My two posts on AI in academia got over a million views and a thousand angry responses. I got a few things wrong. I stand by the rest. But most people reacted to the headline, not the arguments.

So here are all 20 theses laid out. Tell me which ones you actually disagree with 🧵
1/ AI can already do most social science research tasks better than most professors globally. The cost of producing a manuscript-quality draft has dropped to ~$100 plus a subscription.

This is not a prediction. It may already happening in the peer-review journal pipelines.

A lot has happened recently, so we almost forgot America is experiencing a complete reversal in immigration public opinion.

I'm not going to mince words: this is bad. The attitudes are as negative now as they were post-9/11. This is bad not just for Democrats but for everyone 🧵

https://twitter.com/goodauth/status/1816500982802436435

Importantly, this setback reflects both Democrats returning to pre-Trump positions and Republicans becoming more anti-immigration than ever.

In 2020, most Democrats wanted to increase immigration while most Republicans favored decreasing it. By 2024, few Democrats support increasing immigration, and nearly all Republicans want to decrease it.

Why do voters favor radical right-wing populists like Geert Wilders? Our new study suggests it's simply because voters agree with populists' substantive policy positions on immigration & other issues, not because they find their populist rhetoric appealing
doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2…
For a more detailed discussion of our paper with @yaoyao_dai, the new conjoint survey experiment of campaign messaging where we manipulate how US candidates talk about different issues, its implications and limitations, see my earlier thread:

https://x.com/akoustov/status/1691860380618813761?s=20

🚨Is populism effective and, if so, why?🚨

In our new paper, conditionally accepted at @PSRMJournal, @yaoyao_dai & I interrogate the common idea that populist rhetoric alone attracts votes. Our results suggest that underlying policy positions matter more alexanderkustov.org/files/Dai_PSRM…
Using a new US conjoint experiment with realistic campaign messages (rather than just candidate attributes), we find that populist appeals are much less effective than specific congruent (e.g. immigration) issue positions. Populism also doesn't make these positions more appealing

Our paper (w @laaker_dillon/@CassidyReller) documenting the remarkable stability of individual immigration attitudes is forthcoming @The_JOP! This is perhaps the research I'm most proud of, both in terms of the amount of work involved and its implications papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Why is it important to know whether attitudes are stable? Any understanding of immigration politics must make an assumption about the underlying stability of people's preferences, but the evidence so far has been rather inconclusive

1/4 Looking for something new (and eerily relevant) to read while self-isolating? Check out my article "'Bloom where you’re planted.' Explaining public opposition to (e)migration," now forthcoming in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies! @MigCitizenAPSA bit.ly/39V2A3f 2/4 While there is already a lot of great work on public attitudes toward 𝙞𝙢migration, I argue that a fuller account of migration politics and public opinion should also consider 𝒆migration—the other side of the issue salient in many middle- and even high-income countries...