New working paper with @corymccartan.com on the Gaussian Process limit of BART! (Bayesian Additive Regression Trees... not the Bay Area Rapid Transit sadly) arxiv.org/abs/2607.28844

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Gaussian Process Limit of BART

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) have shown state-of-the-art performance in both prediction and causal inference problems. Previous theoretical work has attempted to explain BART's superior p...

arxiv.org

Reading the essay, my take is that the issue is poor methodological and analytical standards. Economics and increasingly political science have pursued social goals with rigor. Psych has gotten much better over the past decade.

Michael Inzlicht@minzlicht.bsky.social · 2w ago

I p-hacked my early work on prejudice. It never felt like cheating. I now wonder if that's because I believed the cause was good. New essay on why scholar-activism is a dangerous turn for social psychology. If justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed. open.substack.com/pub/michaeli...

"Over time, I have reluctantly concluded that my optimism was naïve. I now see evidence-based medicine as a deeply ill enterprise." Manski throwing bombs 💣💣💣 arxiv.org/abs/2607.23660 #statssky 📈📉

📖 Nearly 3 years after the publication of Causal Analysis (MIT Press), I'd like to highlight the lecture slides accompanying the book. Available here as PDF and editable TeX files, together with datasets & code in R, Python, & Stata: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm... @mitpress.bsky.social

If you're a development economist, join @ideadevecon.bsky.social! In particular, students and early-career scholars. Share this with anyone you know who should be part of the community!👇

International Development Economics Association@ideadevecon.bsky.social · 2w ago

IDEA grew to 3,800+ by word of mouth — and there are colleagues who haven't heard yet. We especially want to reach PhD students and early-career researchers, and economists across the Global South. Know someone who belongs here? Send them to idea.devecon.org. Every introduction helps. 🌍

Sinner’s win today was so impressive. Hard to imagine how anyone could have done more than Zverev: check out the stats. Rallying consistently, with 135mph serves on the lines, 115mph second serves when needed, and 85mph forehands. Not enough.

I learned today that conventional nuclear reactors may need to be shut down in heat waves because of the consequences of heated water emissions and inefficiency when external temp is high. A major problem, no? www.lefigaro.fr/societes/un-...

Un réacteur de la centrale nucléaire de Golfech, près de Toulouse, arrêté en raison de la canicule

«Les conditions climatiques de ces derniers jours ont entraîné une montée importante de la température de la Garonne qui devrait atteindre 28°C, ce vendredi», a justifié EDF.

lefigaro.fr

Brilliant analysis. “Moving from polarization to radicalization shifts the remedy from compromise, encouraging civility, and bridging divides to confronting antidemocratic actors, safeguarding targeted groups, and defending institutional integrity.” (I’d toss “populism” onto the trash pile too.)

Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · 4w ago

‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Excellent post. The “reflective” vs “formative” distinction is one I’ve tried to make in the past but not nearly as eloquently. And the fact that Anderson’s ICW index can dampen power by upweighting noise is an important problem that should be better understood.

David McKenzie@dmckenzie.bsky.social · last mo.

In today's blog, @brucewydick.bsky.social discusses what factors you should consider when aggregating variables into an index - and how to use indices to measure abstract concepts like aspirations, empowerment, and social cohesion blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Lovely time catching up with friends and colleagues at the inaugural @epssnet.bsky.social meeting in Belfast. Came away with some paper ideas as well. Now on to the Univ. of Kent DERECK Development, Conflict and the Political Economy of Development workshop. research.kent.ac.uk/development-...

Development Economics Research Centre - Research at Kent

A large group of economists with a diverse set of perspectives and approaches to the field.

research.kent.ac.uk

Why What Works in One Place Doesn’t Always Work Elsewhere. @melodyyhuang.bsky.social hosts a conference on external validity: bit.ly/4xK8aAO @cdsamii.bsky.social @awilke.bsky.social

We had lots of fun doing egap.org/learning-days/ again this year with 25 students from across the continent All training material is open access: egap.github.io/learningdays... FR / EN slides, exercises. Huge thanks to Brice Bado for hosting; @vinarceneaux.bsky.social for leading & the whole team:

Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP)@egap.bsky.social · 2mo ago

C’est notre dernier jour des #LearningDays à Abidjan ! La semaine a été bien remplie : les participants ont conçu des expériences, les ont testées entre eux, analysé les données recueillies et rédigé des rapports sur leurs résultats.

Morocco looking sharp again this time around

Again like in game 3, Knicks can’t figure out how to get through Spurs high press. They get stuck scrambling between half court and three point line almost every possession.

When the methods paper to review is from a Word doc…

I am so very sorry to hear this about a beloved colleague, Raul. I had the opportunity to work with him over the past 15 years through the @egap.bsky.social network, where always brought a critical mindset and reminded us about the human side of our task as social scientists.

harmodio@harmodio.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Buen camino, profe Raúl Pacheco Vega. Fuiste y serás siempre el investigador más chido.

Fonseca - Novak was epic!!!

Participated in “Perspectives on External Validity” workshop yesterday, organized by @melodyyhuang.bsky.social at @ispsyale.bsky.social isps.yale.edu/events/2026/...

We had an insightful afternoon reflecting on what EGAP-style interventions have taught us, and where we go from here in the current development landscape!

Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP)@egap.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Thank you to Edmund‏ Malesky for organizing and hosting us at the Duke Center for International Development!

Just wrapped up another year of Quant 2, my PhD-level causal inference course. Lots of updates to the literature this year, did an "estimator tournament" as part of an assignment on DID estimators, and included regular in-class pen and paper exercises. Materials here: cyrussamii.com?page_id=4190

I've been enjoying the Paper2Audio LLM-assisted text-to-speech app for listening to papers, book chapters, etc. A nice feature is that it constructs verbal summaries of tables, figures, and equations. www.paper2audio.com

🚨Replication alert🚨 I'm pleased to announce that my replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted as a comment at AER. I find ten issues in the paper. My comment focuses on two major problems; in the appendix, I document eight (relatively) minor problems. 1/

Useful rundown of issues in the “science of scaling” interventions, from Rasul. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

From field experiments to policy interventions at scale

A major advance in recent decades in the social sciences has been the use of field experiments for causal evaluation of policy interventions. Such interventions might be targeted to individuals, house...

science.org

Had no idea that the best data science podcast is back 😀 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...

Linear Digressions

Technology Podcast · Updated Weekly · 5eaabb50-0561-11f1-a0bc-cb0c6e332f5b

podcasts.apple.com

@ay-zed.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I too was sorry to see Linear Digressions disappear from my feed, however … it’s back again!

Good analysis of the institutional conundrum facing the Iranian leadership after Khamenei’s death: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/k...

Ayatollah Khamenei’s Deadly Legacy

Pegah Banihashemi thinks Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death will bring meaningful change only if his governing framework is dismantled.

project-syndicate.org

If you are looking for a way to do something meaningful amidst the current events, I’ll suggest again for you to just sit and watch “It Was Just an Accident.”

Update to my Quant 2 course: I used to do an Angrist and Pischke style discussion of regression models and treatment effects. Dumped that (or actually made it a recitation/review), brought in double machine learning instead. cyrussamii.com?page_id=4190

“Affective polarization” is a lot of syllables when the word “hate” is right there.

For anyone looking for postdocs for their students, over the next few months LSE “fellow” positions will start being listed. Research + teaching but 2-3 year runway. The new Global School of Sustainability has 5 new ones posted now! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Excited to see this out. The paper was a huge lift. If you’d be surprised that citizen empowerment *increases* the share that pay taxes in a place like Kinshasa, check out the details in Soeren’s thread.

Soeren Henn@soerenhenn.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🧵 New paper out in AJPS! "Seeing like a citizen: Experimental evidence on how empowerment affects engagement with the state" With @lbp2106.bsky.social, @wilsonprichard.bsky.social, @cdsamii.bsky.social, and Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra. doi.org/10.1111/ajps... 1/11