Do vaccinated children have higher income as adults?
I replicate a paper on the 1963 measles vaccine, and find that it is unable to answer the question.
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1750197740603367689
Michael_Wiebe
Karma: 1,254
I’ve written up my replication of Cook (2014) on racial violence and patenting by Black inventors.
Bottom line: I believe the conclusions, but I don’t trust the results.
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1749831822262018476
Thanks, will edit.
New replication: I find that the results in Moretti (AER 2021) are caused by coding errors.
The paper studies agglomeration effects for innovation, but the results supporting a causal interpretation don’t hold up.https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1749462957132759489
Angus Deaton writes that in academia and policy circles, “Past development practice is seen as a succession of fads, with one supposed magic bullet replacing another—from planning to infrastructure to human capital to structural adjustment to health and social capital to the environment and back to infrastructure—a process that seems not to be guided by progressive learning.”
This framing is weird. Obviously these factors have a positive causal effect on growth. But why would you expect a silver bullet? Conditions change over time, so the constraints on growth will change as well.
I’d expect this article to be pretty solid, but errors in top journals do happen.
What social science research do you want to see reanalyzed?
person-affecting views
supporting a non-zero pure discount rate
I think non-longtermists don’t hold these premises; rather, they object to longtermism on tractability grounds.
What AI safety work should altruists do? For example, AI companies are self-interestedly working on RLHF, so there’s no need for altruists to work on it. (And even stronger, working on RLHF is actively harmful because it advances capabilities.)
Tweet-thread promoting Rotblat Day on Aug. 31, to commemorate the spirit of questioning whether a dangerous project should be continued.
On Rotblat day, people post what signs they would look for to determine if their work was being counterproductive.
How about May 7, the day of the German surrender?
I found the opening paragraph a bit confusing. Suggested edits:
Last week a young man named Onekalit turned up
The dry cough wore him down for over a month, but last week he finally managed to cough a bit of sputum
Why ‘finally’? This makes it sound like the dry cough was preventing the collection of sputum.
The incredible Gates-Foundation-funded GeneXpert test [add hyphens]
Side note: what’s up with “model evals”? Seems like a jargony term that excludes outsiders.
An evaluation by the National Academy of Sciences estimates PEPFAR has saved millions of lives (PEPFAR itself claims 25 million).
The dominant conceptual apparatus economists use to evaluate social policies—comparative cost-effectiveness analysis, which focuses on a specific goal like saving lives, and ranks policies by lives saved per dollar—suggested America’s foreign aid budget could’ve been better spent on condoms and awareness campaigns, or even malaria and diarrheal diseases.
As already mentioned by others, these two claims are consistent.
The Think Tank Initiative was dedicated to strengthening the capacity of independent policy research institutions in the developing world. Launched in 2008 and managed by IDRC, TTI was a partnership between five donors. The program ended in 2019.
Great to see this moving forward!
Potential topic: state governments enforcing housing plans on municipalities.
Has anyone thought about the effects of air pollution on animal welfare?
Has anyone looked at the effect of air pollution on animal welfare (farmed or wild)?
Should you “trust literatures, not papers”?
I replicated the literature on meritocratic promotion in China, and found that the evidence is not robust.
https://twitter.com/michael_wiebe/status/1750572525439062384