I find this discourse perplexing because the solution seems straigthforward: make university marks almost entirely dependent on lengthy in-person exams that combine handwritten essays with oral questioning. Why is this even a conversation? Are there implementation barriers or something?

In much of social science, “descriptive work” is a faintly pejorative label, because explanation is considered the real stuff. Why settle for dusty old “What?” questions when you can jump into the sexier “Why?” I get why this is so and am not innocent of the tendency. But I think this is a mistake, particularly in a period of dense and disorienting social change. The trouble with focusing on causality (or more often, pseudo-causality) is it necessarily forces us to attend to a narrow slice of empirical reality that we can get some traction on, and therefore cuts out a whole lot of context (which is usually brought in via assumption or assertion to make the our claims intelligible rather than accountable). Maybe we take some time to paint a more fleshed out picture of what’s going and, and then turn our attention to which theories or explanations might help us make sense of it taken as a larger whole.

Proposal: there should be a University-wide office whose job it is to manage student absences. If you have a good reason for being absent, you talk to them; and they inform the relevant faculty (passively through some dashboard) what students have good reasons to be gone.

New paper w/ @YamilRVelez! A lot of great research on political microtargeting discounts personalization: tailored ads (using AI or not) rarely beat a single-best message. We define two types of microtargeting, clarify when tailoring matters, & showcase a novel audio-based design

Department dependent, but the thing about poli sci is that we shamelessly hoover up anything that works: stats, Econ, psychology, sociology, history, comp sci…. It’s a perfect launch pad.

As a former uni prez...Best higher ed reform no one talks about: raise the ceiling on standardized tests - a lot! Too many top students max out, then compete on expensive pseudo-extracurriculars instead of actual merit. Wider score distribution fixes this.

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