iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Update: we cannot fix the typos, but the office of general counsel will look into them.

Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Decided to fight a windmill today and see if @caltech.edu HR can fix the typos in the official EOE claims in job descriptions.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Come to LA they said; we don’t have humidity mosquitoes they said.

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Mr. Blabalino 🇳🇴🇺🇸💙 @blabalino.com · 20/09/2026

This is an actual public service ad created by the Norwegian government regarding this problem. If you think the Internet sucks now, you're not alone.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Besides the measles, it is a great airport.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Come work with us! And please tell your students to come work with us! #polisky #econsky

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Greg Sasso @gregsasso.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Now conditionally accepted at @thejop.bsky.social. Very proud of this paper. Full paper here: shorturl.at/TjEWx

Abstract: How do voting laws impact elections? We highlight how laws targeting a specific group of citizens can have weak effects on turnout and vote shares but substantial effects on policy platforms. To parse these effects, we analyze a model of electoral competition with endogenous turnout and targeted voting costs. Each party anticipates the direct effect of raising one side’s voting costs: discouraging targeted citizens from voting. Consequently, both platforms shift towards the untargeted group. These platform adjustments mobilize targeted citizens and demobilize the untargeted, muting the net impact on turnout and vote shares—consistent with scant empirical evidence of these electoral effects. Yet, on policy they also hurt targeted citizens and their aligned party. The targeted group’s size amplifies these effects. Our results address party competition, voter participation, and representation, as well as normative and empirical evaluations of voting laws.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Didn’t the Simpsons already do this?

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

After working through second and third derivatives, I am ready to abandon Bayes learning for something with an easier functional form.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

Cue the john williams's jurassic park theme song

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Political Analysis @polanalysis.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Currently in FirstView: In “Measuring the Quality of Answers in Political Q&As with Large Language Models,” @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social and Jacob Morrier develop an approach for measuring the quality of answers in Q&A sessions using data from the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

These always strike me as strong associations and I’ve always wondered how these observed rates vary by field. Eg: effect of family background of becoming an MD/physician or JD/lawyer?

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

If we write papers using LLM generated data, and those papers are then used to create another version of LLMs and then new datasets for new papers, will the process converge? If not, will it be stationary?

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Colin Camerer @cfcamerer.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

This is close to stenography: “An unnamed source told me all these things [many clearly false] so am repeating them to you” How is this different than publishing a press release?

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Next question: does monterey pdf word count pick this up? I dont know if I can sacrifice 1 of my 5 implications for this.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Stand aside \bot here comes \swordcontradict

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Emily Kracht @emikracht.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences is getting hit with a 67.6% cut, worse than other programs within NSF. Funding for archaeologists comes from the division for Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which is facing a 77.3% cut. It appears every post doc program has been 100% cut.

Screenshot of NSF budget cuts to various programs

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Farouk "Peter" Beardsley @sodiumboat.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

I am looking at NSF's budget request, in awe at the disinvestment in learning anything. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov

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Dr. Jessie Christiansen @aussiastronomer.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR, THE PROPOSED NSF BUDGET CUTS NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION PEOPLE FROM NSF ACTIVITIES. FOR INSTANCE, JOBS.

A screenshot of the number of people involved in NSF activities being reduced from 330,100 to 90,000.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

@caltech.edu and I both agree that international relations needs more theoretical models and fitting those models to data.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

And everyone takes it seriously. No beer cans in sight!

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

To the best of my knowledge, skip day involves seniors planning a series of puzzles and challenges for the rest of the students.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Even after 8 years, I don’t fully understand caltech’s skip day, but this is the first year with an inflatable dragon outside my office.

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Dave Siegel @daveasiegel.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Happy to see that this is now out. The R package associated with the project, IRTM, can now be found on CRAN. Or can you still download it from my github. We'll continue to update it over time. This is a brief thread about what IRTM can do. 🧵 (1/7)

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Ha. I enjoy the wake-up emails of code or proofs at 7am

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

I missed the first year student in the summaries. Just wow.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

This is a neat paper that illustrates the benefits of combining theory with new data. You will find this interesting!

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Congrats Brad. Very well deserved. Can’t wait to celebrate at the Wallis pizza party

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

I am never excited for 9am meeting, but today is dissertation defense day!

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Sounds great! Not as great as designing the "whats in your wallet commericials," but still pretty great!

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

I did not know this! What's on your horizon?

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

I started in grad school, and the bookmark is still about 1/3 of the way through. We all need goals.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

My wife and I have been randomly yelling this while the other drinks in hopes to get a spit take.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

But we had those one or two glorious years when ride-share and delivery apps were "subsidized" by VC investments.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

First day of class for the spring quarter

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chelsea g. summers @chelseagsummers.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

This is just to say I have texted the war plans that were in the Defense Department and which you were probably saving for people with a security clearance Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

That's great. I got: something along the lines of "it must be hard doing theory instead of empirics because we are discovering new data all the time but the number of theoretical results left to discover does not grow."

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Brad Smith @bradsmithunc.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

This is a fantastic paper. If you ever wondered “why would I want to use a structural approach?” this paper is a shining example.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Thanks Brad! It took us a bit to hone our pitch on structural over 3 papers, but I like this one the best.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Thanks to the editors, four reviewers and our colleagues who provided lots of feedback on the project.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Overall, we hope the paper demonstrates why correlations between violence and measures of competition cannot detect evidence either or against outbidding nor will they estimate equilibrium effects. And we show how the structural approach can alleviate these issues.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Our second change is we vary each groups’ incentives to compete. When Hamas has greater competitive incentives, both groups use more violence, which is an encouragement effect. When Fatah becomes more competitive, both groups use less violence, which is a discouragement effect.

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Mike Gibilisco @mgibilisco.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

The reason Fatah violence depresses Hamas violence is a discouragement effect: when Fatah is very popular (after Oslo II) Hamas is deterred by a rival that is more effective.

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