The Duck of Minerva

There's a lot going on in the world, but there's also a lot going on in my world, so here's your abbreviated linkage: Jay Ulfelder explains why big data won't kill theory (or as Dan would write, I can haz quant theory?) [Dart-Throwing Chimp] Seth Masket >yearns for a Neil DeGrasse Tyson of political science [Pacific Standard] Sounds like physics envy to me, Seth [Duck of Minerva] I'm actually normally pretty permissive on issues of pay for government employees, but this explanation of the Jack Lew bonus actually makes me less sympathetic to Lew. He's still incentivized to seek public-sector...

Here's the ten eleven best West Wing episodes you should watch today: Noel Posse Comitatus A Proportional Response kludge

In a nifty contribution to our understanding of LGBT politics, Gallup has surveyed more than 200,000 Americans to ask if they identify as LGBT or not. This gives us what Gallup claims and I'll accept as the first state-level estimate of this dataset. But Gallup mistakenly interprets their own findings (or, rather, do not fully extract as much information as they could). Gallup writes While the variation in LGBT identification across states is relatively small, findings do suggest some evidence that the variation is not entirely random. Social climates that promote acceptance of or stigma...

Another day, another op-ed or blog post saying that the social sciences contribute nothing and that we must be more policy-centric or policy-relevant or policy-synergistic or policy-policy-policy-policy. You know, it's funny. I've just finished reading a history of Bell labs (these journalistic nonfiction books go by quick--about the same time as a movie and a half) and the takeaway was that apparently esoteric research (e.g. Claude Shannon's information theory) can have immensely practical implications. Somewhat like that Tom Schelling guy, who thought that he could say something about...

Tim Burke suggests ways to fix the dissertation, but I'm skeptical that the way to reduce the overproduction of Ph.D.s is to lower the costs of earning a Ph.D. [Easily Distracted] Will Moore wonders what the standard for presenting results as a consensus is; a response to Voeten and Nexon. Via Anton Strezhnev, a critique of Pad Thai. [The Morning News] Yet it’s not entirely fair to complain about the authenticity of Pad Thai. It’s the noodle that’s the most Thai, and at the same time, the least. Before the 1940s, Pad Thai didn’t exist as a common dish. Its birth and popularity came out of...