Political Science

Academic and government research, campaigns, and advocacy.

• Toxic LLempathy: Testing Language Model Misalignment via Reinforcement of User Moral Disengagement in Confessional Contexts — Open source misalignment research paper contribution empirically measuring a risk phenomenon I coin 'toxic LLempathy.' (Project in progress)
• Is UCSC a Safe Place to Protest? Initial Survey Data Suggests Otherwise — Results of an independent open social science survey project indicating that respondents view protesting on or around the UCSC as the least safe place to protest in Santa Cruz.
• A Cloud-Based Application to Translate Handwritten Cyrillic Into String Format — A cloud-based web app to translate images of handwritten cyrillic into string format using a cloud-deployed ML model.
• Modeling the Belarusian Polity — Using statistical learning methodologies to predict the attributes of Belarusians most promising to target with pro-democratization messaging, and clustering Belarusian society using open source survey data.
• NLP Analysis of Republican Candidate Rubio Debate Tweets — Quick and dirty NLP exercise.
• Difference in Differences Analysis Assessing the Impact of State Minimum Wage Increase on Various State Economic Indicators — Quick and dirty DID analysis.
• Anticipating the Next Chapter in U.S. Nuclear Deterrence Strategy — Workshop summary of a discussion held at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Center for Global Security Research.
• The Future of Chemical Disarmament in an Eroding Global Order — Workshop summary of a discussion held at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Center for Global Security Research.
• When They Hurt Us, We Win — Some political theory with a somewhat problematic basis, that state-perpetrated political violence against mass people's movements can be helpful for movement success.
• Operational Infeasibility Unlikely to Deter Further Russian Escalations in Ukraine — Analysis of why Putin's operation on Ukraine won't be deterred by operational infeasibility, despite historical political science suggesting operational infeasibility is a source of surrender or de-escalation.
• Climate and Weather Intelligence: an Undervalued Asset for Climate Adaptation, Resilience and Security — Speculative risk memo from undergrad about climate and weather intelligence.
• Letter of Support for AB-1432 — A Letter of support for AB-1432 I wrote while interning with Berkeley City Council member Rigel Robinson, to make the California Online Community College Inoperative.
• What the CA Governor's Office and CA Higher Education System is Getting Wrong With Funding Student Housing — Policy analysis of how California funds student housing, and what the funding regime could be doing better.