David Waldner

I teach Middle East Politics, democratization, development, state building, and qualitative methods at UVa. Rationalist who believes irrationally in the Mets.

[David Waldner @davidwaldnerdc]

In "Interpretivism versus Positivism in an Age of Causal Inference," Janet Lawler and I argue for moving beyond the traditional antagonism of interpretivism and positivism. We'd love to hear what you think.

https://t.co/BsyvcAkhby

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

Qualitative Research Meets Causal Inference

This book by @davidwaldnerdc will be out in June

I have read it and think it is a landmark work - it shows how to validate causal claims in qualitative research and provide better explanations

For information: https://t.co/K249zaDwVc

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

David Waldner on Qualitative Research

This book by @davidwaldnerdc –out in June–is a major contribution to qualitative methods. It's full of ideas to improve causal inferences & explanations. It fundamentally reorients the discussion

For info on the book https://t.co/tAf7fBztlx

[British Jnl Poli Sci @BJPolS]

NEW -

A Two-Path Theory of Context Effects: Pseudoenvironments and Social Cohesion - https://t.co/nKExXzJ4xF

- Cara Wong, Jake Bowers, @dktr_dr, Mark Fredrickson & @AshleaRundlett

#OpenAccess

[Elizabeth Tsurkov @LizHurra]

The @nytimes just published the report about my kidnapping, period in captivity & how I was freed. The report contains graphic details about the torture Kataeb Hezbollah subjected me to, in order to produce the false confessions.
The reporters writing the story were respectful and considerate, and did not push me to share anything I wished to keep private.
Like anyone else, I don't want the details about the worst moments of my life to be public. But I know that nearly all victims of the Iraqi militias cannot speak up: the militias either killed them, or they are in Iraq or have family in Iraq, and hence continue to be threatened by the militias.
I told myself in captivity that if I make it out alive, it'll be my duty toward the other victims of these militias who are overwhelmingly Iraqi (and Syrian), to expose their sadism and vileness. I made it out alive. I am safe. I can speak out.

[David Waldner @davidwaldnerdc]

@GerardoMunck Thanks, Gerry! For those interested in this material, my book, Qualitative Causal Inference & Explanation, will be published by Cambridge in 2026.

[Jan Vogler @Jan_Vogler]

After 10 years of doing research in Historical Political Economy, this fall I’ll finally get a chance to teach a survey course on the field.

I thought this would be an opportunity to create a syllabus with an overview of many essential contributions to this growing field.

(1/4)

[Monica Marks @MonicaLMarks]

People who spread murderous discourse like this (left pic) will turn right around and, with a straight face & zero acknowledgement of their own dissonance, claim that a killer who acted out that murderous discourse was a “false flag” plant (right pic).

It boggles the mind.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

We really did it.

We took a growing US manufacturing economy, declared it broken, started a trade war, and ... broke US manufacturing.

In last 48 hours:
- Philly Fed Survey: "New orders fell sharply, from 8.7 in March to -34.2, its lowest reading since April 2020"
- NY Fed Survey: Expected orders and shipments plunging

Again, this is a policy to revive US manufacturing.

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

After Hamas rejected the Egyptian proposal to disarm, its propagandists are now claiming the refusal is due to Israel not promising to withdraw from Gaza.

They’re lying.

Hamas refuses to even discuss disarmament. They’ve declared their weapons a red line—non-negotiable, untouchable, and not even up for discussion, no matter what’s on the table. For Hamas, keeping their arms is more important than saving lives or rebuilding Gaza.

Hamas must disarm. These are the very weapons that have killed countless Gazans, continue to cost lives every day, and are used to terrorize Palestinians who dare to speak out.

Just last week, those same weapons were turned on a Gazan protester. Disarming Hamas is not an Israeli condition—it’s a Palestinian necessity.

[American Political Science Review @apsrjournal]

From our new issue: "The Causes and Consequences of Refugee Flows: A Contemporary Reanalysis" by Andrew Shaver (@AndrewCShaver) et al. #APSRNewIssue https://t.co/3Kt4lt55ng

[Rana B. Khoury @rbkhoury]

New @Wendy_Pearlman and I argue in @JoDemocracy that we must look to civil society as Syria's strongest asset for inclusive change and a better future. But, you might ask: Against these odds? And what civil society, anyway? 🧵1/5

https://t.co/uSzm0hEti2

[Noam Gidron @NoamGidron]

🚨Why do masses support democratic backsliding?🚨
A new @AJPS_Editor paper with Yotam Margalit, @LiorSheffer and @ItamarYakir explores this question in the Israeli context. Our findings emphasize the role of leader attachment and affective polarization.
https://t.co/jYM7yVp109

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲

Here are some books that help us think about how states were created and how they evolved - and that focus on cases beyond the rather well-studied European ones.

[Luis L. Schenoni @llschenoni]

Zelensky vs Trump? The real clash today was @SLMazzuca vs Schenoni at @NorthwesternU An all-Argentine debate. Did war or trade made the Latin American state? That was the question.

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

The vast literature on oil as a curse for several outcomes such as democracy - launched by Ross - is surveyed in this gem of a book by @politiconcology and @davidwaldnerdc

Free download of Ross: https://t.co/gtOcFUldhd

Free download of Smith & Waldner: https://t.co/AibrqHCuBZ

[Daniel L. Tavana @danieltavana]

Excited to share my new article in the American Journal of Political Science (@AJPS_Editor)! "Endogenous Opposition: Identity and Ideology in Kuwaiti Electoral Politics" explores how authoritarian elections generate opposition to incumbent autocrats. Link: https://t.co/zHR5o9ayE8

[Deborah Greenhouse @greenhousemd]

Today I saw flu A, flu B, Covid, Strep, seizures, cellulitis, migraines, asthma and a swallowed penny stuck in the esophagus.
I know how to recognize these, test for and treat them.
They don't scare me.
You know what scares me?
Measles scares me.
And that should scare you.

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

Brilliant, necessary thread documenting how DOGE's claim that it's saved $55 billion is totally bogus, built on bad math, an apparent lack of knowledge of how multi-year contracts work, and simple mistakes like reading $8 million as $8 billion.

[Tara Copp @TaraCopp]

.@FAANews: FAA staff fired over the weekend included personnel that worked radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, among others. Hundreds were fired, just weeks after a fatal mid-air collision in DC killed 67. One employee said they were harassed on Facebook by @DOGE prior to being fired. https://t.co/4BXVfKtgWh