Matt Blackwell @matt_blackwell Twitter profile

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Matt Blackwell

4 months

Reminder that I have a textbook on an introduction to mathematical statistics and regression, designed for first year PhD students in poli sci, but maybe useful to others. Let me know if you use it and have feedback!

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

By the time you’re n=30, you should be approximately normally distributed.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

After a long and unsuccessful search for a statistical inference and regression textbook at the right level for our PhD students, I finally decided to write up my lecture notes as a book. The book is publicly available if you are interested:

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Interested in causal inference? I updated my course last year and have posted the course materials online. If you're teaching a causal inference course, please feel free to steal my lecture notes!

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

If the 2nd hand smoke evidence came out now instead of the 80s/90s, I feel like it’d be a real culture war shit show.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Wow this immature and reckless student partying is really ruining... sorry what’s that?

Jack Jenkins

@jackmjenkins

4 years

BREAKING: Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins, who was at the WH SCOTUS announcement on Saturday and was criticized for not wearing a mask and shaking hands, has tested positive for COVID-19. This was just sent out to the campus. Unclear if he had it during the WH event.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

NPR reporter just said Card, Angrist, and Imbens won the Nobel for their analysis of “casual” relationships

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Giving you a glimpse into the future of stats typesetting: 🎩 β = (X’X)⁻¹X’y

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Econ friends, this one is for you (please stop me)

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Same vibes

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

A few rules for faculty interacting with grad students: 1. Always pick up the bar tab 2. Don't make fun of them on Twitter So easy!

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

My best tip on how to give better quantitative presentations is to (a) use more plots and (b) build up your plots on multiple overlays, as in: - Just x-axis (explain it) - Add y-axis (explain it) - Add 1 data point (explain it) - Plot the rest of the data (explain it)

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

I think our sign might be a little too obscure

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

It's telling that junior thinks that "walking around getting gifts from people" is a good metaphor for "earning money"

Donald Trump Jr.

@DonaldJTrumpJr

7 years

I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

I’ll say it again: academics should have walk out songs that play as they’re introduced before talks.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

This picture is a pretty good litmus test for politics: do you regard this formula with respect, or disgust?

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Honestly, I’d much prefer a SCOTUS Justice that has basic statistical literacy than one whose brilliance in con law allows them to write beautiful dissents or the mind-blowing 14th prong of some new test.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

How to be a male academic during metoo: don't be an asshole and don't be a creep. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Last semester I taught an undergrad quantitative methods class and decided to pre-tape most of my lectures. They're not the highest production value, but I thought maybe someone might find them useful so I made a YouTube playlist to share them:

Gov 51: Data Analysis and Politics

www.youtube.com

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

I cannot believe a serious moral philosophy has been built up around the idea that humans can predict the consequences of our current actions on the far future with any degree of accuracy. Insanity.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

For those teaching quantitative methods classes in the social sciences: I put together a {learnr} package called {qsslearnr} with interactive tutorials that correspond to Kosuke Imai's QSS textbook.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

One of the more subtle manifestations of my imposter syndrome: feeling slightly relieved as a reviewer to find out the other reviewers had the same reaction to the paper.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

I feel like the wheels are coming off the Context Collapse Express and we are entering dangerous posting levels

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Some tenured folks on twitter

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Tfw you are a “political scientist”

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

One R function that I forget about and maybe you do too: reformulate() can take a character vector and turn it into the right-hand side of a model formula (and you can add the outcome too). eg: reformulate(c("var1", "var2"), response = "outcome")

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

OLS is out here every damn day, using every muscle to pack those residuals as tightly as it can. And then you have the audacity to complain about the result? Oh, is it too “variance-weighted” for you? Boohoo. Go home and cry to your sample mean.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

@PhuzzieSlippers Yes! It completely reoriented my thinking on slavery when I realized, to whites at the time, slavery was like homeownership today: the path to upward mobility. Absolutely zero regard for the humanity of the enslaved.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Holy shit: Oxford's half-dose first, full-dose later arm was a dosing error

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

I like teaching graduate-level statistical methods classes because it’s like doing an oral comp twice a week for your entire life.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

The fact that this whole Gorka thing isn't a massive scandal requiring a firing and a long news cycle speaks to just how lost we are.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Thanks I hate it.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

For academics, the email subject line “quick chat?” means you are about to get either great news or terrible news.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

huh, I never realized that R had a built-in way to convert from integers to roman numerals: > as.roman(2019) [1] MMXIX

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

NYT double endorsement has a strong academic hiring committee “ask the deans for two lines” vibe

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

If I’m reading correctly, Econ has found the One True social welfare function and now it’s just pew pew pew optimal policy all day long. Love it, congrats everyone!!!

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 months

Last Fall I completed another iteration of Gov 50 (Data Science for the Social Sciences), and I've been really happy with the course. We doubled in size to 250 students and got great reviews from students. What's worked for us?

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

RIP to a real one

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

If I could give a single piece of advice to new PhD students (in poli sci at least): work as hard as you can to write a complete, submittable solo research article by the time you start your 3rd year. Even if it is never published, the experience you get is insanely helpful

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

The entirety of one of the best Econometrica papers. Certainly the best to contain the phrase "ceiling, celery, ceremony, cease, cedar, celestial, celibacy"

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Probably the best way to fix peer review (but also the most impossible) is for everyone to write fewer papers.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Every time I find a bug in my code, I like to say to myself “well, that’s your problem right there” like an 80s sitcom plumber

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

25 days

In case it’s helpful to folks, I have a set of lecture notes available for a grad-level causal inference course here: (with great section notes from the great Sooahn Shin) Feel free to use any of the material in your courses. Happy to share sources!

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 months

Some random practical PhD advice in no particular order: - almost everyone should start their dissertation by writing a paper, even if you plan to write a book dissertation. It’s less pressure and you can always expand it if you find the page count growing and growing.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

This Von Neumann quote should probably be on every syllabus of every remotely mathy class: “in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them”

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

I was curious about the data and so I played around with it and found another teen trait that has changed dramatically over the last 10 years: sleep. Since 2014 we see a fairly steady decrease in the proportion of 12th graders saying they sleep 7hrs ever or nearly every night

Jonathan Haidt

@JonHaidt

1 year

There was no sign of a teen mental illness epidemic until around 2012. Then liberal girls' rates started increasing. Then everyone else. Why? @glukianoff nailed it: Reverse CBT, as I explain here:

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

The best thing that universities could do for faculty with kids right now is bulk purchase rapid antigen COVID tests and make them freely available.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

21 days

can I say something without people getting mad?

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

One practice that is useful to begin in grad school is empathetic criticism, in which you try to give feedback from the target’s own perspective. Instead of saying X is dumb, try to understand the trade-offs that led the author to choose X and tailor your comments accordingly.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

I'm in awe: the 90% effect arm of the Oxford UK study wasn't in the original protocol because that dosing was done in error and they just rolled with it.

Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Holy shit: Oxford's half-dose first, full-dose later arm was a dosing error

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

When working on an R&R, I often dream of being able to have an anonymous text/email exchange with the reviewers to help me understand what the hell they are talking about.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

11 months

🚨 New paper 🚨 In an experiment when should you measure a key moderator? Before treatment risks priming bias, but after treatment risks posttreatment bias. In a new paper, we develop methods to bound each type of bias in any experiment. 🔗:

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

This might be my dumb statistics brain speaking, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to, say, randomly sample 1000 people in the hardest hit states to get a sense of the infection prevalence? Do we not do this just because of testing capacity issues?

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

[gasps in junior faculty]

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

A “wirecutter for statistics” site: Best Regression Estimator for Most People (OLS, upgrade pick: LASSO) Best Regression Variance Estimator for most People (Robust SEs, budget pick: homoskedastic SEs)

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Hokey religions [Bayesianism] and ancient weapons [MCMC] are no match for a good blaster [reg y x, r] at your side, kid

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

One of my favorite tables from Wasserman’s All of Statistics: translating between stats and machine learning.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Going to start an academic clickbait YouTube channel that’s just videos with titles like “Every instrumental variables paper ever, RANKED”

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

This Haidt article on what has caused polarization in the US spends 2 paragraphs on rightward drift of Republican party and 13 on the identity politics of universities

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

cp this_tweet ~/work/tenure_review/public_engagement/

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Few things more unsettling than finding your own “## Fix this” comment in the code and having no idea what the problem is.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

@jmwooldridge Just put ols <- lm at the top of your scripts and everything will be right in the world again and you type: ols(y ~ x)

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Like clockwork

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

my reaction when someone asked me about a methods paper I don't understand.

Jake Sherman

@JakeSherman

3 years

PELOSI on GameStop: “interesting isnt it?"

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

A short comedy for junior scholars in the 21st century.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Honestly makes me feel a bit better about people not understanding what I do.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Academics: may your holidays be merry and not be like mine 2 years ago when I got a paper rejected at 6:34pm on Christmas Eve.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

I love creating simple animations for teaching with my beamer (pdf) slides and I always found it to be a huge pain in Rmarkdown, which I otherwise love. So I finally sat down to fix it and it moved me to blog for the first time in ~8 years.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

The spark that lit the fire of a thousand diff-in-diffs.

NPR

@NPR

5 years

The small city of Sandusky, Ohio, has declared Election Day a paid holiday — by swapping it out with Columbus Day.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Gonna say, probably not great that we live in a gerontocracy imposing policies that are very unpopular with young people with seemingly no democratic way to reverse them.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Excited to announce my new venture, Prior, a platform for all of the ideas you already believe written by the writers you already love. For the low low cost of $500, we will make sure you feel completely justified in your beliefs.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

If academia truly is “a calling”, let’s take away tenure and see how full profs feel.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m trying to delete it

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 months

At Harvard orientation we did an icebreaker where we had to declare our favorite sandwich estimator. I first thought “CRSE with HC2” but I didn’t want to seem too nerdy so I said “White SEs” & a person said that has terrible finite sample performance and everyone started snapping

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

I adore the legacy of RBG, but it’s time to end lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS. This shit is ruining our democracy.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

The scale of Facebook is insane. Its net income over the last few years was almost as much as an Ivy League school’s entire endowment per year.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Shout out to all of the junior scholars going up for tenure in the next year or two and trying to balance existential dread on two fronts.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

normal person: "wow, this united thing is messed up." social scientist: "hmm, tell me more about how they do this randomization"

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

The main views that I self-censor on here for academia are about how much I like to play video games.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

I've been teaching a revamped version of our intro to methods/data science class for undergraduates, Gov 50, this semester and it's been a lot of fun. More live coding in lecture, more simulation, fewer formulas. Details here:

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Going to start a social science themed cocktail podcast called Mixed Methods.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

Agreed: don't reinvent the wheel! Here are materials from my recent classes: Grad Probability/Inference/Linear Models: Undergrad Data Science: Grad Causal Inference: Feel free to take as much as you want!

Gov 2003: Causal Inference: Gov 2003: Causal Inference with Applications

Information for Gov 2003 at Harvard University

mattblackwell.github.io

Shana Gadarian

@sgadarian

2 years

Folks, this is a really hard time to be prepping classes. I have materials for Intro American Politics, Media & Politics (needs updating), Grad scope & methods, Grad Surveys & Experiments, undergrad data analysis. If I can help you prep, let me know.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

Economists when asked about political science

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

6 years

Also out today: my paper with Adam Glynn on causal inference in TSCS in the APSR. We try hard to clarify the quantities of interest and the possible biases that arise in this setting.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Never met a social scientist who didn’t like a good italicized phrase that signifies 𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑡.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

Extremely happy and humbled to report that my book with @maya_sen & @aviditacharya Deep Roots has been awarded APSA's 2019 Riker Award for best book in Political Economy in the last 3 years.

Deep Roots

The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South

press.princeton.edu

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

3 years

Slides are often an imperfect teaching tool and my students will definitely tell you that I had my fair share of equations, but I really enjoyed the challenge of creating intuitive visuals for key concepts in our probability+linear regression course this semester.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

🚨 We've got a cover!🚨

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Lord, crucial policy decisions are being informed by how stata handles weights. We might be truly fucked.

Will Fithian

@wfithian

4 years

The authors said by email that they used a built-in Stata function and aren't sure themselves how the software used the input weights. I suspect they misapplied that function (too complicated to tweet why) but I don't know Stata well enough to be sure; it seems neither do they.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 year

I think academics have taken their eyes off the ball in the debates over academic freedom. So much ink spilled lamenting students shouting down speakers while the right is trying to dismantle the tenure system and shutter academic programs based on ideological grounds.

Drew Engelhardt

@_amengel

1 year

Proposed bill in NC house not only prospectively eliminates tenure for new hires, it would also institute reviews of research.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

4 years

Even though the list hasn't been updated to reflect it, I signed this letter saying that I won't retaliate against striking student workers at Harvard.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

7 years

My paper on instrumental variables for estimating causal interactions is now in print at JASA:

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

1 month

As usual, 3Blue1Brown does a fantastic job stepping through the basics of (parts of) the GPT algorithm. One of the best introductions to the idea of embeddings that I’ve seen

But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers | Chapter 5, Deep...

Unpacking how large language models work under the hoodEarly view of the next chapter for patrons: https://3b1b.co/early-attentionSpecial thanks to these sup...

www.youtube.com

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

I can’t say how incredibly proud I am of @maya_sen . She is absolutely the best and this is great news for Harvard.

Gary King

@kinggary

5 years

Big congratulations to @maya_sen , newly tenured member of the Harvard Kennedy School.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

2 years

These people have more money than anyone can reasonably spend in a lifetime so now we all have to go on their journey to find Meaning.

jack

@jack

2 years

In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.

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Matt Blackwell

@matt_blackwell

5 years

Non-academic market for political scientists growing every day