Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
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ryanhubert.bsky.social
Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
@ryanhubert.bsky.social
Computational social science prof at LSE @lsemethodology.bsky.social

Research on US law & courts, public policy, political economy
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
Congratulations to Rachel Bernhard, Professorial Fellow, on receiving a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant!

Her project, ‘Walls and Wicked Problems: The Role of Complexity in Politics,’ will investigate how complexity shapes political discourse.

🔗 Read more: shorturl.at/5bYBw
September 5, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
#OpenAccess from the Journal of Law and Courts -

Measuring How Much Judges Matter for Case Outcomes - cup.org/4mRvrdN

- Ryan Copus & @ryanhubert.bsky.social

#FirstView
August 20, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
🚔 What role does inter-group contact play in discriminatory policing?

➡️ Using a formal model, @ryanhubert.bsky.social & @anthlittle.bsky.social show how positive contact with overpoliced groups can reduce bias—but only if it is sustained over time www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
April 10, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Big, if true
January 5, 2025 at 10:39 AM
I’m still a newcomer to this place, but the UK’s long term economic stagnation is not just apparent in the economic data—you can see it all around you.

Just like I am for US blue state politicians, I’m baffled by the center-left’s lack of a coherent growth program. It would be very popular!
If I were the government, i'd make fixing *this* the #1 objective for ministers. Almost every problem in Britain is downstream or connected to it. Fixing it will make everything easier.
January 2, 2025 at 11:46 PM
This headline is wildly misleading. Many of these ideas are very bad and/or small-bore. You cannot spend or redistribute your way out of an affordability crisis!
New York is facing a once-in-a-generation affordability crisis that has left roughly half of city households struggling to pay for basic necessities. Now, politicians are eager to show how they are trying to help alleviate the crisis.
Politicians Want to Make New York Affordable. They Mean It This Time.
With voters anxious about the cost of living, politicians are eager to show how they are trying to help alleviate the crisis.
www.nytimes.com
January 2, 2025 at 11:00 PM
This is why you cannot simply throw money at problems. While this is a Republican idea, the lesson applies to other contexts, like subsidies for affordable housing, public transit and healthcare.

You have to pair government money with real efforts to control costs.
December 15, 2024 at 8:48 AM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
After a review process so long and intensive that the title changed twice, I'm excited/relieved that "How to Distinguish Motivated Reasoning from Bayesian Updating" is accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social.

osf.io/preprints/os...

Here is how it's relevant for your Thanksgiving dinner 🦃👇
OSF
osf.io
November 27, 2024 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
I have an op-ed in the NYT today about how to reduce crime.

The key idea, based on decades of strong research evidence: focus on increasing the probability of getting caught, not the punishment.

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...
December 7, 2024 at 12:16 PM
One would hope that governments across the developed world would be more proactive about reversing this. But alas, many have become resigned to the idea that their economies will just stagnate forever, slowly becoming relatively poorer.
Productivity stagnation in Europe, Japan, UK, and Canada.
December 6, 2024 at 11:25 AM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
I like Ryan’s paper and (obviously) I think complexity matters for behavior.

But I think Florian’s updating too much from one experiment. I want to see replications and results from ‘nearby’ designs before saying the lottery anomalies have nothing to do with risk.

Some of the most important lottery anomalies from the behavioral risk literature (e.g., probability weighting and loss aversion) actually have nothing to do with risk.

They also arise in perfectly deterministic settings.

Lead article in the latest AER issue:
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
November 28, 2024 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
If you're interested in trying out LLMs in #rstats but don't know where to begin, I've added a few two vignettes to elmer: elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/elm... and elmer.tidyverse.org/articles/pro...
Getting started with elmer
elmer.tidyverse.org
November 29, 2024 at 3:45 PM
Exactly my thinking

The math is extremely useful for the analyst (and replicators), but a reader can learn from a paper without deep reading all the math

Plus, pushing the idea that deep reading all the math is necessary for learning is probably a good way to turn more people off formal theory
Math ensures two things: that stated claims actually follow from premises, and all implications of the same premises can be found.

If it’s done correctly, in equilibrium you don’t need to read the math in detail to get the ideas. That doesn’t mean the math is irrelevant.
Here's Bryan Caplan writing about math in economics.

Seems very wrong to me. I wonder what the quickest refutation is that would make sense to most practicing economists.

www.betonit.ai/p/economath_...
November 17, 2024 at 11:52 PM
We need more counterfactual thinking in these types of post-election takes. For example, it’s possible that deliverism in fact did work in the sense that Harris would have lost *worse* without it!
Deliverism doesn’t work. I wish it did but it doesn’t.

bsky.app/profile/jdcm...
So many post-election takes are just like “this proves the importance of the shit I was already on about” so I’m curious - is there anything you’ve changed your mind about because of the election?
November 17, 2024 at 11:17 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
This seems like a good statement/approach (UC-Irvine).
Update on Campus Protests and University Response   // Office of the Chancellor // UCI
Chancellor Howard Gillman provides update on campus protests.
chancellor.uci.edu
May 4, 2024 at 1:14 AM
I'm proud of my alma mater (Brandeis), but also incredibly sad that this is happening in 2024.
In response to protests, Brandeis invited students to transfer to its campus.
The university’s president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, promised in an open letter that Brandeis would provide an environment “free of harassment and Jew-hatred.”
www.nytimes.com
April 25, 2024 at 1:37 AM
I’ll just say for myself, I basically stopped listening to NPR programming a few years ago. Partly because there are now more options, but partly because their programming does seem worse and less curious than it used to be (at least imo). It’s sad to watch the decline of such a storied institution.
Inside the Crisis at NPR
Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?
www.nytimes.com
April 24, 2024 at 10:43 PM
Taking a general stand in favor of free expression does not mean that (1) you have to defend disgusting and vile speech, or (2) you have to let all your other principles and values take a back seat (e.g., being against harassment or being concerned about educational disruption).
It is possible to (1) deplore how Columbia University's administration is reacting to the on-campus protests and (2) also think it is very bad that a bunch of ghoulish, antisemitic opportunists have taken it upon themselves to hang out just off-campus, harassing Jewish students and celebrating 10/7.
April 21, 2024 at 11:37 PM
I thought the exact same thing! If I were a potential juror I’d say whatever I needed to say to get out of this. The personal risk to one’s self and one’s family from being involved in this is way too high.
dave. dave. this is way too much information to put in public. i could figure this out in like half an hour
April 15, 2024 at 11:02 PM
I actually think the trend toward extending endless compassion is bad and does not serve students well. We live in a society, and I think it’s good for colleges to teach students about accountability, and how to healthily negotiate social relationships (including with their professors).
I guess my primary comment about this is that it feels that the pandemic ushered in an era in which faculty are supposed to extend endless compassion to students (fine!) but neither the students nor the conditions of academia extend compassion to us. And that is really, really hard.
All the "solutions" proposed in this involve more unpaid work from faculty to manage our own feelings about being overstretched.

I don't want a training, a coffee group, or a paid external speaker about about compassion fatigue.

I want higher pay, admin support, & actual vacation time.
April 14, 2024 at 6:53 PM
Now that it has been co-opted by 20-something (probably mostly straight) comms people working for big organizations, gay drag culture is becoming very, very cringe 😬
two queens coming together to maximize their joint slay wapo.st/3xBdVG5
April 10, 2024 at 8:48 PM
I’m not sure I completely agree. Certainly, many of us have been in situations where a critique seems to come from a place of scorn, and/or reveals a lack of familiarity with the target of the critique. I actually feel this way about many (but not all) “critical perspectives” in academic work.
The resistance to critical perspectives--in culture, politics, science, and many other areas of life--seems to forget that critique is a signal that we care about something. We tend not to waste energy critiquing things that don't matter.
April 4, 2024 at 2:45 AM
My probably unpopular take is that many departments should either (1) eliminate their PhD programs if they cannot guarantee students a reasonable shot at a job they might want, or (2) focus their PhD training on methods and learn to be good at placing students in non-ac jobs.
April 1, 2024 at 11:50 PM
For years people have been talking about how we need to create more robust identity verification systems and nobody actually does it. So instead we’re just going to be awash in deepfakes and other scams and everyone’s going to become even more paranoid about everything 🤷
A new OpenAI tool can recreate human voices — from just a 15-second recording. The technology, called Voice Engine, is currently available only to a small group of early testers. nyti.ms/3TGZIyS
OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voices
The start-up is sharing the technology, Voice Engine, with a small group of early testers as it tries to understand the potential dangers.
nyti.ms
March 29, 2024 at 10:50 PM
Reposted by Ryan Hübert 🏳️‍🌈
We're hiring for a post-doctoral fellow in political science. A core part of the role is teaching on a core comparative politics course with amazing folk like @msands.bsky.social
@pavisuri.bsky.social (and me!). tinyurl.com/5n743sma #psjobs
March 25, 2024 at 2:03 PM