Aidan Milliff

@aidanmilliff.com

1662 Followers 931 Following

Political Scientist

Here's alt text for the image: > Promotional graphic for the Grand Tamasha podcast, Season 15. Purple background with bold white text reading "What Do Indians Think About the World?" Below the title, pink text lists the guests: Milan Vaishnav with Paul Staniland and Aidan Milliff. The bottom-left corner shows the Grand Tamasha logo; the top-left shows the podcast and Hindustan Times logos. On the right, circular headshots of two guests (Paul Staniland and Aidan Milliff) appear alongside the cover of their book, *Indian Public Opinion toward the Major Powers*, published in the Cambridge Elements in Indo-Pacific Security series by Cambridge University Press.
Claude code terminal readout: ▐▛███▜▌ Claude Code v2.1.87 ▝▜█████▛▘ Sonnet 4.6 · Claude Pro ▘▘ ▝▝ /workspace ❯ sudo open strait of hormuz ● That's not a package I have in my repositories, and geopolitics is outside my $PATH. If you have an actual task for me, I'm ready. ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ❯
Quote from The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll Bush administration planners considered an insider coup carried out by military officers to be most likely and most desirable—a quick change of regime that would leave Iraq in the hands of a more manageable strongman. “We made some very overoptimistic assumptions,” recalled David Mack, then at the State Department. “We assumed the chances were great” that military officers would move against Saddam.[19] C.I.A. analysts judged the revolt that spread across the south in early March to be Saddam Hussein’s “most serious political challenge in more than twenty years of power.
Quotation from Phil Klay's novel Missionaries: "An American officer once described it to me this way: “When civilians think about war, they tend to think about the mechanism of death. The heroic Navy SEAL firing a tight cluster of bullets into a bad guy’s head. The creepy, mechanical drone delivering a bomb. But those are just the flathead and Phillips-head screwdriver at the end of a targeting system. And it’s the system that’s the real killer.”
Photograph of Trofim Lysenko
screenshot of the home page of soweps.org
Dr Strangelove "it could easily be accomplished with a computer" meme rewritten to say "it could be accomplished with a computer if you are careful."
Chart showing what proportion of survey respondents think they could beat various animals in unarmed fight. 72% say they could beat a rat, 23% say they could beat a large dog, 6% say they could beat a grizzly. Original here: https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/35852-lions-and-tigers-and-bears-what-animal-would-win-f
• Blattman, Chris. “The Discussant’s Art.” • Humphreys, Macartan. “How To Critique.” • Miller, Beth, Jon Pevehouse, Ron Rogowski, Dustin Tingley, and Rick Wilson. 2013. “How To Be a Peer Reviewer: A Guide for Recent and Soon-to-be PhDs.” PS: Political Science & Politics” 46(1). • Nyhan, Brendan. 2015. “A Checklist Manifesto for Peer Review.” The Political Methodologist 23(1).
Average distance from home location, -7---56 days after a drone strike. Baseline period t=-2.
Screenshot of title page of article. Download pre-print version here: https://aidanmilliff.com/publication/estimating-the-impact-of-drone-strikes/BMCJ_Drones_20Aug25.pdf
Screenshot from LaTeX compilation reading: or "blowback" violence (??????), while others identify short term violence spikes (?) or violence diffusion due to degraded militant command structure (??).
Email thanking the OP for joining AAUP, "the premier organization dedicated to uniting faculty to protect academic freedom and quality higher education"
Table showing the "shortfall" in NIH Indirect costs among the top 25 NIH-funded universities in FY24. This subset of the table shows the ten universities among the top 25 who are most impacted (vis. total university or medical center budgets). Baylor, Pitt, Duke, WUStL, Yale, Northwestern, NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, Hopkins, UCSF
Breakdown of the costs of research by direct/indirect costs.
Graphic from United for Medical Research showing that NIH funding produces $2.46 in economic activity for every $1.00 awarded
Over-time favorability toward the US, China, and Russia among Indian survey respondents. Approval of the US and USSR is consistently pretty high from 1950s through 1990s, approval of China much lower.
Editorial manager screen showing two previous "submissions with a decision"
Thisis howonepicturestheangelof history.His face is turnedtowardsthepast. Whereweperceive a chainofevents,he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckageand hurls it infront of hisfeet. The angel wouldlike to stay, awakenthe dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has gotcaught in his wings withsuch violencethatthe angel can no longerclose them.Thisstormirresistiblypropels himinto thefuture to whichhis back is turned,while thepile of debrisbefore himgrows skyward.Thisstormis whatwe call progress. -Walter Benjamin
Covers of two books, against an office-style background On the left: "Death Dominance and State Building" by Roger Petersen On the right: "The American War in Afghanistan" by Carter Malkasian
Different spellings of Afghan districts in various US datasets.
A screenshot with text reading: “Consequently, knowing the causes of emotion is presumed sufficient to answer the question of what the experience is. While expedient, this scientific approach leaves out an important aspect of reality: people feel something when they experience emotion. Describing how emotion experiences are caused does not substitute for a description of what is felt, and in fact, an adequate description of what people feel is required so that scientists know what to explain in the first place.”
Figure 4 from the paper available at ow.ly/EUHQ50QuZHf with a better caption!
Fig 2 from the paper: A table with predictability on one axis and control on the other; showing that high/low assessments of each predict a preference for one strategy of survival. Low predictability, Low Control: Fleeing Low predictability, High Control: Fighting High predictability, Low control: Hiding High predictability, High control: Adaptation
Figure 1: What are the dimensions of difference that distinguish different survival strategies.
Quotation from the preface to the second edition of "Perception and Misperception in International Politics" by Robert Jervis "The world is so complex and contradictory that the “evidence” alone cannot yield any coherent picture. We are sense-making animals: we are quick to reach interpretations, to tell others (and ourselves) stories about what is happening, and to explain puzzles as soon as we can."
Abstract of Making Sense Making Choices, available at this link: https://ow.ly/EUHQ50QuZHf
Cover page of "Making Sense, Making Choices" See here for text version: https://aidanmilliff.com/media/Milliff_JMP.pdf
Hand-drawing of the chart on Page 205, but way uglier
DJ Khaled meme: "Congratulations, you played yourself."
A fountain in front of a university building at FSU.
Sign (Hindi and English) reading: Regional, Racial, Religious discrimination, Apartheid & outside food prohibited in the restaurant.