Normie spouse, ignorant of causal inference: "My life would be so much better without you."
Causal inference savant: "Akshually, we will never know due to the fundamental problem of causal inference. But first, let me introduce you to potential outcomes notation...".
Genius !
Same thing for non-competitive cooking programmes these days too - stating foodie beliefs, going to market, cooking, set up fake jeopardy ("but can I persuade my football mates that veggie food is great for a match night?"), stressful bit, guests turning up, staged eating food with mates.
TIL that there is a Lao Gan Ma sweater
The condiment, pretty sure that look on a Chinese grandma means it is best to stay away
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Just received an invite to review a paper that I have recommended for rejection at two previous journals...
(Also, Lao Gan Ma is nice!)
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
Come visit us at @cinchessen.bsky.social in Essen. Questions? --> @kaimiele.bsky.social #econsky
Legoonlas was right there
📢 New Working Paper (in German): Es wird ja viel über einfachere Zugänge von älteren Menschen mit gesundheitlichen Einschränkungen / beruflichen Belastungen in die Rente diskutiert. Zusammen mit Martin Brussig versuchen wir diesen Personenkreis abzuschätzen. difis.org/publikatione...
An interesting sidenote was that it seemed widely accepted that the industry should use custom tools built in-house rather than general purpose solutions.
2. Someone noted that while genAI might speed up the work of producing evidence, regulators will become aware of this and likely start requiring more work that was previously prohibitively costly.
The parallel for academia here is clear - ideally, we produce better research, not necessarily more.
Maybe a lesson here for us academics is that we need norms around responsable AI use, and we need to someone to enforce them?
1. The environment is pretty heavily regulated, and trust is critical. Existing guidelines by regulators (e.g., NICE in the UK) are pretty clear that not all tasks should be outsourced to AI, accuracy is critical and needs to be guaranteed.
All of this means a human has to be in every loop
I was just at a big pharma conference and surprisingly the discussion there seemed a lot more clear-eyed about AI than on here or LinkedIn.
Yes, genAI will change their work, but the work will need doing, it will just be different (and possibly more).
Two interesting thoughts:
Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”
And that somehow works for all babies, except yours
Deux postes de doctorant·e·s à pourvoir au Centre Walras Pareto pour la rentrée 2026
un·e Assistant diplômé·e en Histoire de la pensée et philosophie économiques
un·e Assistant diplômé·e en Histoire des idées politiques
Délai de postulation : 2 mai 2026!
I am somehow under the impression that in Gen 3 (it's been 3000 years!) Gardevoir was genuinely popular, but yeah...sorry you are one of the unlucky persons to learn this fact today
Yeah, I wrote "makes me doubt" because I have been assuming that you at least put in enough work to make sure that the results reflects your thinking in this area - but that's not a given so a clearer disclaimer might be helpful
Not sure what "entirely generated" means, exactly, but I feel we need new norms around this. Here's a blog I like about "etiquette", "consent", and what should be considered "rude" when sharing AI-generated content. Disclosures after the fact do not cut it, IMO. distantprovince.by/posts/its-ru...
This is a nice piece and captures my feelings about this quite well. I read the post because I assumed that a fellow academic had some thoughts to share - learning afterwards that this was written by an LLM makes me doubt the decision to read this
Seconded
I strongly object to the insinuation that I don't carefully curate my downloads folder
A 3x3 grid titled "Is it a library? Alignment chart". Horizontal axis categories: Contents purist: Must contain books Contents neutral: Must contain information Contents rebel: Can contain anything Vertical axis categories: Curation purist: Must be managed by a professional librarian Curation neutral: Must be curated by someone Curation rebel: Can be managed by nobody Examples represented on the grid: Curation purist, contents purist: New York Public Library is a library Curation purist, contents neutral: A newspaper archive is a library Curation purist, contents rebel: A school information commons is a library Curation neutral, contents purist: A home bookshelf is a library Curation neutral, contents neutral: A Spotify playlist is a library Curation neutral, contents rebel: A zoo is a library Curation rebel, contents purist: A street library is a library Curation rebel, contents neutral: A PC downloads folder is a library Curation rebel, contents rebel: A junk drawer is a library
📚
Then he got to us and we said we were from Ireland. He paused and then with extreme gravity and hushed reverence he said "Irish butter is comparable to French."
I randomly felt a bout of National pride I've never experienced before or since.
Would love to see some statistics on how frequently this topic is brought up in these courses and how many people take this up.
This said, I also partly get it - we can never prove that exclusion holds, only that we didn't find violations in places we looked. And as a reviewer I also sometimes feel that there is a methodological issue without being able to precisely articulate it.
Scrutiny is fair, but if I bring empirical evidence showing that the exclusion restriction holds, this should count for more than the intuition that it might be violated.
It is possible to publish empirical work using imperfect IVs, where you argue empirically that violations of the exclusion restrictions do not seem to exist or are too small to matter - but it is very hard
This is less common in seminars, but as someone who writes plenty of IV papers, I can safely say that there are plenty of reviewers who are not prepared to accep exclusion restrictions, even though they cannot give a sense of how large violations might be or how exactly they would occur
