Stray thoughts, notes, and digressive ditties.
In case anyone is still reading this, I have a big data-rich post on my Github site on using ChatGPT aka GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude (the Anthropic AI bot) to generate democracy scores. It may be of interest if you read this blog!
(A footnote on Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel, “ Cults of Personality, Preference Falsification, and the Dictator’s Dilemma ”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(3) 409-434 [2020]) Charles Crabtree, Holger Kern, and David Siegel just published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Politics that models cults of personality as screening devices . Their argument is similar to arguments I’ve made in…
In my corner of Twitter, I recently became obliquely aware of a kerfuffle about Michael Bloomberg saying that “Xi Jinping is not a dictator” . (Twitter is funny that way: sometimes all you get is a trace of some public person’s comment as reflected in memes or snark, and it takes some effort to find the original motivation for the jokes. It’s like a cloud chamber for political events). Not that…