iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

I'm really vibing with this collection of essays on the Future of Quantitative Social Science. It flat out has me buzzing. As Kevin Munger says in Chapter 14: "But AI will soon make it impossible for us to ignore the absurdity of the status quo..." rohanalexander.github.io/notes_on_the...

rohanalexander.github.io

Notes on the Future of Quantitative Social Science

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Everyone else in this hackathon is like 20 and me, I'm like, "hey let's please have our theme inspired by 'I want my hat back' by Jon Klassen."

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

All welcome at the workshop in 10 days. rohanalexander.com/tdw.html Also, if you read Ryan's piece and thought "hey, I have thoughts on AI and quant social science as well", please do get in touch.

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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 21/04/2026

I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...

Information manipulation is going to get cheaper much faster than interacting with the world will. I expect that this will lead to the bottleneck in research shifting from production to consumption. We should be preparing for this shift now by building infrastructure that allows us to adjudicate claims and filter work in a world where production is cheap. The current journal system is not well positioned to do this, and so we should be experimenting with new institutions that can.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Please join us in Toronto on the 29th!

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Crystal Lewis @cghlewis.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

9 months in and RDM Weekly has hit 700 subscribers! 🎉 I would love to hit 1,000 by July for the 1 year anniversary. rdmweekly.substack.com

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

The Mythos system card is worth reading. Nuanced and interesting throughout. www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a...

www-cdn.anthropic.com

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Tiffany Timbers @tiffanytimbers.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Our survey closes in just 2 weeks!!! 🏁 Calling folks working in a #DataScience (or related) role 📣 – we want you to fill out our survey aiming to understand if and how practicing data scientists use and integrate #LLMs 🤖 into their data science tasks. www.linkedin.com/posts/tiffan...

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

This Wednesday 1 April 2026, noon (EDT) on zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Yiqing Xu, Stanford University on "Scaling Reproducibility: An AI-Assisted Workflow for Large-Scale Reanalysis". All welcome!

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

This Wednesday 25 March 2026, 1:30pm (EDT) on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host James Tebrake, International Monetary Fund on "StatGPT: AI for Official Statistics". All welcome.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Many analysts evaluate many AI agents doing data analysis - arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 - arxiv.org/pdf/2602.16666 - papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... - arxiv.org/abs/2602.18710 - arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20440

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

This Wed, noon (EDT), on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Zora (Zhiruo) Wang, Carnegie Mellon University on "AI Agents at Work - But Whose Work?" All welcome! Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

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Inessa De Angelis @inessadeangelis.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

New article w/ Lindsay Katz & @rohanalexander.bsky.social in @ausjpolsci.bsky.social! Analyzing Australian House of Reps debates, we find that as women’s representation increases, interruptions of women MPs & interruptions overall decline Read more: doi.org/10.1080/1036... #polsky #gendersky

Screenshot of a journal article published at the Australian Journal of Political Science titled "Do women politicians face more interruptions? An analysis of interjections in the Australian parliamentary debates (1998-
2025)." Authored by Lindsay Katz, Inessa De Angelis, and Rohan Alexander.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

This Wednesday 11 March 2026, noon (EDT) on Zoom - utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 - we host Morris Greenberg, University of Toronto on “The Past, Present, and Future of Scrabble Engines”. Should be a fun one, all welcome! Upcoming/details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

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Emma Zang @dremmazang.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Call for Submissions: AI for Social Science Methodology (Yale) • Keynote: @nachristakis.bsky.social • Panel with editors of leading journals on publishing AI research • Mentoring roundtables for early-career scholars • Generous travel support Discussion-driven, high-quality research.

yalefds.swoogo.com

Home

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I was really surprised at how different the silicon sample results were between GPT-5.2 and 5.4. Light red is 5.2 and dark red is 5.4 and it's an Australian-setting so we're seeing big differences for right-wing parties.

Screenshot showing silicon sample responses to a question about increased gun laws in Australia. There are three question variants, and four parties - the main result is that 5.2 tends to have higher levels of support for restrictions than 5.4, especially for right wing parties.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Two recent pre-prints: 1) "Same Prompt, Different Outcomes: Evaluating the Reproducibility of Data Analysis by LLMs" with Jiaxin (Allyson) Cui, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14349 2) "Benchmarking AI Performance on End-to-End Data Science Projects" with Evelyn Hughes, arxiv.org/abs/2602.14284 Comments welcome.

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Christopher Barrie @cbarrie.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Very interesting "Academic publishing in LLM age": osf.io/9sxnc/files/...

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Alex Coppock @aecoppock.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

Call for Proposals: Data Collection for
Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments
Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath
January 27, 2026
We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se-
lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of
American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality
and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com).
Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously
published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’
choosing.
The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a
meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi-
pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit
to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for
submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.

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Laura Bronner @laurabronner.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Is online discourse getting worse? To bring actual data to bear on this question, we launched the Public Discourse Indicator, a dashboard tracking online comments submitted to several major Swiss newspapers. Our aim here is twofold: www.public-discourse.org/en/public-di...

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

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Kris Inwood @kris-inwood.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Big congratulations to Rohan Alexander & Tim Hatton for their article ‘The making of a nation: Who voted for Australian federation?' which has won the 2025 Sir Timothy Coghlan award for best paper in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review!

doi.org

The making of a nation: Who voted for Australian federation?

Between 1898 and 1900, six British colonies held referendums on whether or not to join together as states in a federal Australia. We focus on New South Wales, which was pivotal to the affirmative res...

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

TFW you accidentally agreed to take your 4yo to Italy tonight, thinking he wouldn't remember, and he very much remembers.

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Tyler Burch @tylerjamesburch.com · 01/02/2026

The better LLMs get, the more data scientists are going to find out the truth.

Always has been meme.
“Wait, domain knowledge is the most valuable thing a data scientist can have?”

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Tiffany Timbers @tiffanytimbers.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Calling folks working in a #DataScience (or related) role 📣 – we want you to fill out our survey aiming to understand if and how practicing data scientists use and integrate #LLMs 🤖 into their data science tasks. www.linkedin.com/posts/tiffan...

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

4yo: I'm running away. Me: Okay. Where are you going? 4yo: Ottawa. *Speechless*

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Monica Alexander @monjalexander.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!

Poster showing speakers for the TPN seminar series

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Tiffany Timbers @tiffanytimbers.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Ana Elisa Lopez, @rohanalexander.bsky.social and my paper, "Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education" is now available (the "Just Accepted" version) from Harvard Data Science Review: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/xv4hxs7u...

hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education

Forthcoming. Now Available: Just Accepted Version.

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Inessa De Angelis @inessadeangelis.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

In the wake of X’s deepfake controversy, it’s surprising and disappointing to see that still only 35% of MPs are on Bluesky. Read more on MPs’ use of Bluesky: doi.org/10.1017/S000... #cdnpoli

Graph showing the number of Canadian MPs with Bluesky accounts, by political party. There are 95 Liberals, 6 Conservatives, 10 Bloc, 7 NDP, and 1 Green.

Source: De Angelis, I., & Alexander, R. (2025). What are Canadian Members of Parliament doing on Bluesky? Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423925100619

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

This Wednesday 14 January 2026, noon (EST) Toronto Data Workshop hosts Amy Mann, Oxford University, on "Measuring the quality of mortality data in high-income settings". All welcome. Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Weird that my uni housemate is 40 tomorrow, when I'm still a care-free-20-something.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

On Wednesday, 7 January, noon (EST), Toronto Data Workshop hosts Ciara Zogheib, University of Toronto, on "Government Data and AI Strategies: A Case Study of Technology Policies in Canada's Federal Service". All welcome. Zoom: utoronto.zoom.us/j/4784708970 Details: rohanalexander.com/tdw.html

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Nothing better than a reviewer's tick next to a paragraph.

Red handwritten tick against a cropped paragraph of text.

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

The best books that I read in 2025:

Boo, Katherine, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity"
Dryden, Ken, "The Game" [HT: Peter Loewen]
Gold, Alex, "DevOps for Data Science"
Hao, Karen, "Empire of AI" [I'd recommend reading Hao and Metz (see below) at the same time]
Huyen, Chip, "AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models"
Lee, Richard, "The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society"
Metz, Cade, "Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World"
Powers, Richard, "The Overstory"
Tartt, Donna, "The Goldfinch"
Vogel, Ezra, "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China"
Wang, Dan, "Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future"

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Bethany Lindsay @bethanylindsay.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

After a year of trying, I finally got my hands on some of the annual financial statements for the Eric Woodward Foundation. They've raised a lot of new questions about the Langley township mayor's pre-election pledges... theijf.org/article/eric...

theijf.org

B.C. mayor’s foundation reported just $8,117 in donations over 5 years

Public service journalism

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

I can't believe Microsoft brought back Clippy. The king is dead; long live the king. 📎👑

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Thomas Davidson @thomasdavidson.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

New paper in Nature Human Behaviour. I use a conjoint experiment to test multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for context-sensitive content moderation and compare with human subjects. Methodologically, this demonstrates how social science techniques can enhance AI auditing. 💻🤖💬

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Chris Warshaw @chriswarshaw.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

PoliSci Friends- I'm updating some MRP-based public opinion estimates. Anyone willing to share micro data from recent nationally representative surveys you've run (e.g., CES modules) that ask one or more batteries of binary questions about the American public's issue/policy preferences?

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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Academia regularly has meetings with like 4/6 of these. 😬

Screenshot from
- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1l7s1aAsNPlNhSye8OsMqmH6pMR32OYGGdLT6VKyFaQE/preview?pru=AAABmv_qln8*GyJ6r-MNC38f8eYUobQLSg&slide=id.ga9d227f816_0_5
- with red flags that include meetings over 30 minutes, recurring meetings, meetings with no agenda, optional meetings, meetings focused on discussion not outcomes.

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