Chris Said

Every day you see a headline about a celebrity official in the Trump administration.

With the rise of Claude Code, the prospect of widespread white collar unemployment feels increasingly real, and it seems like a bad outcome.

At some level, most people know that factory farming is an indefensible way to treat animals.

This weekend the New York Times published an essay by Emma Goldberg titled, What if Charity Shouldn’t Be Optimized?.

Last year we learned that 20 papers from Hoau-Yan Wang, an influential Alzheimer’s researcher, were marred by doctored images and other scientific misconduct.

Science has a fraud problem.

[Notebook] In 2006, Sylvain Lesné published an influential Nature paper showing how amyloid oligomers could cause Alzheimer’s disease.

[Notebook] The most basic question one might have about respiratory infections like Covid is when are you infectious?

Have you ever felt a little hazy on what the Air Quality Index (AQI) actually means?

When people first hear about the risk of AI running amok, they sometimes ask how so much damage could come from a piece of software that is trapped inside a computer.

In machine learning, double descent is a surprising phenomenon where increasing the number of model parameters causes test performance to get better, then worse, and then better again.

Across the world, thousands of labs perform research on infectious pathogens.

[Code] Major depressive episodes among teen girls have increased by 52% since 2005 (Twenge, et al. 2020).

Think of a view you hold politically.

[Code] Last week I published a blog post on whether infectiousness was a linear or logarithmic function of viral RNA count, as measured by PCR.

[Code] Here’s a plot of SARS-CoV-2 “viral load” over the course of an infection, where “viral load” is measured by PCR.

Disclaimer: I’m not an epidemiologist, so adjust your priors accordingly.

At this moment, a growing number of scientists are studying viruses that have not yet infected human populations, seeking to understand and publish information about how deadly they are.

Starting around 2012, teen loneliness and depression increased dramatically.

Covid-19 vaccinations are a triumph of science.

What are some ways to reduce the risk of autism?

A special thanks to Scott Cunningham and Dean Eckles for helping me clear up my own confusion and inspiring me to write this blog post, and to Scott for his excellent book, which taught me a lot of background for this.

Instrumental Variables estimation is one of the most popular techniques in causal inference.

Every once in a while, I try to better understand cross-entropy by skimming over some Medium posts and StackExchange answers.

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, but I’ve been working closely with testing experts since July.

If you run a Github Pages blog that uses MathJax for formulas, you’ve probably had some problems recently.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I came across a recent preprint from Larremore et al. that makes this point much better than I do.

A few months ago, I came across one of the most extraordinary papers I have ever read.

Anybody looking at coronavirus data right now must feel very confused.

Attention mathematicians and computer scientists: I’ve got a problem for you, and I don’t know the solution.

A special thanks to John McDonnell, who came up with the idea for this post.

This is Part II of a three-part blog post on how to optimize your sample size in A/B testing.

This is Part III of a three part blog post on how to optimize your sample size in A/B testing.

What do \(R^2\), laboratory error analysis, ensemble learning, meta-analysis, and financial portfolio risk all have in common?

One of coolest things I ever learned about sensory physiology is how the auditory system is able to locate sounds.

When I was in grad school I occasionally overheard people talk about how humans do something called “hyperbolic discounting”.

I recently came across a magazine that helps pastors manage the financial and operational challenges of church management.

This isn’t news to anybody, but the internet is changing our culture.

Keyboard shortcuts are interesting.

I recently came across Artir’s Pyramid of Economic Insight and Virtue.

Here’s a data problem I encounter all the time.

As a data scientist, a big part of my job involves picking metrics to optimize and thinking about how to do things as efficiently as possible.

Last week on Marginal Revolution, there was a link to a wonderful paper comparing the policy opinions of economic experts to those of the general public.

One of the great developments in product design has been the adoption of A/B testing.

Jupyter notebooks are great because they allow you to easily present interactive figures.

Welcome to the new location for The File Drawer!

Some videos on the internet are so good that I’ve watched them twice.

Everywhere you look, people are optimizing bad metrics.

Like most people who have analyzed data using frequentist statistics, I have often found myself staring at error bars and trying to guess whether my results are significant.

I often need to jump between different directories with very deep paths, like this: $ cd some/very/deep/directory/project1 $ # do stuff in Project 1 $ cd different/very/deep/directory/project2 $ # do stuff in Project 2 While it only takes a handful of sec…