Jim Savage
@abiylfoyp
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I do a lot of work on science of selection. I've also sat on a lot of selection panels (hiring, scholarships, grantmaking, contracting etc). Someone asked me for my "rules of thumb of selection". Here's a thread!
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I drove alone for 8h yesterday. It’s like torture. You can’t talk to anyone, browse Wikipedia, read your texts. Just constant low-grade activity in silence to avoid certain death.
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Steve Ballmer: CEO from 2000-2014. Stock price when he took the job: $56. Stock price when he left: $37. Net worth: $110B.
Satya Nadella. Stock price up 10x. Commercial genius. Net worth ~$1B.
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A friend who worked for startups, nonprofits and the top rungs of government now works for a hedge fund. Calls it the most truth-seeking place she's ever worked. Interesting how humans thrive when performance is a scalar.
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I'm unreasonably annoyed by these cartoons. They capture a deeply destructive mindset fairly common in the UK and Australia. Everyone else is stupid, everyone else is an inconvenience. Wanna do something new? You c*nt. Utterly toxic.
I've had a load of requests to draw these train shitehawks
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This is a good example of something you see all the time on here. OP makes a joke. Person 2 thinks they're being serious and makes a sassy quote tweet about how dumb OP is. Person 3 screencaps and gets hundreds of thousands of likes.
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People often talk about skills needed to be a good data scientist. Maybe general, like python or R, or specific, like "split-apply-combine", "linear algebra", "ggplot".
By far the most useful is the desire to conquer error messages or crazy results, no matter how long it takes
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Celebrating 13y of marriage today. 5 stars. One point I don't see made often:
If you're the sort of person whose friends are likely to wait until their 30s to partner off and start families--a merger marriage--consider a startup marriage in your early/mid 20s.
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I just saw some guys on the street asking people if they are vaccinated, and if not, if they’d like to get vaccinated right now. Response from the unvaccinated people I saw them ask wasn’t vaccine hesitancy as much as “🤷♂️ I guess you can vaccinate me now”.
More of this!
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Think of the shockingly smart people you’ve known who’ve wound up underperforming strongly. Why? Are there any interventions along the way you think might have helped?
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I know my weirdo brethren don’t want to hear this, but blow-ups are entirely a predictable outcome of organizations with too few normies. Any org at scale should be 60-80% normie. You need weirdos for creativity, but they just can’t build robust systems.
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This area is pretty remarkable. Two huge cities, half a dozen big ones—most of them cheap. 8 of the world’s top 50 universities. Plenty of water. Great soil, food, beer.
Room for tens of millions more.
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"Regress A on B please jim"
"Got it. You want me to do one of lm(A~B) or lm(B~A) and my puny brain will never understand which."
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John Stachurski and Tom Sargent's new book on Economic Networks looks incredible.
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@AGamick
The only thing more torturous thing than driving alone is being on the phone for more than 15 seconds.
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Amusing interaction I saw today
[new colleague on hearing
@davidshor
describe his work]: "Oh, you must work with David Shor"
David "I *am* David Shor" Shor: "I *am* David Shor"
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Child having a pretty rowdy bath. Yells "economics! Yeah, baby!" for no apparent reason. This pandemic has scrambled the brains of our children.
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Gorgeous new textbook by Tom Sargent and John Stachurski on Dynamic Programming, with Julia and Python.
If you're interested in teaching from the book, worth getting in touch with the
@QuantEcon
team.
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Surprisingly common failure mode for managers: an employee volunteers to work on something that is <100% aligned with the team's work. Importantly, it's their idea. Manager tells them not to.
Cycle repeats a few times and the employee learns it's a low-agency team, gives up.
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Yellen earns $219k, in purchasing power terms roughly 1/3 of her Australian counterpart.
The reason: US fed public service salaries are ~ capped by the Vice President's salary--$230k. Can't help but think the US would run better if we gave that role a 10x pay bump.
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The US needs a department of deregulation
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@Andrew___Baker
The only issue with NY is that it’s either too cold or too hot to wear a suit.
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Upsides
- Kids leave home in your early/mid 40s (career prime)
- Get to spend more time with your grandkids
- Many excellent partners just simply won't be available if you wait.
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Downsides
- You'll backload some career advancement and fun
- Marriage inevitably has ups and downs; the downs are easier if you have $$, which happens later in career
- FOMO around dating in your 20s. I think this one is largely overblown, and happy to chat about it in private.
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Choosing a city to live in the US is an exercise in profound trade-offs.
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Saw a pretty compelling talk yesterday. Many high rank sparse matrices have a low rank representation given nonlinear (relu) transformation.
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I get deeply upset at zooming along this incredibly convenient, free road sitting right on top of the world’s most valuable land.
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What a great set of plots!
What a fascinating paper:
Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation
h/t
@JimPethokoukis
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An underrated skill: learning to prefer those things that are relatively high quality and abundant in the place you are.
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Two disappointing conversations yesterday with young friends dreaming up reasons not to have kids. A quote from each:
"My generational trauma ends with me"
"AGI takeoff and wages go to zero. That's a terrible world to bring a child into"
Social media was a catastrophic mistake.
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There’s a counterfactual world where Aella is working through R 4 Data Science and getting supportive messages on Stack Overflow from female package authors with degrees in zoology and linguistics who understand that learning to code is hard—and having a great time.
Learning Python has been really hard so far. Here's a thread of me breaking down my process of learning it from 100% scratch so far (day 2)
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@hyperdiscogirl
Sadly, doing stuff like this to meet women guarantees you'll give off awful vibes. Doing it to get good at dance though gives off good vibes. Then you meet nice people.
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Just downloaded some official government statistics with the hope of making a quick time series plot and instead I'm going to drink oven cleaner
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So
@SarahHBana
is on the job market this year. She's ludicrously brilliant and radiates good vibes. Last week she gave me three good ideas in about 10 minutes. If y'all don't hire her, I'll try.
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Found myself in an Upper West Side community board gc full of people extremely upset that a homeless shelter is being placed in the neighborhood. I'm going to take great pleasure in making them all angry at me tonight.
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A friend joked he thinks there’s a conspiracy of lobbyists in Europe making sure that US immigration policy remains insane, else they’d get none of the top talent at all.
Always surprising to me how popular admitting more high skill immigrants is -
@pewresearch
recently found 71% support amongst Trump supporters, 87% amongst Harris supporters:
So depressing that Congress is usually gridlocked on common sense pro-growth policies like this.
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Infuriating. Who’s working on this?
I know I've said this before, but it is *very annoying* that you cannot observe the counterfactual.
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More broadly, if I think that social media companies engage in low-grade mind control, why can’t I pay them to get me to do more worthwhile things? If instagram can make people get cosmetic surgery, surely it can fomo us into studying harder or spending more time with our kids?
Let’s say a country decided to pay social network companies a large bonus if their average PISA score increased by some amount. This would be money better/worse spent than direct spending on education for the same objective
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Ever do some statistical analysis where the implications of the results rather than the work itself makes you sad?
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Why do people host costume parties? It’s as if to say “since I find hosting inconvenient, I’d like to impose a small inconvenience on everyone coming.”
Maybe that’s the point? Increase the cost of attending so that only people who really want to be there will come?
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@Aella_Girl
Three years ago v ten minutes ago. Lost tum, grew shoulders. No regular gym since pre pandemic—only fun, social exercise.
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Celebrating 12 years of wonderful marriage to this hottie today. 😍
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Once had this summer job writing essays for a guy. He’d take my essay and re-write it, making substantial changes to the arguments, keeping no word of mine—and publish.
Asked why he paid me for the drafts, which he clearly didn’t value. “They make writing the essay much easier.”
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The DS-160 application website, which no American will ever need to use, is an embarrassment to the USA.
- Logs you out at random intervals
- Requires you manually enter Department of State data that both State and Customs and Border Protection already hold
- Very ugly
Do better
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Machiavelli got it right. "The innovator makes enemies of all of those who have prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who will prosper under the new. Their support is lukewarm partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the
Today's testimony should be a frank warning to NY local politicians that support of congestion taxation is a political liability in NY as it is has become in the UK.
The bulk of the testimony was from everyday New Yorkers that would be adversely impacted by yet another tax in
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Brought to you by the other side of the trade
Why invest in index funds at all when you can just pick the top individual stocks?
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Completely open and welcoming communities attract lost souls who kick adverse selection into gear. They drive out the people who generate the club goods that make the community fun at first, leading to collapse.
Closed communities become toxic cesspools with no new ideas. Their
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I see log(1+x) is trending again. As
@economeager
’s aggregation paper shows us, it’s easy to model 0s in continuous data. Treatment effects needn’t correspond to a coefficient—they’re the derivative of the model wrt treatment.
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@jenniferdoleac
A source of culture shock is how little RAs are paid at US universities. 12 years ago my AUD rate for RAing was $35/h, and $90-120/h as a tutor. I wonder if Australian academics make less use of RAs?
@SHamiltonian
might know
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Wife just told me they surveyed the engineers to see what they wanted in office amenities. The resounding response: “two monitors and no salespeople”
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If you read a serious piece of work and find it helpful or interesting, you are allowed to send the author an email and thank them for writing it. I promise it'll make their day.
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Replacing lead pipes is such great politics. And incredible policy—on the order of getting some major macro lever right. Amazing less has been made of it before.
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When I was 16, dad wrote to his old housemate who'd studied economics before starting a mining company. "Jim says he wants to become an economist. What should he read?"
He wrote back "Start with Smith, then Marx, then Keynes, then Marshall."
Such wonderfully bad/based advice
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If you're not the sort of person who's going to work out path variables for the two java installs on your computer necessary for some analysis, swearing the whole time but doing it anyway, it's not the right job for you.
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@mnolangray
After 7 years of being in the US I now know nothing about anything happening anywhere else.
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Being single sounds so exhausting. Re-upping my evergreen advice: if you’re dating someone pretty, about as smart as you, and without glaring issues in your early 20s, put a ring on it. Grow up together. Much easier. (14 years next week!)
men don’t realize the degree to which women vet them for safety, in dating
🧵
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Name drawn in H1B lottery, so it seems you're stuck with me for some time :D 🇺🇸
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@EconAndrew
Degree of specialization/excellence within. Especially away from the coasts, the diversity of religious offering and quality of religious life. More broadly the richness of small communities.
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The 8yo’s latest irritating habit: he mixes a Manhattan for anyone who walks in the door—without asking.
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"We picked our football team by scoring how fast each player looked running across a pitch, untimed" is how an enormous amount of hiring and selection happens.
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The world is short a very specific type of public good: that which can only be produced by top tenure track academics that is not evaluated in tenure packets.
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A surprisingly good rule of thumb is to not pick a fight with someone who is very into eigenvalues.
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They don’t want you to know this but you can just propose to the girl of your dreams on gmail chat in 2009 and organize the wedding before she gives you an explicit yes
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This was me 3.5y ago. The answer was sport, not exercise. Showing up for something fun and challenging with a good community is far easier than showing up for chest day.
I started working out again in July after a couple years off. I am making progress, but the workouts are often so *mentally* challenging for me. I dread when I see the workout on the board, I want to give up soon after it starts. I still don't know how to overcome these feelings.
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A young guy I like got undergrad offers at Cal Tech, Berkeley and Oxford. He's optimizing for rigor and exposure to the right tail of EA-ish activities over his lifetime. Which should he pick and why?
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Well this is a first. A grantee finished their project, under-budget and ahead of schedule, and asked to return unused funds. Yes they are German.
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Theory: very nice people get less constructive feedback, and that’s the main reason we don’t see as many as we’d hope at the top.
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Mentioned
@andreamatranga
's neolithic revolution paper at a mostly academic (life sciences, linguistics, stats) dinner party last night. All were wowed. One person wondered if anyone would cite it. I assured him folks would cite the paper in unrelated research for the hell of it.
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The PNAS paper reminds me story from a friend sent to [redacted country] to advise on building macro forecasting models
The models were back-fitting perfectly. Turns out they'd taken a model the IMF had built them and *used its predictions to generate the national accounts*
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@erin719nyc
Makes you wonder how much print was, in a former life, “tocome” “worldisfuktktk” etc.
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*The
@KumarAGarg
principle*
- Give homework and select on ability to do things.
- Some people do things without *any* prompting. They're on rails. Kumar's "doers".
- Almost nothing else matters.
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A *big* problem with selection is that spies like spies, marines like marines... They will fill *all* roles with people like themselves if given the chance. It is important to decide what type you are looking for and use your police to hire police (but not spies) etc.
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These are now hilariously awkward memories, but three totally inappropriate events from early-career Econ in Australia:
1) boss booked me and him a single hotel room at a conference, apparently to save grant money. It had one bed. He spent a lot of time naked.
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The 10yo is obsessed with Seinfeld. He’s 8 seasons deep. Has perfected his Kramer impersonation. Deeply strange child.
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So when you're evaluating a CV or application, it's worth asking: is this person relatively underqualified or overqualified for their current role? So long as there's some good evidence of performance (promotions, work products), bank on the underqualified candidate.
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Dinner party tips
- learn to make a black Manhattan
- sous vide brisket serves 20
- always invite 2-3 other seasoned hosts eg
@yashkaf
- the use they serve is turning acquaintances into friends. Blend friends with folks you want to know better
- Don’t cater, don’t skimp.
@abiylfoyp
Do you have any hot tips for how to make this a habit / especially successful? Like - do you have a few go to meals? Do you organise guests around themes?
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A mentor's good advice: you inevitably have to piss some people off sometimes. But you have a budget for pissing people off and you have to allocate it wisely---and don't piss people off on credit.
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Great piece. It's kinda amazing that the anti-SAT crowd don't look abroad. Most other advanced countries have more intergenerational social mobility than the US. Most give close to 100% weight to standardized tests in admissions. I don't think it's an accident. A nice, clear goal
Removing information doesn’t solve deep societal problems. A brilliant essay by my brilliant friend
@kph3k
:
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Imagine you have a choice between two surgeons at the same hospital. One went to Oklahoma State, and the other went to Johns Hopkins. This principle says you should go with the Oklahoma State surgeon--if the Johns Hopkins Dr was as good, they wouldn't work at the hospital.
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The new Schmidt Science Fellows cohort has been announced. I love this program.
- The team identifies top early-career scientists finishing PhD
- Provides generous support to do a postdoc in a different field
- And builds a network of likeminded researchers.
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*Don't give too much weight to interviews*
- Our research on gifted high-schoolers found that well intentioned, smart interviewers weren’t able to identify a range of important personal traits through structured interviews.
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@Andrew___Baker
That’s only because espresso machines are expensive. Go to Brazil and you get perfect espresso.
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I've seen a few guides on hosting a dinner party that recommend making it easy for yourself. Portion and expense control. Spreadsheets. Catering.
I utterly reject this Protestant approach to entertaining. A good host slaves for days to feed and amuse the people they adore.
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Related: what are the best papers to talk about at dinner parties?
Mentioned
@andreamatranga
's neolithic revolution paper at a mostly academic (life sciences, linguistics, stats) dinner party last night. All were wowed. One person wondered if anyone would cite it. I assured him folks would cite the paper in unrelated research for the hell of it.
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I fast, take NMN, resveratrol and do as much sauna as I can for the same reason. Where can I get a metformin prescription? Always be integrating your loss function over your posterior.
"[Buterin] takes the anti-diabetes medication Metformin in the hope of slowing his body’s aging, despite mixed studies on the drug’s efficacy."
Despite? Because of!
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Love this question.
Tried to become a spy. Made it to final interview round. Worst interview of my life. The experience had a significant enough effect on me that I think most young people would benefit from a big career setback at an age when it doesn't really matter.
A question for you: what's one of the biggest rejections you've experienced?
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who could ever have seen this coming 😑
As colleges shift toward test-optional admissions, essays will become more important.
This computational analysis of 60,000 applications to UC finds essay characteristics correlate even more closely with family income than SAT scores. (via
@mitchellatedf
)
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Some time, eventually, we'll get hit with a pathogen far worse than covid and will really need lockdowns. I hope the public health communications community still has some dry powder then.
Filling workplaces with infectious people today just means more infectious people tomorrow!
Business worried about too many employees getting infected should really be calling for industry-wide shutdowns. Getting COVID under control is what actually gets people back to work.
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Just got an email auto-response “I’m overwhelmed and won’t respond to this email.”
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If I was going to moneyball together a university, the recruiting strategy I’d use for a good chunk of roles is:
- make a list of “senior research scientists” and other untenured senior staff working in *top* labs
- filter for “PhD in field other than the one they’re working in”
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