Raising kids & bread & grant money. Cleaning data & diapers & fish. EA (bed nets not light cone). Social scientist. bsky.app/profile/ryancbriggs…
Toronto, Ontario
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I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
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I asked my wife why she was in private browsing mode on her phone and she explained that Safari only allows 500 tabs in regular mode so she had to switch. You think you know a person
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When I was young I fixed my parents’ computer and now that I’m older I fix computers for my kids. Are we the only generation that knows how computers work?
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My 2 year old just looked outside and exclaimed “my rock is growing so fast!”
and then the 9 year old whispered to me “I swap it out for a larger rock when she isn’t looking.”
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Kinda unnerved by how little my wife knows or cares about the SR-71 Blackbird
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I can’t stress enough how much lawlessness undermines basic progressive goals. When it’s safe, everyone benefits but the most vulnerable benefit most. I ran a few times at night here on dark paths and women are there running. Kids use public bathrooms alone.
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My mom used to be an ER nurse and they used to call them “donor cycles” because so many young men would come in dead from head and neck injuries but with good organs.
Wow, I didn't realize the difference between cars and motorcycles was this big. Motorcycles are 29x more dangerous.
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Gambling is one thing I’ve flipped on as I got older. I used to laugh off the critics and think of gambling as “a tax on those who can’t do math” but I’ve come to think that’s cruel (and regressive) and paternalism is good here. This paper is another brick in that new wall.
Sports betting legalization reduces net investments of households by nearly 14% overall.
$1 of sports betting reduces net investment
by over $2, increases credit card debt, but has no effect on participation in lotteries or other online gambling
outlets.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
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“The fraud isn’t my fault because my grad students, who weren’t coauthors, did literally all of the work” is quite a take.
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Yes! I was also thinking that it seems like we were car tinkers but for computers.
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Parenting pro-tip: my (lawyer) wife introduced “strict liability” into our household and it’s been so useful. If a kid is eg holding a stick then strict liability applies & any injury from said stick is the fault of the stick holder regardless of actual fault or intent.
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yeah. I realized it had that potential with the “letting people feel seen” bit and team dynamics and vague notion of cleanliness and whatnot, but it’s still interesting to see. I went to bed so I’ve no idea how it hit escape velocity
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Old people can use the subway without fearing an altercation. It really unlocks a lot of social life, especially for anyone who isn’t a strong man. And because people are cautious, even low levels of violent crime ruin this. You’ve gotta get near zero.
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My only contribution to H-1B discourse is to point out that US universities have access to uncapped H-1Bs (I was on one), so every American professor working at a university competed with the world to get the job. This means:
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Over the past few years, my family and I spent a month in Helsinki and a month in Singapore. Helsinki obviously has low crime, but there was a qualitative difference between the two. Singapore’s near zero crime unlocks **so much.** I did not anticipate how wonderful it is.
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oh my god this is painfully dumb
"EXCLUSIVE: Mark Carney faces plagiarism accusations for 1995 Oxford doctoral thesis
Carney's doctorate in economics from Oxford shows 10 instances of apparent plagiarism, according to academics who reviewed the material"
nationalpost.com/news/mark-c…
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Anti-Hamas and anti-occupation is in fact the obviously correct position
Today in feeling sad and hopeless: one of my grad school acquaintances is Israeli, and wrote their dissertation on (what I interpreted as) an anti-occupation topic. And now, they are posting photos of victims of the Hamas attack with "Hamas = ISIS."
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Just so we’re clear, if I’m ever responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people I want everyone to say it was my fault and that it was bad, not that I’m exonerated because of woke.
Disappointed but not surprised by the tone of this article.
The authors tried desperately to smear Luke with their poorly engineered invective but instead only showed the limitation of their vision and the mediocre cowardice of their "sources" who couldn't even air their own uninformed opinions under their own name.
Not a single mention of the ballooning deficit. Not a single mention of collapsing state capacity.
Implied that USAID was cut bc Luke misread some database, and not that DOGE found that USAID had illegally ignored an executive order by continuing to pour money into unaccountable foreign NGOs, some of which was illegally coming back into partisan US organizations.
It is astonishingly irresponsible to paint a target on Luke like this. A number of sources made claims about his motives, which is defamatory.
An article like this brings dishonor upon the profession.
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There is probably also an argument to be made around how progressives want to use state power to do things, and so it’s helpful to have people (rightly) believe that the state is competent and that its power is not used capriciously. But I’ve got to run.
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So the way I applied to university in Ontario is I wrote three university and program names on a piece of paper and gave it to my guidance councillor. Then a little while later I got letters in the mail saying I got in.
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The pig area at the Royal Ag Fair shows a mother pig in a cage so small she can barely move. Approximately nobody cares, and she is not hidden (she is a prominent part of their display).
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If I ever stop being a professor it will probably be because I can no longer withstand how many people doing research do not deeply care about trying to get the right answer.
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1. Take the opinions of US profs very serious here! They not only have theory or evidence, they also have genuine experience.
2. The US has an example of what happens when you allow uncapped high skill visas in an industry. Seems pretty good to me fwiw
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The starting point here really has to be “clusters of what?” but I agree with your intuition.
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It’s the time period. I, a shy nerd, did this a lot. Everyone did. “Talking to girls” (which basically meant getting dates) was a major life skill you learned in high school. I’m so glad I escaped before dating turned into an app-based hellscape.
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Toronto has fairly low crime, but part of the reason is because people don’t do things like leave their possessions unattended in public. Singapore has low crime **and people don’t do defensive things.** They just live. It’s wild! We should aspire to this level of safety.
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In retrospect it’s kind of wild (and toxic) how much politics in Canada or the US is about not enforcing laws on the books. If they’re bad laws, remove them. If they’re good, enforce them fully. It’s not progressive (or conservative, or even libertarian) to not enforce laws.
I miss Toronto’s food, but I do not miss this. Singapore has solved this. Put cameras on the cameras on the cameras and if we’re not going to cane the vandals at least give them like a $10,000 fine.
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This was my main takeaway from the seeing cave paintings in the south of France. They’re around 15,000 years old and it was just chilling to think that for over 10,000 years anatomically modern people were basically stuck living nasty, brutish, and short lives.
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Cool. Literally just yesterday I told my class we couldn’t do this
A widely held view is that the Gini coefficient is not decomposable by subgroups. This paper proposes an axiomatic framework that ensures well-behaved within and between-group terms under which the Gini is decomposable with a novel and unique formula. econometricsociety.org/publi…
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I forgot how cool this paper is. When elite civil servants in Pakistan were randomized into a training course on econometrics, they were twice as likely to support actual policies with RCT evidence a year later and were more likely to pay for such research users.nber.org/~dlchen/paper…
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My undergrads this year are struggling like I’ve never seen in a decade of teaching. I don’t think they’re lazy or in any sense worse than other cohorts. My best guess is covid shutting down high school was very bad and there is basically scarring. Anyone else seeing this?
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It’s kind of funny to imagine having a billion dollars and then giving it away to American doctors, one of the richest groups of people in world history.
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I cannot recommend more highly being open to looking stupid in front of others. It's such an important emotional posture for learning things.
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Not nothing. Many people who received AIDS drugs via PEPFAR have probably died. More people will die because of the cuts to GAVI. But it previously cost so little to save these lives that letting these people die won’t generate enough savings to show up on the graph.
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This was a response to my post saying at least thousands would die from cutting PEPFAR. Perhaps other people also think this.
Let’s assume, somehow, that 99% of the HIV+ people that were getting antiretrovirals from PEPFAR somehow still get them.
1% of 20 million is 200,000.
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to be fair I thought corporal punishment was underused relative to detention before coming here. Detention seems good if we need to remove dangerous people from society, but for dissuading people from crime using pain seems more humane honestly (than eg destroying a family)
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I think a lot of cost-benefit calculations around becoming a parent are kind of silly because for many people it's a transformative experience and your pre-kid self is not well equipped to understand the preferences of your post-kid self.
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This is simply wrong. The core shocking thing EAs pointed out originally was that the distribution of cost-effectiveness was very skewed. For example, here is Toby Ord writing in 2013. This point is still under-appreciated. cgdev.org/publication/moral-…
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During the Flint water crisis around 5% of kids had blood lead levels over 5 µg/dL. Half of all Indian kids—almost 300 million kids—have a higher blood lead level today.
Eugenicists were convinced they had to cull like 30% of the Swiss population for a couple of generations to breed the cretinism out of it. Turned out you could fix the problem with iodine in salt.
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Begging, crying, desperately trying to get people to understand statistical power
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You hate Aella for being slutty. I hate her for refusing to handle her non-representative survey data properly. We are not the same.
(I actually kind of like her and find her interesting—and she does not deserve the pile ons she gets—but the bad survey practices drive me nuts)
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I promise you can teach mathematically-averse undergrads enough R in a few weeks to allow them to intuit the correct interpretation of confidence intervals via simple simulations. I do this. It’s not so hard.
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Discourse in the past few days:
* Oppenbarbie
* EJMR
* communist banana cocaine girl
* what did imperial Japan ever do to anyone?
* Menswear guy, probably
Folks, this place is alive
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As a non-Jew married to a Jew, one harsh thing I learned over the past year is that I had severely underestimated how much antisemitism exists in Canada and especially in my lefty academic bubble.
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This sets up very good (cautious) incentives, and kids can totally understand it. You just need to clearly communicate when it applies or not (holding sticks was a big one for us).
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I guess I plagiarized when I wrote "I ran a regression with..." or "standard errors were clustered by..."
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I let my students use AI tools on a not wildly hard final assessment (I gave them fake data for an experiment an they had to analyze it and write up an R notebook) and the ones that leaned more on AI got screwed by it. I'm surprised it hurt them this much.
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I'm teaching poverty measurement this semester and I made a little shiny app where students can move incomes or the poverty line around and see how various common poverty measures change. Feel free to use or share or tell me what I should add or modify.
ryanbriggs.shinyapps.io/Pove…
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I can’t remember. Do we want the judges to hear the Gino case before or after lunch?
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This is probably just collider bias. Consider impressiveness as a function of talent and execution (organization). If you select only highly impressive people, you’re conditioning on a common effect of both variables. That induces a negative relationship (red) vs the pop (blue).
correlation i have observed:
the most talented people i know (who also happen to be high agency) have the shittiest workflow organization
- no notion organization hell, usually messy apple notes and google docs
- regular users of pen and paper
- no superhuman or fancy email
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People saying this is important so that she doesn’t kill the piglets are at best useful idiots. If you don’t put them in such tight spaces, she won’t crush the piglets (obviously). Here is what the farm where I buy pork does. The first picture is where the piglets are. the second picture is where they move once they’re bigger.
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lol it’s real. EJMR assigned public author IDs based on a fixed slice of hashed IPs & thread numbers (no salt), where thread numbers were ~public. Clown world. The main thing I didn’t realize was the latter, though even then the authors were still v clever to have sorted this out
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Everyone who says they are “EA adjacent” is in fact an EA. Everyone who says they are not EA adjacent but knows what that phrase means is in fact EA adjacent. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.
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It's very human to only double check that a process is working when you get a weird result. It's also very bad practice, because sometimes your "right" result is due to a bad process and you will be misled. Social scientists (economists) do this kind of asymmetric checking.
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My kid (7) wants me to teach him some basic data analysis in R. Anyone have ideas for good csv files that might hold his interest? Or can anyone point me to Minecraft-related csv files (recipes?)?
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About 9 years ago my son was born. On our first day home and his third day of life he spiked a high fever and we rushed him back to the hospital. After days of waiting for tests (including a spinal tap) we learned that he had bacterial meningitis.
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Good criticisms of EA:
* it’s risky to introduce caring young people to ideas that can glorify unlimited maximizing behaviour
* the community is sometimes shitty to non-nerd types
* perhaps various philosophical criticisms around infinities or flow through effects
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The self-control required to not repeat “the prices already reflect all available information” over and over when you get stuck in a conversation with middle aged men discussing the stock market.
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omg stats twitter has been preparing for this moment for years
A United flight from San Francisco to Boston had to be diverted to Denver after it was discovered mid-air a portion of the wing was damaged. Passenger Kevin Clarke took this video. What he says he saw before getting on the plane on @boston25 this morning.
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My second Xmas wish is for causation weasel words to die. If a result is only interesting when interpreted in causal terms then I don’t care if someone picks a word that only winks suggestively at causation.
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“Dad wisdom” is vindicated again
this is strangely heartwarming: the canadian pediatrics association now recommends that children engage in risky play—"thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury"—because of benefits e.g. to mental health
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This isn’t close to what most academics work in an average week, but it’s become cool to brag about overwork and uncool to brag about how much free time you have so if you take academic job comments at face value you get a very biased view.
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I'm not saying anyone needs to have kids, but if you don't have kids then you aren't generationally anything
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Big parenting win that my eldest was totally freaked out by it (unprompted by me). It’s just crazy making.
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I have a kid with serious communication challenges and man, I’m so so so happy for you.
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Worst days of my life. Easily.
He survived and is now fine, but this did give me the tiniest glimpse into what it is like to lose a kid. I’m rehashing all this because the US is freezing PEFAR funding, which among other things keeps about half a million kids from dying of AIDS.
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Worth observing that these people would be just as dead if it was p-hacking or other questionable-but-not-outright-fraudulent research practices that created the incorrect result
One of the worst cases of scientific fraud ever:
>cardiologist fakes data showing better outcomes for patients who were given beta blockers before heart surgery
>Europe changes its medical guidelines based on this research
>turns out beta blockers increase risk of death by 27%
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GiveWell literally funded research by a Nobel prize winning development economist on a question GW cared about. They then flagged it for an open peer review process (unjournal.pubpub.org/pub/eva…). And yet Leif writes this 👇
In March I published a critique of Effective Altruism in Wired. After reading the responses, especially from young EAs, I've written a long open letter to young EAs that I hope they'll find useful.
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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I don’t want to be overly Canadian here but surely the first thing we should say is “Sorry”
I wrote about the effort to decipher sperm whale language with artificial intelligence.
I reached out to philosophers, linguists, animal rights lawyers, marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, and paleontologists. Assume that this works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization.
What should we say?
Gift link: theatlantic.com/science/arch…
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I did this the old fashioned way, by making sure my wife was hot and smart.
Today we reveal CogPGT, the world’s most powerful genetic predictor of IQ.
We achieve a correlation with IQ of 0.51 (0.45 within-family). Herasight customers can boost the expected IQ of their children by up to 9 points by selecting the embryo with the highest CogPGT score. 🧵
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I think people conflate “teach subject x while highlighting indigenous examples or contributions” with “indigenous people have special knowledge of x that is outside of ‘western’ testing paradigms.” Former seems straightforwardly good. I’m very skeptical of the second.
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I think this is kind of neat and I don't think anyone else has noticed it (I can't find anyone who has)
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This is such a good textbook on statistical hypothesis testing and related topics (experimental design, meta-analysis, research transparency). It would have saved me so many hours of work if I had it in grad school. Kudos @lakens. lakens.github.io/statistical…
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