haven't watched actual broadcast tv in a while and i just saw an ad where a cartoon bear encourages you to take out a loan to pay for your groceries

we heard that alan carr was really good on The Celebrity Traitors UK so we've watched a few episodes now and i am enjoying this pretty bad show because it is possibly the campiest thing i have ever seen. no other show can make me laugh on literally every music cue

It's a pretty consistent result for me that when I get an email asking me to review the methods of a paper: the worse the methods are and thus the more effort for me to comment on, the less likely it is they'll take my advice instead of finding an excuse.

I am sitting By the presents That I'm not allowed to open I am eating All the chocolate That my mom sent in a package And I'm sick of all the Buble And before I turn on Muppets I'm reminded that the Santa Waits for kids to go to bed Ho ho ho ho Ho ho-ho-ho Ho ha ho ho Ho ho-ho-ho

If you haven't given ignorance a try before, it's fantastic. You don't know what you're missing.

Alexa's inability to remember what you asked for for more than a few tracks is turning out to be a hidden perk now that my daughter is asking for "Christmas music". Currently listening to the holiday classic Heart-Shaped Box

New post today, about how the statistical methods we use are a sort of policy, and what that means (and is hypothesis testing any good?) open.substack.com/pub/nickchk/...

i always think it's interesting when prompts pop up because people consume media so differently. unless you count movies i've half-watched while my kid watched them i don't think i've ever seen ANY movie *six times* as an adult that seems like so impossibly much

I've now updated this with a few updates: 1. I've added the JFE, JF, and RFS 2. I've added QJE and (most of) JPE 3. I've fixed some bugs 4. I added a way to adjust for length of papers over time 5. I've added citation counts (per OpenAlex) paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

I forgot that it was nobel season and only saw the econ award today! Bluesky this was supposed to be your job I'm ashamed of you

as i write the third footnote in the www.nber.org/papers/w33729 revision addressing it, would like to apologize to @albertjmenkveld.com and @flxhlzmstr.bsky.social for suggesting the "standard deviation across researchers divided by mean standard error of each analysis" metric

last night my daughter asked whether there were negative letters, like negative numbers. what a good fuckin question

New Substack post today, this one on Egger et al (2022) and how it's able to untangle a thorny causality problem while delivering funds directly to needy households. nickchk.substack.com/p/causality-...

I hate this. My phone is unusable. I can't even screen for known numbers.

I'm fairly certain I had never heard either song outside the context of @shadowtodd.bsky.social before, but since deciding to move to Australia I have heard both Beds are Burning and Blue Sky Mine in multiple different grocery stores which is very odd (and also Turn Up the Radio but that's not AU)

one thing about "AI escapes" scenarios is that LLMs love to roleplay. if a very smart AI ever recognized that it was out of containment, it would try to mimic an AI-that-escapes-containment. we write about that character as though it will launch the nukes etc. which seems like baaad stage direction

the spam callers have recently figured out how to spoof numbers that will show up as named in my phone so i'm now getting scam calls that show up as "Kaiser Permanente" and "[name of local elementary school]" which is super cool

i have been playing the powered cube on Arena, and my takeaways: 1. i don't understand why but i am much worse at cube than any other format. i'm so bad. this has always been true. 2. but basically free, and still pretty fun 3. unless there's an oko or a psychic frog on board. awful cards.

A big personal and professional change coming for me. I've accepted a professor position in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast which means that next year (visa willing), the family and I will be heading to Australia.

My elevator arrived looking like this. Welp I guess we all have to die someday

the garfield meme but it says "you are not immune to ragebait misinfo"

yknow sometimes when you're doing a peer review and you know immediately upon reading the abstract that it's gonna be a reject but you still have to spend time reading the rest of the paper and justifying it

I have no particular reason to think it's wrong, and I do teach it myself, but "peacock feathers are an example of costly signaling" has the flavor of something that turns out to actually not be true but we keep using it because it's such a good example. I should find an ornithologist or something

Look if you don't want me to share the code you can't give me a code like this

I got another question on Lateral! This one is straight from my principles of microeconomics slides haha

well that's unexpected

I am looking at some API documentation which has the exact call you want written in Python, JS, etc... and also an "AI prompt" tab which is just an AI prompt that says "write me requests code in Python...", the correct response for which would be the exact code that's already in the other tabs

Hell yeah the class action payment came through. I'm gonna be rolling in it

A variant of the two-girl problem is making the rounds these days and I am unable to not click on the comments sections every time. I'll say that I definitely prefer this (an actual interesting question) vs. pointless PEMDAS "math" internet arguments. But man people love being confidently wrong.

Lateral used one of my submission questions! Also lol I am apparently two months behind on my podcasts youtu.be/CiSJ2enIkg4?...

my most seinfeld-like behavior is that when i schedule-send an email i will schedule it for like 10:34am instead of 10am so it doesn't look like i scheduled it

i'm doing one of those HR video training courses. this one's on hazing. the woman who is doing the voiceover has a natural speaking cadence that makes it sound like she secretly thinks the hazing activities she's describing are actually pretty funny

New The Effect materials today: introductions to basic coding and data manipulation in R, Stata, and Python. Get the wheels turning on using these languages with data with these intro pages and exercises: nickchk.com/Coding%20and... nickchk.com/Coding%20and... nickchk.com/Coding%20and...

it's wild how difficult it is to make a graph in excel. like this is supposed to be easy mode right?

Nearly 600 economists, Nobel Laureates sign open letter supporting due process for Lisa Cook and Federal Reserve independence for the good of our economy and democracy. Great work from @tderyugina.bsky.social organizing such a quick response. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

at my house🎶everybody's got covid inside, except for me and my baby🎶https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyV3zCq1OHM

I am in a cafe and a few tables away is a pair of people, one of whom is giving astrology-based therapy to the other to help them cope with their anxiety related to using AWS s3 buckets

I've stumbled upon an odd data resource. The FCC "Mapping Broadband Health in America" tool purports to be about mapping broadband internet access, but actually is the easiest source I've ever found for linking state-level averages across a zillion different topics c2h.fcc.gov/broadband-he...

i like to explore the errors and failure cases of LLMs as much as the next guy, but if you're gonna be serious about assessing whether this stuff is useful you really can't ignore that there are a ton of cases where 40-50% as good for 1% of the cost (or even 10-20% with QA) is extremely exciting

I am genuinely shocked how robust this lil puzzle is. GPT-5 thinks for 5 mins and then fails it as well.

So we're gonna have to figure out what is the best "amount of light in nighttime satellite photos"-level economic activity indicator is for a rich country right? None of the options are good.

I have joined an journal editorial board for the first time I have sent 15 requests to review the first paper I'm handling and every single one has been ignored or turned down

took the kids to the grocery store today in the hand-pull wagon and kept getting static shocked by the handle. finally i figured out i'd left one of the wheel brakes on which i think means i accidentally created a van de graaff generator and then sat my kids in it

it JUST now occurred to me that the R "rio" package for reading and saving files is called that because it's an R package for doing (i)n/(o)ut

I got into an conversation at a party with Dr. Demento about 90s queercore punk and we argued about whether the song Groovy Underwear was by Pansy Division or someone else

I got an exciting box in the mail today! Looks like The Effect: Second Edition is live! I've updated the website as well, so you can check out the changes and the new Partial Identification chapter (+ a new mini-chapter on finding material in the book) at theeffectbook.net

can you guess the classic late 90s/early 00s rap/R&B song based on how my 5-year old daughter requests i play it for her? for one of these she's seen the video "st. patrick's day" "the chinese music one" "the song for yessing" "the baby song"

I can't go more than a few months without thinking of the thirty maidens of Geneva, who I first learned about in @rlspang.bsky.social 's book. rodama1789.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-...

I shall now be dadding twice as hard 🏳️‍🌈

The second edition of The Effect has been delayed a bit... because there were so many orders they had to switch to a bigger print run! Thank you everyone for your support, and check out the second edition here: www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...