The Experiments Section Newsletter is BACK! Latest issue just dropped: what do we actually do while conducting experiments, and how do we handle unexpected events?

The end of 538 is a huge shame - both for the incredible people who worked there, and for political and data journalism as a whole. I was lucky enough to work beside them for a few years and want to say a bit about what I think was so valuable that I hope doesn't vanish from the media landscape: 🧵

RCTs are good, but not (just) because they make the statistics easy.

Interested in how people talk to each other online? Care about causal inference and/or NLP? Want to design and implement field experiments? Come do a PhD with Dominik Hangartner, me, and a bunch of awesome people at IPL in Zurich: jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...

The US2020 project was not independent (and that's good) open.substack.com/pub/drewdimm...

I riffed on Ivan Illich, Smalltalk and This Place. open.substack.com/pub/drewdimm...

A thread about being wrong: 5 years ago, we wrote a paper about how how newly enfranchised 16-year-olds vote in Austria. But we were wrong. This year, @elisabethgraf.bsky.social, @schnizzl.bsky.social, Sylvia Kritzinger and I are setting the record straight: authors.elsevier.com/c/1juT5xRaZk...

Welcome to Hertie, @ddimmery.com ! 🤝  The Professor of Data Science for the Common Good begins teaching today. "Algorithms, code and machine learning are an increasingly large part of how our world works. I'm excited to empower students to understand these topics!" @hertiedatascience.bsky.social

Using the reframing of "the Algorithm" to "the Apparatus" should shape how we evaluate what it is/does open.substack.com/pub/drewdimm...

Continuing with the controversial takes, in this post I argue that folks should plot their data (based on a new paper at ISR with Yan Leng) open.substack.com/pub/drewdimm...

Got a hot take: open.substack.com/pub/drewdimm...

Does anyone know of a good intellectual history of ML/AI? Something that doesn't just survey the development of methods, but includes things like "Papert and Minsky think solving computer vision will be an undergrad summer project in the 60s"

Your weird linear algebra fact of the day: b_ols = (X'X)^{-1} X'y = X^+ y where X^+ is the Moore-Penrose inverse and X'X is invertible.

Really nice post by Kevin about the (insane) techno-optimist manifesto. There's also an implicit meta-level critique about modes of thinking that's worth considering, too: the Manifesto was basically a tweet-thread; Kevin's post is not. open.substack.com/pub/kevinmun...

Wrote some thoughts on microblogging (derogatory)

Meanwhile, in Austria, US soft power is undefeated www.politico.eu/article/let-...

My coauthor Drew Dimmery (formerly of Meta) on how the 2020 US Facebook and Instagram Election Project offers a template for reporting by social media platforms under future regulation - recommended

I finally got around to posting a package to PyPi (https://pypi.org/project/bwd/). Geez, the comparison to the CRAN process is like night and day. Zero worrying about a petty tyrant yelling at me for not following some abstruse and poorly documented procedures.