Gabe Lenz
Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley
- Reposted by Gabe LenzI understand the fear and anger. But also: 1) It is connected to the belief that AI is fake and going to vanish, which means that critics who should be helping shape AI use through policy and collective work are sitting it out 2) Lumping all AI criticism/talk into us vs. "tech bros" doesn't help
- New paper in PNAS: Your homicide risk follows you around the country. If you’re born in the historically violent Wild West, Appalachian Highlands, or Deep South, a higher risk of violent death trails you wherever you go. 🧵1/14
- We measure state historical homicide rates, our independent variable, in the 1930s. Kentucky, the Deep South, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada stand out. Since we have state of birth on death certificates starting in '59, we can look at persistence of these high rates in later periods. 2/
- Bivariate findings. Left: people who stayed put. Right: migrants wherever they ended up. Migrants from historically violent states remained at much higher risk even after moving. Kentuckians stand out. They remained at higher risk wherever they went (mainly the safer Midwest). 3/
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View full threadMy wonderful co-authors and link to article: @mvinaes.bsky.social and @annamikk.bsky.social. 14/14 t.co/Ti0DdSOuwf
- Reposted by Gabe LenzIncredible parallels in this Berinsky & @gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...
- Reposted by Gabe LenzResearch: Believing that the mass public in the opposing party supports undemocratic tactics leads people to be more supportive of undemocratic tactics themselves. Being assured that a majority of your opponents oppose such radical tactics increases support for democratic norms osf.io/my987/download
- Reposted by Gabe LenzI went on Washington Journal to talk about Elon Musk and third parties. www.c-span.org/program/wash...
- Reposted by Gabe LenzDon’t trust an observational model with a bunch of arbitrary control variables @gabelenz.bsky.social @alexandersahn.bsky.social Lenz, Gabriel S., and Alexander Sahn. "Achieving statistical significance with control variables and without transparency." Political Analysis doi.org/10.1017/pan....
- New paper. What happens when a presidential candidate steps way out of line, not only with the public, but even with his own voters? And on a highly salient issue? Candidates typically don’t do that—they’re too strategic. But Trump isn’t. He’s good for social science. 🧵
- In the 2020 campaign, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump took a stance out of line, not only with the public in general, but even with his own voters. It’s been forgotten, but even Trumpers were scared and wanted masks and aggressive gov’t action in 2020.
- Trump’s pollsters repeatedly warned him he was out of line with his own voters. The RNC chair and some of his advisors pleaded with him to change his stance. Trump ignored them.
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View full threadLink to the paper link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- Reposted by Gabe LenzEverything indicates that the Tesla protests are really eroding his wealth and are the only thing causing enough business/financial pain to him to possibly change his behavior. www.teslatakedown.com to find a protest near you this weekend. Something you can do to really make a difference.
- Reposted by Gabe Lenz[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Gabe LenzOne way to think about what's happening with Trump getting elected and then waging war on the Constitution and laws is that: It's taken less than 9 months for Trump v. U.S. to almost break the American republic. /1
- Our institutions depend on a coalition of moderate Republican senators emerging. Give Schumer space to help it form.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzPermitting reform: sexy? Not so much. Important? Crucially. Red tape trips up so many critical housing, transportation, renewable energy & climate resilience projects — and we can fix this. Here I talk to my colleagues about why it’s so important that we do. www.youtube.com/shorts/v17C4...
- An underappreciated reason why Harris lost was flat real disposable income growth in the election year. RDI was above trend, but voters care about growth in the election year itself. Between Jan. and Nov. 2024, nothing happened.
- Here is the same period for the 1984 election, morning in America.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzNew 2024 data: Over 50% of GOP fundraising now comes from just 100 mega-donors. Trump’s embrace of the billionaire class—and their embrace of him—will only supercharge this trend.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzMore evidence for the long-term stability and persistence of party id. A change induced by a major early life experience does not decay.
- being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases White support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later www.nber.org/papers/w33365
- Reposted by Gabe LenzImagine if employees of the IRS could give out cards to their friends and family and those with cards didn't have to pay taxes. I could see an argument that this is even worse.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzSince their rollout, I have made heavy use of the custom GPT tools in ChatGPT. Here is a thread of some of the tools that I use regularly (all of them require ChatGPT 4). I think they are most useful for people doing quantitative social science, but some are more general.
- It's added to the fun of writing papers in markdown that copilot tries to write not only the R code but also the paper, suggesting what I should say next. The spooky part is that once in a while it guesses correctly.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzAcross 93 countries, the preferences of the lowest socioeconomic group, rather than those of the median or upper strata, are most predictive of realized redistribution. This finding contradicts the expectations of both leading experts and regular citizens. www.nber.org/papers/w31974
- Reposted by Gabe LenzNY Fed measure of underlying inflation also more or less says we won the war
- Been working on the unicorn problem for years only to read it’s been solved by GPT-4. AGI must be close.
- From this nice article, which I had to ask GPT-4 to explain at several points. www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scali...
- Reposted by Gabe Lenz[This post could not be retrieved]
- We should adopt the phase planetary destabilization in place of global warming. It sounds worse and is the even greater threat posed by global warming. lhttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1259855
- Reposted by Gabe LenzIn the aftermath of the financial crisis austerity advocates claimed that contractionary policy was actually expansionary bc of confidence — which I mocked as belief in the Confidence Fairy. It seems to me now that we're seeing a somewhat parallel myth: the Credibility Fairy 1/
- The real threat to humanity is humans, not AI. Every decade technology makes it easier for a small group to wipe us out. Will AI improve fast enough to protect us from ourselves? Sure hope so.
- I'm curious to hear from IR scholars how much Trump's four years (and the possibility of more) lies behind this increase. How much of it is because Trump undermined the perception of a US backed world order? polisky
- You think it is grim? You're right, it is! Latest Armed Conflict Survey from International Institute for Strategic Studies identifies183 regional conflicts in 2023. This is "the highest number in three decades". Sir Max Hastings reports for @bloomberglp.bsky.social.
- Sure wish Elon Musk spent $44B on catching oumaumua then on wrecking twitter. phys.org/news/2022-01...
- Spent too much time last night trying to understand the oberth effect. A long conversation with ChatGPT didn’t help much but this video finally did. youtu.be/4u6B1BUT_uM?...
- Reposted by Gabe LenzVery excited that @i4replication.bsky.social is going to be doing annual stress tests of papers published in Psych Science. It’s amazing to see what they’ve done in econ & poli sci, and great that they’re expanding to psych!
- Reposted by Gabe Lenz[This post could not be retrieved]
- An example of the ever present tendency of elites to extract from non-elites. Workers are being forced to pay thousands of dollars to quit. www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/m...
- Exemplifies two well established tendencies in American politics: 1. Knowledge about party positions is surprisingly low. 2. People over attribute responsibility for everything to the sitting president.
- Reposted by Gabe LenzFeature suggestion: Editorial Manager Clippy
- Political Science should beat other fields to this obvious next step in improving transparency and reproducibility. Pre-register or justify! From a nice Data Colada post: datacolada.org/115
