Andy Guess

🚨 🚨 🚨 NEW: A shocking @USCIS memo seems to declare that hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in this country and applying for green cards must instead apply for visas abroad; which could MASSIVELY disrupt lives. 🧵 on what we know, and what we don’t.

@MishaTeplitskiy @umsi Congrats!

I guess I'm no longer assisting and can finally ASSOCIATE!!! (And get ready for the posts / takes to get spicier! 🌶️🌶️🌶️) Huge thanks to my *students*, colleagues, advisors! And frankly huge thanks to @umsi for supporting junior faculty, and having reasonable standards, and good leadership. I hear at other places pre-tenure period can be super stressful and sleepless, but here it's been (almost entirely) fun! <3

Academic journals imposing online appendix length limits is one of the sillier developments in publishing. -We are not exactly running out of storage space. -It reduces transparency. -It incentivizes “death by robustness checks” reviewing, where authors are penalized for analyses they actually ran but could not include. -It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how reviewers should approach appendices in the first place. All to solve the supposed crisis of “appendix bloat.” Why not instead train reviewers to review more efficiently and/or adopt formatting standards that make long appendices easier to navigate?

Access to broadband mobile phone networks radically decreased in-person socializing among teens and led to a decrease in teen fertility and an increase in teen suicide. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

new @NewYorker column, on the rise of hyperlocal neighborhood email newsletters, solo shoe-leather operations telling you what's going on on your block. In Brooklyn alone there's the Carroll Gardens Times, the Court Street Journal, the Grand Army Gazette, the Boerum Bulletin...

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

I can't believe this isn't all over higher ed twitter. The AIM Committee votes May 18-22 on rewriting US accreditation. (Lower barriers for new accreditors, outcomes-based standards, peer-review elimination, intellectual diversity mandates.) kylesaunders.substack.com/p/accreditatio…

Image quality sucks, but it looks like people started using @grok instead of Community Notes for fact-checking

"Writing is hard." Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in @polanalysis. Most text methods focus on content. I test if expression is also effortful action and find measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

Colleagues-- I am looking for a postdoc at @Princeton. Position posted below, and is currently taking applications: I'll begin reviewing applications on July 1. Some flexibility wrt start date. Please circulate as you see fit. apply.interfolio.com/185840

How much of the internet is actually AI-generated? And what impact is it having on online discourse? 🤖 In a new paper led by @jonas_dolezal, in collaboration with our friends at the @internetarchive, we set out to answer exactly that. A brief thread on our findings 🧵👇

As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages. wired.com/story/the-inte…

On Thursday, Florida's Board of Governors removed sociology from the general education curriculum of every university in the state. Chancellor Ray Rodrigues attacked the discipline as illegitimate. On behalf of sociologists everywhere, I respond to them in today's @MiamiHerald:

Updated versions of my misinformation and experiments course syllabi now posted

What happens when a polarized democracy bans a social media platform? New working paper with Christopher Barrie, @mollyeroberts, Chris Schwarz, and @j_a_tucker. We study Brazil's 2024 ban on X and find it created what we define as a "partisan sorting ratchet ." 🧵 ⬇️ 1/

Nearly half of Americans (46%) report using AI to get news at least occasionally--but most are light users. Only ~14% use it 3+ times a week. Some people use AI as their primary interface to society, even if the models are not really up to the task.

@ben_golub well played, Ben

@andyguess ok but the robot is pretty good, Andy - would you like some discount codes?

Economists be like "We have the most rigorous research and the highest IQs. Also, the next 50 users of my peer-review robot get 20% off with discount code AER2026"

Striking UAW members at NYU just won the highest minimum salaries of any unionized full-time, non-tenure track faculty in the United States. Amazing.