I'll be teaching a grad methods class focused on experiments in the fall for a development studies dept. I'm looking for published development RCTs. Ideally they would have: 1. replication packages in R, or 2. fairly simple code I could rewrite in R. Anyone have recommendations?

I'm hiring for In Development's first not-me hire. Help shape the future of development journalism; edit pieces that do serious cost-effectiveness analysis AND have jokes. Up to $90k USD, fully remote worldwide. indevelopmentmag.com/jobs/

We can estimate the resource cost of solving the Erdos problem. The calculations below seem reasonable, so using the best public estimates we have, it took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity & 3–31L of water Equivalent to < 3 almonds worth of water & the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving

Post-Instrument Bias (Also: poli sci people doing what is beneath Real Rigorous Econometricians™... umm, doing the Lord's work.) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

“Stochastic parrots”

June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"

OpenAI has used a "general purpose reasoning model" to disprove that the square grid type construction is the best solution to the planar unit distance problem. I am sure the "AI is completely useless" crowd will now change their ways, right?

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

Jeremy right now

We have a new version of this paper out. The headline results are the same—political science must filter results heavily for statistical significance—but we've added many extensions and rewritten much of it in response to feedback (thank you!). A quick thread on updates 👇

Feeling pretty happy about these

How to post on a twitterlike: 1. spend 20 min listing edge cases and objections to your point, 2. compress each quibble into a single word choice that implicitly addresses it 3. finally, watch replies to the post ignore those qualifiers and perfectly recreate the original list of objections

Come tell me why I’m wrong!

All welcome at the workshop in 10 days. rohanalexander.com/tdw.html Also, if you read Ryan's piece and thought "hey, I have thoughts on AI and quant social science as well", please do get in touch.

I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...

incredible work indevelopmentmag.com/money-for-no...

Me just finishing reading a kid version of Wizard of Oz to 3 year old: “There’s no place like home.” “No” “Is home your favourite place?” “No” “What is your favourite place?” “Hot pot”

The more that folks outside of science hear of this, the more they should ask: why? open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...

There are no longer any great options in the twitter-ish social media space and it’s sad

Feel free to borrow/steal---the source is here: github.com/pos5747/notes The goal is a *still relevant* course on parametric models that can sit alongside a course on more agnostic methods for causal inference. *These are in-progress and written in the pre-Claude Code era.

You guys @carlislerainey.bsky.social has a free textbook online and it seems really useful pos5747.github.io/notes/

probably a good time to share this again: asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca...

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

Today is the day that a lot of social scientists get their first Nature publication

I know how to solve the marriage and birth rate crisis and the good news is that it’s delicious

You can just make scones

My attempt at articulating why I think LLMs are a clear net positive for all research, and it's a mistake to ignore it despite private concerns: paulgp.com/2026/03/16/r...

This is a good example of the kind of anti-semitism that is common enough in leftist circles that I imagine most people don’t even notice it, but it’s really quite vile.

Each frontier AI model seems to use a little under a year's worth of a square mile of farmland's water to train. I think about this as the country having 4 square miles of farmland sectioned off to grow some of the most popular consumer products in history.

I forget who first pointed out that the pre-2020 internet is going to be thought of like low-background steel, but I think about that a lot.

We’re so lucky that these issues only affect the papers that smart people look at very deeply.

I will always re-post Toronto mango content

Money is useful for 1. Buying illegal drugs 2. Hiring hitmen 3. A medium of exchange that facilitates modern technological civilization Which one do you use it for?

This is a millennial problem, though we greatly improved overall coffee quality so you’re welcome. Gen Z cafes have plants and ornamentation and way better vibes.

I’m the lead of the Quarto project. We work hard to make it easy for people to use. It *thrills* me that LLMs got so good that they can take over much of the labor required. We’ll always work hard to make it easy for people to use Quarto. But less total human frustration is good, actually!

It's quite wild that the "LLMs are stochastic parrots" thing is still a meme on here given that at for at least the last 2ish years (since o1) so much LLM progress has come from reinforcement learning on things like math and coding problems (not next token prediction).

In a flurry of spending before the fiscal year ran out, in one month the DoD spent more than the annual budget of USAID, whom this administration had accused of waste that never materialized

The most downloaded paper on EconStor in Feb. 2026 was: "Briggs, Ryan C.; Mellon, Jonathan; Arel-Bundock, Vincent (2026) : It must be very hard to publish null results, I4R Discussion Paper Series, No. 281, Institute for Replication (I4R), s.l." hdl.handle.net/10419/336819 @i4replication.bsky.social

lol sometimes this place is like Portlandia but for 2021

This skeet is only two days old, but since then two more synagogues were shot at.

More people should be putting orange peel and dried chillies in their braises.

This is all great

Weirdly little known fact but you can hire grad students in a subject to tutor your kids on that subject and it’s cheaper and often much better than what is commercially available (Russian school of math or whatever).

this but for scientists who have p-hacked

This week a synagogue in Toronto was shot at, 3 Jewish stores were vandalized with swastikas in Montreal, and a student in Halifax was targeted for being Jewish and bullied out of high school.

I gave Zoë Kravitz & Penn Badgley a lunch recommendation in Paris (they asked) & then a bunch of people around us asked to take a photo with them & my mom didn’t know who they were & misunderstood the social situation & so asked if those people also wanted to take a photo with me & my now wife.

Opus 4.6 solved a problem Don Knuth (author of Art of Computer Programming) had been working on for weeks. www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...