Philip N Cohen
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philipncohen.com
Philip N Cohen
@philipncohen.com

Sociologist and demographer, University of Maryland; SocArXiv director.

New book: Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists https://cup.columbia.edu/book/citizen-scholar/9780231555418

Website: philipncohen.com
Blog: familyinequality.com .. more

Philip N. Cohen is an American sociologist. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences. .. more

Political science 34%
Sociology 29%
Pinned
I'm about 18 months and 20,000 words into the "pronatalism" tag on Family Inequality. Surely this means my book is almost done.
familyinequality.wordpress.com/tag/pronatal...

Also withdrew from UN Women

Trump just withdrew the US from the UN Population Fund. For obvious reasons: "working to uphold the rights and choices of women, girls and young people... Through our work, we ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person can fulfil their potential."

This is a challenge for people trying to counter our authoritarian slide, too. My sense is that we are moving decisively in the wrong direction, and any models of progressive social change in the field today have already failed and need to be retooled.
New, from me: The Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. They view the world through a social media lens in a way that is plausibly corrupting their judgment and undermining their performance.
Welcome to the clicktatorship. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/life-under...
Life Under a Clicktatorship
What happens to government when everything is content?
donmoynihan.substack.com

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen

Here is my first newsletter of the year, on the destruction of science past and future. buttondown.com/carlzimmer/a...

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen

There is a full-fledged attack on women's reproductive - and thus their overall LIFE - autonomy. It's dressed up as "promoting health" and in the guise of "expanding options," but the intent is clear given Heritage's "Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family."
MAHA is weaponizing fertility awareness based methods to undermine access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care (e.g., other forms of contraception, abortion, IVF, Title X). Here, I argue that FABMs must be grounded in evidence & reproductive justice: www.healthaffairs.org/content/fore...
Health Affairs Journal
www.healthaffairs.org
New, from me: The Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. They view the world through a social media lens in a way that is plausibly corrupting their judgment and undermining their performance.
Welcome to the clicktatorship. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/life-under...
Life Under a Clicktatorship
What happens to government when everything is content?
donmoynihan.substack.com

Ah yes. I agree. I especially don't like the "everyone complain to IRB" campaign. Uncool.

I agree. The person whom I responded to (who blocked me) doesn't list a rank in his bio, just "cognitive scientist" (I checked), and I was polite. I did not check how many people were replying so I don't know if I was piling on.

I guess so. I chose "temporary chat" but that's not the default

Good luck talking to people who block you for even thinking this.

also, unless I'm wrong, usually "feeding" text into regular ChatGPT etc doesn't automatically make it part of its training data.

"In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters."
The future of propaganda studies is going to be lit. So much raw, primary source material to work with. Streams of it running directly out of the U.S. White House at the moment. www.whitehouse.gov/j6/
January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy
Discover the real January 6 story: peaceful protest turned tragedy, Deep State entrapment, media deception, and President Trump's triumphant pardons restoring justice to patriotic Americans.
www.whitehouse.gov

Please share - @pewresearch.org wants to hire a data archivist who will be an advocate for data users, helping to ensure that our datasets are easy to discover and reuse by researchers, journalists, and the public.
pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/CenterExtern...

That's a serious problem, I agree. But trying to keep your papers out won't stop it -- while it will undermine your mission. We need other ways to improve or stop AI companies

Yes I do think it's better to lose control than lock up research. But that's not the real question, because you can't stop misuse by restricting access - even as you undermine your mission by ... reducing access.

Agree. Good example. Also studies of linguistics or statistics, etc

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen

Feeding papers into an LLM ≠ Supporting the plagiarism machine

AI and machine learning are a bundle of techniques and systems, and yeah, they have baggage much like inferential statistics etc, but they also have fair use.

Reposted by Philip N. Cohen

Yep! They're out there in the public record and people can address all kinds of research questions at them that you may not like.

E.g. history of thought research is often about treating published work in different ways from what its authors intended.

I agree. That's on the list of bad things they do!

We do research to contribute to knowledge. That only happens if people can read it. In modern democracies, we don't choose who gets to have the knowledge we produce, thankfully. There are barriers to accessing our research, and we want to reduce them. The ideal is universal access.
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