Brad LeVeck

political scientist at UC Merced
Likes: 🌄📸, 🧠🔄🧠, 📊🧪

[Adam Thierer @AdamThierer]

Because this is happening to Anthropic, the temptation for many will be to say: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They have relentlessly raised the regulatory temperature in Washington by inviting far-reaching controls of frontier models. They made this bed and now they have to lay in it.

But this decision by the Trump administration should not be judged on a desire for payback politics, but on the merits, and specifically what it means for America's broader AI objectives.

In that regard, this action is truly outrageous. How exactly is the government planning on even going about verifying everyone who uses this specific model to ensure compliance? That alone raises huge flags.

Between the latest Executive Order shifting more control to NSA, and the recent chatter about quasi-nationalization / equity stakes, and now this action, we are talking about a significant escalation in the politicization of AI and centralization of control over advanced computation in this country. And this is all being done by an administration that had previously made acceleration and winning the great AI race a priority.

We're moving backwards now.

[Jelani Nelson @minilek]

"The Regents vote went completely contradictory to the faculty recommendation to retain the SAT...what I keep hearing from people is your faculty want this. 1400, 1600, whatever. And the January 2020 report that unanimously recommended retaining standardized testing from the faculty, which the Board of Regents then unanimously voted against." -- President Milliken (just now in a meeting of the Assembly of the Academic Senate)

O.M.G.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@SolomonMg @alexolegimas @GoogleDeepMind @KLdivergence @wsisaac @charvvvv_ @kweku_gdm Congrats!

[james hong @jhong]

This is bullshit. The UC Faculty already did a comprehensive 225+ page study in 2020 when they suggested to the UC Regents not eliminate testing to begin with. This sounds more like a tactic to drag and delay, hoping the energy to bring back testing withers away.

---

"But UC is not expected to decide immediately on whether to reinstate the tests - a delay that some professors who signed the open letter said would be too late for the class entering in fall 2027"

https://t.co/Rcej1FDJht

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

🔥Humanities professors unite w/ STEM faculty, demanding the University of California reinstate the SAT

“We call for the UC Academic Senate and the UC Regents to give up the failed experiment of the last 6 years & return to including both the math & the verbal reasoning components of SAT/ACT as part of undergraduate admissions”

[Sean Gailmard @SeanGailmard]

UC soc sci & humanities faculty endorse reinstatement of SAT for admissions:

https://t.co/rOtzAzsFOL

The UC is an incredible engine of progress and knowledge. We need this to ensure our students are those best able to use what it offers and move it forward.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@generativist I’m not sure who he’s saying this to or about, but my mind instantly captions this as “And today, we really do have the perfect guest…”

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@JamesSurowiecki If they were just weighting the sample by partisanship, yes.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@generativist The app you need is

[Justin Grimmer @JustinGrimmer]

There is actually considerable evidence against claims that the variation in electoral institutions across US states have a meaningful effect on the level of fraud in elections. (As I explain below, institutions do matter for perceptions).

Here is one example: one common argument is that voter ID laws prevent the fraudulent casting of ballots. If that were true, then imposing a voter ID law should reduce turnout.

A consistent finding, across many studies, is that voter ID laws have zero or a minute effect on turnout. This fact is hard to reconcile with a lack of voter ID laws facilitating the fraudulent return of ballots.

Likewise, all-mail elections have small effects on turnout and no consistent effect on vote share for candidates from a particular political party.

I'm not aware of a careful study on "ballot harvesting", but we have good reason to be skeptical the effect is large. The total effect of all mail elections or no excuse absentee voting on turnout necessarily bounds the ballot harvesting effect. Also, an individual must have their ballot in hand to have it harvested.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@ClaytonNall One nice thing about the Vanderbilt-WashU report was that it was very clear that the ideology of faculty members isn’t really the problem anyhow (though I do think it causes some problems with university governance).

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

https://t.co/k0E01huV2t

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

To all the people who said I was crazy for constantly saying “thank you” to the agents.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@generativist I think you mean fabulous

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@ryanjmccomb Small N, especially if you subset to the voters who switched after seeing this prompt. Probably only worth theorizing about if another poll can replicate it.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@Afinetheorem Oh yeah. 100 percent. I remember maybe half a year back a lot of people noting how they didn't realize CC was useful even if you don't code that much, and I think those experiences/realizations are still happening.

[Brad LeVeck @bradleveck]

@KevMcCarville @mattyglesias No, because it’s not a statistical anomaly.

[John Patty @jwpatty]

Lots of attention being paid recently to cooperation and public good provision from outside the social sciences, which is great! There are a few "social science-specific" issues, however, with interpreting evolutionary game theoretic analyses. First of a short series this week on a recent paper in Nature by Sheng, et al (https://t.co/eGVM85ntBb)

https://t.co/oa73W0FTG7

#MathOfPolitics

[Sean Gailmard @SeanGailmard]

This line of thinking undermines academia’s self improvement. Perhaps the said authors are saying things they think are true, in the spirit of self improvement; and academia is better served by such inquiry than by rejecting it on the grounds that it might help the bad people.