Anthony Mancini

Can trauma improve your psychological functioning? I don’t mean posttraumatic growth—a speculative, method-dependent approach of dubious validity. I mean improvement in functioning that directly follows exposure to an acute stressor, such as military deployment, a school 1)

@paulnovosad I live in New York City and have my whole life, and whether I think this is a good policy or not, I find his sadistic glee repulsive.

You can just do things

@PsychRabble Association for Psychological Science is similarly unhealthy and has seen plummeting membership. This symposium suggests why (a sense of irony not their strong suit): psychologicalscience.org/publications/o…

New post, link in thread below. Why I consider one of the major social psych organizations deeply unhealthy.

@JoyceCarolOates I’m a tenured full professor, and I can rarely recall anything but a left perspective at faculty meetings.

anyone who says "academia went far left" has spent little time at a university department meeting or senate. in fact, anyone who says "academia" isn't on any university payroll.

@CUNY_Prof You bet, a professor as well.

If you follow me, support Zionists (or are one), and you would like me to follow you back, please drop a line on this post's thread, and I'm in! All of us must support all of each other!

@birchlse It’s obviously in both places, in the mind and on the apple. 🍎

I suspect you need to first be shaken out of naive realism (e.g. by reading Descartes) to grasp the phenomenal/access distinction. If you think the redness is out there on the apple, where it seems to be, you'll have absolutely no idea what the philosophers are talking about.

@mboudry Marcuse is similarly impenetrable. You have to read his sentences twice, and they often make less sense the second time.

Finally managed (or forced myself) to read this famous book cover to cover—and it’s even worse than I expected. From the very first page, it’s an endless stream of—there’s no polite way to say this—verbal diarrhea: aggressively pretentious, deliberately obscure, almost totally incoherent. And when it is more or less intelligible, it’s tedious and predictable: ➡️capitalism / bourgeois / modernity / family = BAD ➡️disruption / revolution / deterritorialization = GOOD Even Michel Foucault’s fawning introduction comes across as lucid and almost reasonable by comparison. And while Gilles Deleuze struck his “radical chic” pose, he himself lived a thoroughly bourgeois life in Paris and barely ventured beyond his own doorstep. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a philosophy professor and renegade psychoanalyst who was knee-deep into this shit early in his career. His reaction: “You actually READ that book? Even I couldn’t stomach it back then.” It’s astonishing that this kind of drivel was ever taken seriously—and still is, in some quarters. (Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari)

@JohnHolbein1 As an editor, I’m particularly fond of them when done well. Which is not so easy.

Contrary to popular belief, writing null effects papers is tremendously fun

@amandafortini I still remember reading this—when it appeared—in the New Yorker, lo so many decades ago.

Every year about this time, I need to read this poem. Maybe you do too. “You Want A Social Life, With Friends,” by Kenneth Koch

@NathanJRobinson Joyful? Most people I know find him, by far, the most divisive mayor in history. I’m a lifelong New Yorker. Are you?

Kind of crazy that Mamdani's first three months are also the lowest murder rate ever for the first three months of the year. I'm not saying Mamdani's joyful community spirit makes people stop wanting to kill each other, but the correlation is striking

True, causal inference is not a statistical problem, but very few statisticians understand this limitation and, in many universiities, statisticians control "data science" and "machine learning" -- fields that include causal inference. The psychological barriers that prevent statisticians from understanding causal inference are important for anyone who hopes and labors to remove them. Historians of science will ask some day: "Why did it take half a century for causal inference to penetrate higher education, machine learning technology, and RCT practice?" They will find my email conversations with statisticians like Dempster and Lindley to be invaluable. That is why I occasionally quote them on this platform -- treasures of philosophy and history of science. @soboleffspaces @eliasbareinboim @analisereal @ylecun @f2harrell @ConjectureInst @DavidDeutschOxf

“Government critics are not suspects and free speech is not a crime. The First Amendment protects our right to criticize the government anonymously — an American tradition that dates back to the founding. So far, the government hasn’t been able to point to a single Reddit post that’s not protected by the First Amendment. Not one.” FIRE statement on the government’s attempts to unmask Reddit critic fire.org/news/fire-stat… via @TheFIREorg

Important reading: Historian Simon Schama: With parts of London ‘no-go zones,’ Jews have lost basic civil rights timesofisrael.com/historian-simo… via @timesofisrael

@libbyemmons Hey cuz @formerleftwingr. Nice work!

So many Democrats oppose California's ban on telling kids they are not the opposite sex.

@LeahLibresco @Kenzie_Thielen Absolutely irresponsible study. Universal interventions have an extraordinarily poor track record—did they even read the literature? It also says nothing about the efficacy of proper therapy, which is not teaching skills and assigning homework but an interpersonal process.

@Kenzie_Thielen Part of the problem here is that they referred kids to therapy who had no known mental health problems. It's not a general use tool! It's very helpful when used in its specific niches.

"The therapy seemed to make the kids worse. Immediately after the intervention, the therapy group had worse relationships with their parents and increases in depression and anxiety." theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@EPoe187 @ShineboxHukster Interesting to think about. Pinker has done a lot of this kind of work obviously.

@AnthonyM6485 @ShineboxHukster Yeah, no easy way to measure, of course, and plenty of debate, but I think we could do a reasonable job coming up with some "human flourishing" variable.

@EPoe187 @ShineboxHukster On most objective measures, I agree. As a quantitative psychologist, I do wonder how would you capture the distinction I believe is there. Life satisfaction would not do the job.

@AnthonyM6485 @ShineboxHukster Yeah that's a very fair point. Still, if we created some objective measure of flourishing, I think NYC in 2020 would be higher than NYC in 1975. Obviously, people can still prefer the 70s version.

@EPoe187 @ShineboxHukster Two things can be true. I grew up in New York City in the 1970s and never left. It was happier--a sense of grit, pride, and fellow-feeling made for a powerful identiy with the city. But it was also way more dangerous. Strangely, my friends and I rode the subway at age of 10.

@ShineboxHukster I agree. Rates are too high. But important not to allow nostalgia to distort our vision of the past.

@geeskat @akoustov @goescarlos @crehbinder The golden age of sociology—Goffman, Merton, etc—was theoretical and intellectually ambitious and that spirit remains. But quantitative work in sociology is subpar, and the discipline seems now to use data to support approved narratives, not to discover knowledge.

@akoustov @goescarlos @crehbinder I am simply pointing out that in sociology, objectives other than replicability are relatively pronounced. Claiming that sociologists need to repent is hysterical. I won't fall for this bait again. Clown show over here.

Just a few weeks ago some sociologists here were screaming at me for spreading "malicious lies" about the unfortunate state of reproducibility in their field. What I actually said was that the American Sociological Association does not have a coherent reproducibility policy, and has blocked journals from requiring replication code. Sociology finishes last in this chart (among core fields). I'm sure everyone will update accordingly, repent, and try to make their field better.

@EliLake They don’t seem to realize that their absolutely deranged hatred of Jews makes the point for Israel’s existence quite nicely.

I’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback about this tweet from our community. I want you to know that I take our stakeholders seriously and I thank you for this opportunity to learn and to listen. So allow me to clarify: Israel is the Jewish homeland and it’s not going anywhere.