Stuart Buck
@stuartbuck1
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Executive Director, Good Science Project Senior Advisor, Social Science Research Council, Harvard Graduate
Joined June 2011
@DOGE I can read books I own that are 150+ yrs old, but cannot do anything with floppy disks or cassette tapes that I had in the early 2000s. Maybe paper records are actually better for agencies that need to maintain records for several decades?.
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How the vast majority of people and organizations think about evidence:
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Hospitals: "we demand to charge $15,000 for a service that costs $5,000 in Australia. We never tell the patient the price in advance". Insurance company: "That is too high, we will only pay $12,000". Commenters: "The insurance company is so heartless and cruel!!".
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This Harvard Business Review chart seems to have been made by someone who didn't know what most of the terms meant: .
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Boss: We need a name for our film studio. Me: Let him go first, he'll copy my idea. 1-up Karl: No I promise I won't. Me: Ok my idea is 19th Century Fox. 1-up Karl: *looks at camera*.
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Driver: My God… that weasel….Onlooker: He just went… “pop”….Weasel’s family: *sobbing*.Ice-cream man: I’ve got an idea for a song y’all.
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This is why DOGE should do just a tiny bit of homework before trying to cancel items that they don't understand. The program below was launched by DARPA in 2018 in order to prevent cyberattacks and phishing that happen via social deception.
Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for “large scale social deception”. That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.
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@nicksortor He was 100% right though. Foreign countries don't pay our tariffs. US-based importers literally pay the tariff to US Customs. It is amazing that so many people have no idea how anything works, and even get indignant when anyone points out the truth.
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It's easy to romanticize the past . My grandfather was born in this farmhouse in Arkansas. Life was so hard that he couldn't afford new shoes--he had to repair old shoes with tire rubber. He hoped I would grow up to "get an indoors job.".
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@OldRowSwig @NateAFischer There were around 240 million cars in the US in 2010. The Cash for Clunkers removed 677k from the road. You think that removing a mere 1/3rd of 1 percent of cars in 2010 is causing some massive car shortage today?.
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What NIH purports to do here is illegal. In annual appropriations bills for the past several years, Congress has specifically banned NIH from changing indirect costs: .
Last year, $9B of the $35B that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted for research was used for administrative overhead, what is known as “indirect costs.” Today, NIH lowered the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15%, above
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I've been seeing this story a lot on Twitter today: Headline: Florida Surgeon General shows that there is an "84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination".
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@adamhousley No one has found massive fraud, though, except the existing agencies (GAO) and IGs who actually know how to tell fraud from just a grant that they don't personally like.
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1. The extra $3,000 that you may or may not be billed for originated with the hospital, not the insurance company. 2. Think for 2 seconds about what would happen to health costs if insurance companies had to automatically pay any price for literally any invoice.
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So much misinformation out there. The only way to determine causality is with so-called "p values." . * If the p value is under 0.05, the relationship is causal. *If over 0.05, you're looking at correlation not causation.
This is a common misconception I see a lot in my intro econometrics class. To detect causality in regressions you actually need to look at the *adjusted* R-squared, since the regular R-squared always increases with more controls. Hope this helps!.
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@realchrisrufo @soncharm Seems very doubtful that 1st grade teachers are telling kids that all white people are born evil. At most, what might have happened is that the teacher said something about how "white people enslaved black people centuries ago" (true), and the 6-year-old extrapolated from that.
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@Anc_Aesthetics 40 million is a number you made up out of thin air. Moreover, you obviously have no idea what the Supreme Court held (which has nothing to do with blocking deportations per se).
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I don't understand the repeated impulse to cancel the best surveys/statistics that the federal government collects. Savings will be trivial, but the loss of information about government effectiveness will be enormous.
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@53gaDr3amca5t I once saw the original Die Hard on TV, and the key line was dubbed in: "Yippie ki yay, Mister Falcon.".
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@SarahTheHaider Maybe it's not strictly a fallacy in and of itself, but if people start making a slippery slope argument, they will be more likely to make worse and worse arguments and before you know it, they will be guilty of innumerable logical fallacies.
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@of_not_course I did not realize that insurance companies demand to pay 10x what a hospital would be willing to accept. Quite generous of them!.
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I'm not sure how it's the case that London is an expensive place to live, yet every job like this seems to pay half or a third of an equivalent job in the US.
The head of pandemic preparedness in the UK will literally make less than most random 24 year olds I met when I was in NYC lol
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@hsu_steve I saw this paper a while back, and had trouble believing that a firm with 1,000+ material scientists didn't have their own internal economist or AI researcher, and turned over millions of highly confidential records to a random first year graduate student. .
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Great, just great, now we need to stay 6 feet away from tigers too. "Tiger at Bronx Zoo in New York City tests positive for coronavirus" via @abc7.
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It’s time to publicly announce something I’ve been working on for quite some time: the Good Science Project.
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@the_dugster @KelseyTuoc @teapottery_ Indeed (see screenshot). About 10 years ago at the Arnold Foundation, I suggested to a colleague that we sponsor the biggest/best RCT ever as to fingerprints. [cont]
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@JDVance @lwoodhouse @ZaidJilani Why are you talking about deportation when the real problem is that he was sent straight to prison despite never being charged or found guilty of anything that would justify prison?.
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Given what apparently triggered a key dispute on the OpenAI board, it's interesting to recall that none other than Larry Summers once told Elizabeth Warren about a key distinction: Insider power vs. outsider power. From her memoir:
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@MJRosenbergDad @mattyglesias He didn't take issue with those beliefs per se; he took issue with the idea that making everyone write out such anodyne statements actually makes any difference in the real world.
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But it's one of the worst studies I've ever seen. It doesn't show what you might think, not even close. Here's why.
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@deanwball @jbarro @TheStalwart @hamandcheese We have heard many rationales:. *trade deficit.*fentanyl.*immigration.*reciprocity.*reshoring.*replacing income tax. Dean, why are you pretending there is a coherent rationale?.
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@the_dugster @KelseyTuoc @teapottery_ Give a bunch of examiners an incomplete print, and then randomize them to compare it to 1 of 2 databases (1 that contains the real print and 1 that doesn't). Overall goal is to see whether they differ in rates of finding a "match.". But then also randomize into further groups.
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Not very plausible that Harvard would investigate a superstar researcher, write a 1000Ă· page report, and suspend that person, just because of internet outrage over problematic data. Universities err in the opposite direction all the time, and a superstar well-funded researcher.
Regardless of the underlying cases, @lessig makes good points about universities caving to internet outrage here.
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@the_dugster @KelseyTuoc @teapottery_ In one subgroup, examiners are fed false information that there is additional confirmation that the guy really did the crime. Goal: See whether additional info like that can bias the fingerprint examiner towards finding a "match.".
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@GaryMarcus @timnitGebru Many in the field of "AI ethics" are discrediting themselves on a daily basis, unfortunately.
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@the_dugster @KelseyTuoc @teapottery_ You can imagine a number of other subgroups in which examiners are tested for bias in one direction or another. So, a huge multi-stage RCT that tests for false positives and for many possible biases. Ought to happen.
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@FischerKing64 "Effort to repatriate manufacturing" -- meaning the idiotic tariff policy that is driving manufacturers to layoff people b/c their own costs for inputs are so much higher?.
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@bridgietherease Not even close to true. It was an illusion because most states can be called for one side or the other before all votes were counted.
The last state to finalize their election results is almost always California but setting that aside there is nothing weird about it taking longer for *projections* of close states (which is the definition of a swing state) to take more time than other states.
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CIPSEA (reauthorized under Trump in 2018!) provides that if you let the wrong person see confidential data, you can go to prison for 5 years and be fined $250,000. It's no wonder that top professionals resign. Trump may have to give preemptive pardons.
BREAKING: The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration has exited after a clash with Elon Musk's DOGE over sensitive data, multiple sources tell The Washington Post. Same story really across federal agencies.
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In other words, they *only* looked at people who literally died within 25 weeks of a Covid vaccine. This means that "rate of cardiac death" really means something like, "of the few people that died, what proportion of deaths were cardiac-related?".
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1) Terrible mismatched chart from Case/Deaton.2) Roughly the same chart with scale fixed for white/black deaths.
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@Acyn Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT? . He was a professor from 1936 to 1973--some 37 years. Gilbert Strang spent 61 years on the MIT faculty. Heather Lechtman has been at MIT since 1974:
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Found all the talk of neural nets impenetrable, but on looking into the actual math, it looks like computer scientists managed to reinvent (multinomial) logistic regression (+optimizing the loss function) and renamed all the traditional statistics terms for no reason?.
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@KatiePavlich For many civilians, it's hard to grasp the idea that the Constitution grants certain powers to state legislatures and Congress, and definitely not to the President.
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There's a tendency in the effective altruism movement (most egregiously with FTX) to give lots of money, power or responsibility to youngish people who are really smart and well-meaning, and to worry less about who actually has experience with boring issues like public.
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@Austen Completely wrong. What they're talking about is precisely the money that goes fund research staff, labs, medical supplies, etc.
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A dismal success rate at arguably the single most important task that police have:.
Some details from my first investigation with @CBSNews:. Cops in the US only solve about HALF of murders in the US. It's the lowest rate ever recorded.
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Rings true for every parent, but note that this unbelievable level of self-determination may help explain why humans learn so many skills in the first few years of life.
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@realchrisrufo @jmrphy Justin's chart is the exact equivalent of this:. USAID deposited money at Chase Bank at some point. Someone else who used Chase sent money to Rufo. Therefore USAID is somehow indirectly sending money to Rufo. Utter nonsense!.
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Imagine that before vaccination, 100 people die in 25 weeks, and 20% are cardiac. After vaccination, 40 people die in 25 weeks, and 25% are cardiac. Even though cardiac deaths went down, this sort of study would say that cardiac risk increased.
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The latest "plagiarism" case is absurd. All of the passages involve routine descriptions of how a survey was constructed. Are scholars supposed to invent new wording when they quote the survey questions? Are they supposed to come up with new ways to say "Methods and Data"?
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Another mischievous idea: . Give nutritional epidemiologists a dataset that is real except for 2 variables that are random noise. One is labeled "blueberries" and the other "red meat.". Ask them to estimate the effect on mortality, disease, etc. Then sit back and watch.
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@ENBrown So what?. If 90% of your friends have a smartphone, and you don't, then of course you see them less, and are anxious about it, etc. That says nothing about the overall effect of 90% of kids having smartphones.
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@drgurner @Zanussi46 If you think you "fully own" property without any obligations to the government, then the government would have no obligation to protect your property by, say, sending the police in case of a home invasion or even by allowing you to register your title. It's all on you.
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@notlouisck The problem is that so much of what DOGE posts is wrong or misleading. They have had to correct many mistakes (such as claiming an $8 billion savings on an $8 million contract).
Hard to check the endless puffery from DOGE, but $52m to WEF is this grant which started in 2015. $35m has been spent (mostly during the first Trump administration). Seems like it went to support this free trade group.
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@DavidSacks How would a crypto reserve of any kind whatsoever be funded? By donations from crypto bros? That is the only way it would be net positive to the US government.
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I was going to write up a response to this PNAS piece: Redish et al., “Reproducibility failures are essential to scientific inquiry.”
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@Anc_Aesthetics Nonsense. Zero evidence for that.
The 20million number is an article of faith on the right, but it's completely made up. I've been trying for a long time to track down how they came up with it. Even if you assume that literally every border encounter was an illegal alien allowed in, you get half that number.
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In any event, if you select just a group of people (however small) who got vaccinated and then died in the next 6 months, you can't say anything whatsoever about their risk of death compared to the overall population.
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@Meelsie143 @JackTierney30 @RapnCap @bitchardthe3rd @uncoolboyfriend "Bon Iver! Rock on, man, I love 'Living on a Prayer.'".
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Firing the newest ("probationary") government employees is a great way to cripple new fields (such as AI).
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Enjoyed Katalin Kariko's memoir, especially when this surprise popped up towards the end!
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Which I did. Am I happier than him? Hard to say -- incommensurability of personal experiences, hedonic adaptation, etc. But with my allergies, I suspect I'd feel like him if I had to spend all day in the dust, wind, and sun, cleaning out barns with animal excrement, etc.
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The way the headlines are written, you might think someone measured a baseline rate of cardiac deaths (let's say, prior to Covid or vaccines), and that this rate spikes up by 84% for young males after an mRNA vaccine, as compared to unvaccinated people.
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@micsolana Completely wrong. I'm not aware of any YIMBYs who want to make the picture on the left illegal. But NIMBY zoning laws in most cities literally DO make the picture on the right illegal to build (due to parking requirements, setback requirements, etc.).
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Second, they exclude anyone who had Covid or died from Covid! . "Individuals were excluded if they (1) had a documented COVID-19 infection, (2) experienced a COVID-19 associated death. ".
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A number of studies have shown that smarter and more well-informed people are *more* skillful at coming up with reasons to ignore evidence they don't like.
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This comedian (Darryl Vega) is hilarious . singlehandedly comes up with more funny skits than SNL.
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One downside of Twitter making "Likes" private is that one of the most interesting ways to find new ideas/tweets was to go to the "likes" of someone you admire, and see what they had been reading lately.
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@MommaMonkey5 @BradMossEsq @RadioFreeTom That's nothing. In Katy (where I lived), voters enacted a tax for a $70 million high school football stadium.
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@ArmandDoma @hamandcheese Agreed. Are we 100% sure it's true? (I ask because so many DOGE claims are questionable or are outright lies.) If so, it would be the first unarguable success on DOGE's part.
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@simonsarris Well, my first thought is that I'd like some verification that the original claim is true. Lots of misinformation out there, and there's zero reason to trust claims being made by anonymous social media accounts.
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@cremieuxrecueil In early 2020, he blocked me and called me an "idiot" merely for linking to a paper showing that hydroxychloroquine didn't cure Covid:
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@Meelsie143 @JackTierney30 @RapnCap @bitchardthe3rd @uncoolboyfriend Just say you get Bon Iver confused with Bon Jovi sometimes.
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That is not what happened *at all.*. If you read the actual study, such as it is, it seems they did something very different.
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Note that even if the overall death rate is *lower* after vaccination and even if *cardiac* deaths are lower, the cardiac portion of the actual deaths could go up.
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