Paul Smaldino @psmaldino@qoto.org

@BatSara That's fair, and I guess part of the mastodon landscape I'm still working to understand. Personally, I wouldn't want to be part of a server that was so protective and reactionary, and I can choose that and reap the consequences, just like those who join other servers choose to shut out other voices based on their own risk management preferences.

@BatSara Thanks, I'll check it out. I still don't like the "my server blocks anyone from your server" aspect -- it feels like too broad a brush -- but perhaps I'm not seeing things with the right perspective.

@BatSara Anyway... not sure if this is an ask for methodological textbooks or something more general.
Matt Salganik's book is decent, focused on data, and free to read online: https://www.bitbybitbook.com/
A great intro to models, with lots of relevance to social science, is Page's The Model Thinker. https://www.amazon.com/Model-Thinker-What-Need-Know/dp/0465094627
James Evans and Jacob Foster have a book coming out in the next year or so that should be really good. And my own book, a textbook on modeling social systems, is due out in late summer.

@BatSara Like, I'm a social scientist. I wanna see all the things people are posting everywhere so I can get a sense of the different conversations people are having. Guess that's not the vibe here.

@BatSara Ugh. I've seen some of that discussion. I can't stand the attitude of "they won't block people I don't like, so therefore I don't like them and must therefore ban them." I picked qoto sort of arbitrarily when mastodon.social wasn't taking new members and saw it was STEM-based and affiliated with preprint servers like arXiv. I'm don't have any commitments to qoto per se, but I find the general tactic really distasteful and one of the worst things about mastodon.

@conjugateprior An editorial suggestion. It will be corrected. Bayes' Theorem 4eva