bayesianism but at least it’s an ethos.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

The way I think about this is that the distribution of effects is approximately sparse (most effects are very weak but nonzero). Journals/researchers are interested in effects that are surprising given that prior distribution.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

An eternal story: there’s a lot of money/clout/influence to be made in scaring people into listening to you. “Doom is on the horizon, but, lucky for you, I have the answers if you’ll just like and subscribe.”

Tweet that says “I do loathe all the stuff about how you have to use Al or you're going to be left behind. If it's going to be that disruptive, then there's probably not much that you can do. And also there's no skill involved in using it.
There's no learning curve. Can always pick it up later.”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Really curious about this 3-4hr tasks that in the METR database that do worse than the longer ones.

Graphs from METR evaluates showing a large dip in probability of completing a task at 3-4hr human baseline time.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

you really should deal in first principles. Does X(X’X)^{-1}X’y constitute “thinking”?

Tweet that says: It can design websites from scratch, compare bodies of literature at high levels of abstraction, get A-grades at least in practically any undergraduate class, analyze and graph enormous data sets, make PowerPoints, write sonnets and even entire books. It can also engineer itself.
I don't actually know what "thinking" is at a phenomenological level.
But at some level it's like: if none of this is thinking, who cares if it “thinking”

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

On a lark, tested Opus 4.6 on a common academic task: take a 10k word article and shorten it to 6k words for submission to a new journal. I told it to use the command line tool texcount to count words given the known inability to count words. It failed in a fairly funny way…

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Watching Claude code struggle with word count for a tex file. LLMs, they’re just like us

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

One of the biggest wastes of academic productivity is the variation in page/word limits across journals in the same/related fields.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

I’ve seen takes you wouldn’t believe

Is Governor Tim Walz today's Governor George
Wallace?
ICE policies are dreadful, but sanctuary states should not nullify federal lawn

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

The python notebook dependence is one of my least favorite parts of the move to industry. Writing code that gets saved as json instead of plain text, absolutely disgusting.

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Matt Blackwell @mattblackwell.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

AI is going to let academics write so many more papers (derogatory)

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