Jesse Smith

Assistant Professor, OSU Chase Center | Sociologist of religion, politics, culture & knowledge | The Next Turtle Down:

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

See my latest at Theory & Society.

There's lots talk about the need for viewpoint diversity in higher ed, but the discussion can be vague. I provide clarity re: what it is, what problem it's supposed to solve, and what it should look like in the context of social science. 1/ 🧵

[Jon Green @_Jon_Green]

big update to this working paper: new data, new (simpler!) methods, similar story: the empirical literature on Christian nationalism has measured something interesting, but probably not the niche ideology that it's worried about at the elite level

https://t.co/fc5K9A8tAC

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Great piece laying out a sketch of populist epistemology. Our typical emphasis on possession of propositional or technical knowledge of political affairs a) casts the cognoscenti as superior in virtue by definition, but b) renders even the tip of that class severely deficient since our ignorance will always and necessarily overwhelm our knowledge. Seems like a problematic standard. Hence the need for greater focus on practical knowledge. https://t.co/I1FA1aBppa

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@DanielGullotta Bummer. Though I know experiences vary, but Inhad one a few years back and it wasn’t any worse than getting a filling.

[Stephen Bullivant @SSBullivant]

TRADS event with @firstthingsmag in NYC on 3 December. Please RT.

https://t.co/mIdm8wVfrY

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@taimurabdaal Could use some of that aura right about now.

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@DanielGullotta But if you are really good from now until Christmas…

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@MishaTeplitskiy That’s funny, my experience is that Claude has unambiguously improved the quality of slides compared to the before times. Though it has also rendered them homogeneous.

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Excellent talk from Shamus Khan at LSE (channeling Nisbet) on sociology’s neglected conservative tradition. Themes of legitimate hierarchy, nature, community, and tradition are central to society, and used to be central to sociology as well. They now represent some pretty glaring blind spots in the discipline. https://t.co/OBOviSJzGC

[Brad Wilcox @BradWilcoxIFS]

Some news: Grateful to be inducted into the American Academy of Sciences and Letters (@AASL_Academy) with my colleagues Joe Davis & James Hunter @UVA: https://t.co/JCseBNhBQD

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

This is interesting.

[Azim Shariff @azimshariff]

Victims can be villains. Villains can be victims. But our minds resist seeing people as both.

@paulbloomatyale & I explore our moral psychology and its allergy to moral nuance in this new piece in the @NewYorker:

https://t.co/msLPgtEqV7

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Unironically, though. An insight does not need to be novel to be valuable. Updating, rearticulating, applying to some new problem, etc., are all perfectly legitimate scholarly activities. In many cases, probably more worthwhile than struggling to say something genuinely new.

[John Attridge @John_Attridge]

Many scholars have made this argument. But it's the first time that I personally am making it, which is pretty exciting for me

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@rbnmckenna86 That's interesting. Strikes me as an odd position, but maybe there's an argument that it will be added to some general stock, accessible to AI and ready to be surfaced when needed.

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Important point. You sometimes hear concerns that academic publishing is just going to be AI-generated papers reviewed by AI agents, but in that case, why would we bother? It can’t function without some element of human significance. Though I don’t rule out the prospect that the human signal could become scrambled to the point of unrecognizability.

[Thomas Prosser 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇵🇱 @prossertj]

Ultimately, the social sciences reflect human interests and human interests are inextricably human. For this reason, I think there are limits to the scope of AI incursion into the social sciences.

[Andrew Perrin @AndrewJPerrin]

A few sociological thoughts on the election: culture can trump structure; party coalitions make for overdetermined outcomes; routinizing charisma is hard. My latest for Scatterplot: https://t.co/3ieK2wnvHp

[The Chase Center @osuchasecenter]

All of us at the Chase Center would like to congratulate Dr. Michael Clune, who has been invested as a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Congratulations!

Read the full release at https://t.co/O5L8Ip6Auj.

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@markdtooley That’s not how it’s been used in the past decade of discourse though. If it had been so narrowly defined, it wouldn’t have made for much of a discourse.

[Daniel N. Gullotta ⚓️ @DanielGullotta]

I wonder how many Christian Nationalism articles people are going to write about all the pastors winning midterms...?

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

@DanielGullotta Do it.

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Of course, everyone will have their takes after an upset election, but this strikes me as among the most important lessons to learn.

[Ross Douthat @Douthat60]

At the very least people who told you that serious democratic contestation was going to disappear (because of mass immigration or left-elite cultural power or Trumpist authoritarianism or the undemocratic Constitution) have been consistently mistaken.
https://t.co/lfj7mzSQJS

[Jesse Smith @jessesmithsoc]

Weird how spooky season is supposedly over November 1 even as the weather gets even spookier.