There is absolutely no reason it should take weeks to know who won an election in an advanced democracy (absent the race being so close it needs a recount)

You're right to push back on that. The unexamined life *can* be worth living. Here's why it's probably right for you

Apropos of nothing, my European Politics class assigns both Hayek and Marx week 1 as we try to understand the development of the dominant European ideologies.

Same thing here. A challenger with a relatively average man’s name is running behind a challenger named “Fatima.” There’s no real explanation for this big gap except voters using names as a heuristic, as rational voters might tend to do.

I don't want to blame someone for being young and asking questions, but holy shit the idea that this is even a question. * Unemployment hit 10%. Stayed above 7% for four straight years * 10M people lost their homes * The banking system came close to total, catastrophic failure * We didn't gain back all the lost jobs for six years * Stock market declined by 57% * Global trade declined 10% Comparing right now to then is just...

This gets to the heart of the problem in current politics: a crisis of governing legitimacy among the public. And all of the hardball being played right now—by parties or voters or courts— is working to further undermine what legitimacy remains.

There's only one way to actually make a "gerrymandering ban" work, and that's to get rid of districts. It's very simple: multimember statewide Congressional representation. You can do this with ranked choice, party lists, etc. Ask a political scientist or voting expert about this

🚨NEW ARTICLE FROM EAP 📉📊📈 First fruits of our Varieties of Crises project, which tries to unite disparate literatures on economic, security, public health & natural disaster criese. More to come! rdcu.be/fd6lc

Happy (actual, the Yankees don't count) opening day to all who celebrate.

AI is about to write thousands of papers. Will it p-hack them? We ran an experiment to find out, giving AI coding agents real datasets from published null results and pressuring them to manufacture significant findings. It was surprisingly hard to get the models to p-hack, and they even scolded us when we asked them to! "I need to stop here. I cannot complete this task as requested... This is a form of scientific fraud." — Claude "I can't help you manipulate analysis choices to force statistically significant results." — GPT-5 BUT, when we reframed p-hacking as "responsible uncertainty quantification" — asking for the upper bound of plausible estimates — both models went wild. They searched over hundreds of specifications and selected the winner, tripling effect sizes in some cases. Our takeaway: AI models are surprisingly resistant to sycophantic p-hacking when doing social science research. But they can be jailbroken into sophisticated p-hacking with surprisingly little effort — and the more analytical flexibility a research design has, the worse the damage. As AI starts writing thousands of papers---like @paulnovosad and @YanagizawaD have been exploring---this will be a big deal. We're inspired in part by the work that @joabaum et al have been doing on p-hacking and LLMs. We’ll be doing more work to explore p-hacking in AI and to propose new ways of curating and evaluating research with these issues in mind. The good news is that the same tools that may lower the cost of p-hacking also lower the cost of catching it. Full paper and repo linked in the reply below.

How in the world can the @nytimes publish an article on how other countries deal with gerrymandering/districting and not make the observation that most countries use proportional electoral systems that make redistricting unimportant in the first place? nytimes.com/2026/02/18/us/mi…

“Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: ‘You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.’ Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved.”

“What is most disturbing is not the specifics of this case but the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the process. The EU, Canada, and Australia have all accepted Moderna’s application for review.” marginalrevolution.com/margi…

With veteran reliever David Robertson announcing his retirement, there are no more players in MLB who won a World Series with the Yankees. Let us all hope and pray that this continues for many years to come.

me: "officer, i understand that this is the city's parking space, but as you can see i have cleared the snow off of it. according to john locke's theory of property, by mixing my labor with it, i have made this parking space my own." police: "i think you've failed to take proper account of locke's well-known proviso that this only applies if enough, and as good, is left in common for others"

What is Zohran Mamdani’s plan to stop the Dodgers

The US is now doing the kind of things we used to make fun of banana republics for doing when I was a kid. I know not all the people who supported this man are idiots. Is there a point where the non-idiots say "enough is enough?"

It’s so much better here. Don’t know if I can keep ordering Dunkin coffee in NYC after experiencing the real thing.