Josh Dean
@josh_t_dean
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Behavioral and development economist. Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics @ChicagoBooth .
Joined June 2010
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Kinda interesting that Wolfram Alpha could pass a calculus exam when I was in college and no one had this kind of reaction.
ChatGPT passed a Wharton MBA exam.
Time to overhaul education.
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Border agent: why were you in Kenya?
Me: I was going research for my PhD in economics
BA: What is your research about?
Me: How noise affects people’s productivity
BA: How is that economics?
#reallyhappened
Border agent: purpose abroad?
Me: conference.
BA: what are you doing there?
Me: delivering a talk.
BA: what in?
Me: ophthalmology and visual science.
BA: <gets two more border agents> Give us your talk…
Me: <Delivers my talk for 15 min sans slides>
#reallyhappened
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Today in parents who mean well, but don’t really understand your job.
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Some random Saturday night thoughts on economist men's obligations to their women colleagues. 🧵
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How econometricians see themselves Vs how applied folks see them
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As a
@briq_institute
affiliate, I am extremely disappointed by this statement.
I don't know any facts, and the allegation may be without merit. But threatening an accuser with a lawsuit serves to scare other accusers into silence and that is never ok.
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This. It's amazing to me when people who claim the market will end discrimination by punishing those who discriminate, get upset with the market attempting to punish those who are discriminating
On the other hand, signaling types, reputation, repeated games... Econ practically invented cancel culture
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Economists seem to want to rationalize everything except non-economist’s views about economic policy.
Instead of writing off people as being “misguided”, it seems like a useful exercise to ask what mental model of the economy/government/firms/workers justifies this policy.
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This is THE lesson I've tried to learn from Esther: “I don’t have many opinions to start with...I have one opinion—one should evaluate things—which is strongly held. I’m never unhappy with the results. I haven’t yet seen a result I didn’t like.”
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What concept in your field did you think was super important when you first heard its name, but later realized is typically irrelevant.
I’ll go first: heteroskedasticity.
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Gotta say, I’m completely baffled by the complaints I’ve seen aired in the last 24 hours that RCTs have shifted development into viewing poverty as the result of individual decisions rather than structural barriers. (Completely unsolicited thread/rant)
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Identification strategies as Schitts Creek gifs. A very necessary 🧵
First up is selection on observables
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Putting my son to bed tonight, I had a moment of profound sadness. I don't know anything about any particular case, but all of the men who harass women started exactly the same way as he is now. How did we fail to teach them to not be abusers? Will I fail too?
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Alright. I'll take a stab. A "real economist" might say that the effect of price controls depends on market structure and the source of inflation because a "real economist" knows more than Econ 102.
An UChicago midterm asking how a "real economist" would respond to the Guardian article about price controls
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Hey
#EconTwitter
- If you're thinking about grad school and are interested in behavioral and/or development,
@Devin_G_Pope
and I are both hiring RAs.
We are typically able to sponsor visas. Please share widely!
cc:
@econ_ra
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@Jack_shane2
My point is we should expect AI to be able to do anything humans can do in controlled settings where there's a correct answer. So whether a machine can pass an exam about a topic or not isn't a great predictor of whether that topic is valuable. Could be or not, need other info.
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I was reading Heckman, Urzua and Vytlacil (2006) because in our cookstoves paper/ongoing followup
@BerkouwerS
and I have a continuous instrument and a binary treatment.
I needed to draw some graphs to build some intuition for this result, and figured I'd share them. 🧵
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Time for a 6 year delayed job market paper thread!
Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity" by Joshua T. Dean.
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(2) Do not expect women to trust you, and do not put them in a position where they either have to trust you or damage their careers.
Given the prevalence of abuse, any good Bayesian would suspect any man until given reason not to. Act accordingly.
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I am pleased to announce that I will be working on my Job Market Paper today.
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@Josh_Merfeld
Ugh. Sorry to hear that. In case it helps/provides inspiration, here’s an assignment that
@FrankSchilbach
gave to the cheaters when he had a cheating outbreak
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(3) Be prepared to prioritize/believe women you don't know over men who you do. It's easy to be opposed to abuse in the abstract (and I think most men are). Where the rubber meets the road is when it's about your friend who has always been nice to you.
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Really looking forward to “Did you drop 2020?” becoming the new “Did you cluster your standard errors?” for seminars on UI.
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In this whole discussion of whether academia is hostile to “conservatives” I find the conflation of being able to believe in “conservative” ideas and to not change behavior that hurts members of our community extremely frustrating.
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Here's the letter I just sent to the leadership of the Deutsche Post Foundation announcing my intention to resign as a briq Research Affiliate unless they change course.
*I'm not an IZA affiliate so I can't sign that letter.
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Imagine if pop songs had Econ style abstracts:
“I study the importance of reputation. Using a model I demonstrate how mad love can become bad blood. I then validate two predictions of the model empirically: bandaids don’t fix bullet holes, and you say sorry just for show.”
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Hey
#EconTwitter
, if you're interested in development or behavioral or both and are thinking about grad school, I'm hiring an RA for next year. And as a special offer for a limited time only, the app is 2-for-1 because
@Devin_G_Pope
is also hiring!
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Excellent and substantive meeting with President
@Jmilei
on how best to take the country forward.
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No excuse making that "he's having a tough time" or "he's just awkward". Actions have consequences, and *even if you're right about his intent*, the intent is not relevant for how his actions affect women on the receiving end.
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(1) Be on the lookout for inappropriate behavior, and if you see something, intervene.
Many male economists are asking what they can do. While there are many systemic issues that must be addressed, at an individual level, my suggestion is to *notice* and *intervene*. A small story: (1/4)
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This is one of the hardest things about the market. Even when you get an outcome you're thrilled with, you can end up feeling very vulnerable.
I applied to ~160 jobs, got 15 interviews, 5 flyouts, and 2 offers.
I still worry I'm one bad step away from unemployment.
Context for this amazing outcome:
The job market was brutal. I applied to ~40 jobs & got one offer. The self-doubt took over. I re-started my anxiety meds.
It's important to also talk about the losses/cost of the wins (cc
@jhaushofer
failure CV).
#Academia
#MentalHealth
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(4) Listen to women's anger without placate them or convince them it's not really that bad.
It's that bad.
If you haven't heard enough to make you livid, return to (2) and ask if there's possibly a reason for that.
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Unpopular hot take: Most economists should spend less time worrying about the elegance/transportability of code.
If it is readable and error free that’s good enough.
Most code is going to be run by maybe 5 folks curious to see if we’re lying. We’re not exactly developers.
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Correlational/Causal claim Turing test: If you're not willing to flip the order of your "association" (e.g. Heart Attacks predict consuming avocados), you're making an implicitly casual claim and should either knock it off or be up front about it.
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In the past week:
- Democrats held the senate
- My JMP got an RR
- I got COVID for the first time
Did someone activate an Infinite Improbability Drive?
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I didn't go to a prestigious undergrad. I often get asked by current students in the same situation how to get into a top grad school. My advice is ace the GRE quant and then either win an NSF GRFP or get a good RA job. Even then expect to get rejected a lot. 1/2
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I think this is an important point. When someone is accused of misconduct, you shouldn't just compare the misconduct with your experiences with them. You should question whether their interactions with you were calculated to win allies.
@jenniferdoleac
[I don't know the people in question here, so this is a general comment.]
Perpetrators groom their defenders just as they groom their victims.
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I know they probably don't care, but I wonder how many of the folks calling
@ProfEmilyOster
a monster realize they're also implying those of us with small children who appreciate her data-driven approach are monsters who don't love our children.
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R is great until you spend all afternoon combing through stack exchange and messing with settings, only to find out one dependent package was out of date.
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Think about what you say, and how you react to things others say. Innocent until proven guilty is only for the courts.
It's your job to prove to women in the profession that they can trust you.
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Can we please, please stop writing headlines designed to scare parents based on horribly biased estimates? The study is only able to control for age and sex. The number of confounders is insane. Not to mention whether this is about increasing diagnoses or disease.
Children who have recovered from Covid-19 appear to be at significantly increased risk of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, CDC researchers reported on Friday.
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We shouldn’t require real analysis because then we could remove macro from the core and then people would see once and for all that Stata is better than R. This is the one true path to ending the tyranny of the top 5. Am I
#EconTwitter
- ing right?
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As someone who found (and finds) this super stressful, I never did this until
@FrankSchilbach
being a good advisor made me. That was a mistake.
A quick 🧵 of tips for surviving:
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If you're organizing a dinner or drinks at a conference, ensure that multiple women are coming. Make sure that the dinner is at a place where seats are sufficiently far apart to minimize risk of groping.
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Apparently the traditional clustering approach is too conservative. People use that all the time. What a standard error.
Std clustering approach can be too conservative! We propose the causal cluster variance (CCV) that has right coverage when treatment variables are imperfectly correlated w/ clusters. Easy to code analytic formula. 6/8
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Here is what I would have said if I felt I was wrongly accused (again I have no facts):
“We have launched an independent investigation and will make our findings public at its conclusion. Anyone with information is encouraged to contact XX”
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If thats the state of the world, rent control suddenly makes a whole lot more sense.
We may disagree that’s the state of the world, but that’s a starting point for a more useful/respectful discussion.
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Is anyone else finding that they’re grumpy about everything basically all the time these days? If so what’re y’all doing about it?
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@pgodzin
Sure. I don't mean GPT-3 isn't impressive. Just that a computer's ability to pass an exam shouldn't be taken as a signal of whether the class content is useful.
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A thread of tips for working from home. As some of you know my partner is an OB/GYN resident in NH. So I worked from home/commuted into Boston 4th and 5th years of grad school. Learned some things from that experience that may or may not be obvious to/work for others.
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If you're an American, please consider contacting your federal representatives and asking them to lobby for donating AZ doses and anything else that might be helpful to India.
Here's a link to find out who they are if you don't know:
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Clearly the most exciting story of the night is
@SallyLHudson
officially being elected to the VA House
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When they ask about your identifying assumptions:
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Getting rid of the GRE scores/RA positions seems to focus admissions even more on where you went to undergrad. Both because of the name on your transcript and the names of your letter writers 2/2
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This viral 1460 SAT video highlights how crazy it is that top colleges haven't expanded supply to meet demand.
- 1460 is 96th percentile of SAT takers
- But 1.9 million SAT takers means 76,000 scored better
- Ivys collectively enrolled 22% of that (16,801)
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Friends don't let friends use bad controls, even if they call them "mediators"
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@pietrobiroli
Boooo. OLS is on the opposite end of the spectrum. You think it’s the boring intro concept, but really it’s all you need 99.9% of the time.
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If you were thinking to yourself this morning, "Man, I just haven't heard Josh talk about noise enough. I really want to hear about his job market paper again". Now's your chance!
Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears, this week on Freakonomics Radio:
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It’s a tough call to decide what part of living in Germany is my favorite, but being able to drink beer in a public park while working on eduroam has got to be in the top 10
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My hot take for the day is if money is changing hands in exchange for giving an academic seminars, for most speakers the market-price honoraria is going to be negative.
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As an example, I have many FB friends who want rent control. It doesn’t seem to me like they just haven’t thought about the possible consequences.
Instead it seems like they believe capital owners will inevitably collude to extract high rents absent regulation.
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My partner is an OB/GYN. I have heard too many stories of women almost dying from pregnancy complications. These are horrifying enough, but to add concerns that they might not get appropriate care or be prosecuted? That's an unacceptable burden to place on AEA attendees.
Open letter to AEA Executive Committee regarding the locations of the next ASSA meetings (scheduled for New Orleans & San Antonio).
Letter:
Joint w/
@econhist_allday
@femonomics
@sndurlauf
@OwenOzier
@eeshani_kandpal
Sign here:
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The tone deafness of this tweet is amazing. The US is sitting on vaccines that we aren't even allowed to use rather than donating them to India. Come on. There's no excuse.
@SecBlinken
,
@POTUS
@VP
@SenDuckworth
@SenatorDurbin
@RepDannyDavis
The COVID-19 pandemic makes this year’s World Immunization Week especially significant. Among our efforts, we have contributed $2 billion to
@gavi
and we are working with partners to increase global manufacturing capacity so more people can get vaccinated quickly.
#VaccinesWork
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But on the later, I feel like we’ve already made too little progress in making these things unacceptable and we can’t afford to throw marginalized members of our community under the bus in order to get some more faculty who are registered republicans.
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On a completely unrelated note, if anyone find themselves in need of a 2-3 day trip to discuss research to a place where research discussions are allowed, I’m pretty sure many of us would be happy to host such a trip.
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To be 100% clear - I'm not saying that price controls are the solution to inflation. Just that it's definitely possible to write down a standard "real economics" model and have price controls improve welfare.
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I know this is supposed to be a joke, but the world would be a better place if more people understood this.
Just because it turned out badly doesn’t mean we were wrong when we made the decision.
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Does anyone know this history of how we started calling skills that are obviously managed by the brain "non-cognitive"?
It's as if we think attention and self-control are located in the femur while interpersonal relationships are managed by the pinky toe.
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First, I know of absolutely zero randomistas who believe poverty is because people make bad choices rather than facing structural challenges. Not few, I know zero.
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Three weird things you didn't know were economics
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Frankfurt, where they dare to ask “what if an airport was also an escape room?”
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Hi
@pgreenfielduk
@guardian
,
You link to
@BerkouwerS
and I's paper in your new article on overcrediting of cookstoves saying that we find "they often failed to produce their potential benefits in practice."
This is wildly inaccurate. Please correct it.
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“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if the seminar speaker does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the rest of their talk (I’ve done before!)”
#MakeEconomicsGreatAgain
As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over...
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Just landed at Heathrow for the
@Oxford_CSAE
#OxCSAE2024
conference!
One of my favorites because I always meet new people in spite of my social angst (other conferences should adopt quasi-random meal seating arrangements).
If you're here, please come say hi!
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There is *no* excuse for this. I don’t care if it’s the worst paper you’ve ever read.
If you ever feel tempted to write something like this, please go take a break and come back. If that doesn’t work, please do us all a favor and quit the profession.
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I dunno. I think it’s hard to be objective about where you’re from. Can you imagine an American studying our health insurance, retirement systems or minimum wage laws??
This thread is for young ‘uns from poor countries who want to do development economics. We got a paper out that we wrote about South Africa, where a couple of the authors are from. Many people tell you writing about your home country is a bad idea
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Daycare being closed on a teaching day means I have the best guest lecturers for negotiations. Let’s do this.
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This is I think one of the hardest mental battles of academia. You’re signing up to hear a bunch of people tell you that the things you’re interested in are pointless and dumb.
Academia is a place where you are free to surround yourself with your passion, assuming your passion is anonymously hearing the past few years of your life was spent on a topic that is not sufficiently general interest to warrant publication.
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Second, it’s wrong to claim that RCTs can’t study structural problems. Lots of new work is studying structural challenges like gender norms, market power, and corruption.
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@LucioMM1
@Jack_shane2
No, we can be impressed. We just shouldn’t take that as a huge signal of whether the underlying skill is useful to teach or not. The fact that a computer can do calc, doesn’t mean humans don’t benefit from learning calc.
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@MaiaMindel
"Microeconomists are people who are wrong about specific things, and macroeconomists are wrong about things in general" -
@standupecon
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Since we're in unsolicited PhD advice season, here's mine (with a negotiations prof hat on):
Consider your outside options carefully.
🧵1/4
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Nothing has made me realize how dumb gender roles are than having a kid. Ours loves
-cooking
-monster trucks
-helping clean
-dinosaurs
-hair in pig tails
-dump trucks
Why should we deprive anyone of any of that?
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Drive four hours round-trip to get stabbed by a stranger? Yes please.
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I thought this tweet was banal... and then I read the replies (h/t
@johnjhorton
)
What in the world. If you are an academic, you are expected to maintain a website. So an obvious part of auditioning for that job is to make one...
On the academic job market?
PLEASE make a website. Even a really simple one.
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The opportunity costs of doing a PhD are *large*. I think folks should spend at least as much time on trying to figure out if it’s what they really want to do, as they spend on trying to improve their admissions chances. If it kills two birds with one stone, all the better.
Try to author or coauthor papers before applying. Doing research will help you figure out if Ph.D. is the right fit. The worst outcome is getting admitted...not thinking about sunk costs correctly...and properly internalizing only after 5-7 years that you hate this life.
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