hello atmosphere

I'm mourning peak Twitter era, where the network was a useful way to keep in pulse with ideas, loose thoughts about where I wanted to go, and keep people updated about what I was thinking about.

I've been working towards a critical pragmatics over the past several years, and I've landed on several constructive principles, rather than polemics, forged by fire, that work for my idiosyncratic toolset:

Causal inference is a contested lingua franca for how people use data to make, or justify, decisions

Sometimes it's enough to have decision validity, but unfortunately we have a much better grasp on predictive validity instead.

Touching grass is good. A good model can touch grass without getting wet from the morning dew

Program and policy design is one bureaucratic-shaped lever for improving social welfare. There are others.

There has been much progress lately in the past several years, despite institutional and environmental headwinds that threaten to snuff out the light of a candle. I think these headwinds clarify what matters most vs. what can be easily co-opted for regulatory capture and dumped when it starts being inconvenient. I believe that we will win.

About me - by listing some formative encounters:

Working with data from a nonprofit, then going to volunteer with some local nonprofits doing similar things occasionally

Backwards induction

Training as a legal observer

Influence functions

Bonnans and Shapiro, perturbation analysis of optimization programs

Learning about partial identification from Francesca on Zoom before everything was Zoom

Printing on riso

going to fatml 2017 on a lark

media studies

some causal inference reading group hosted by buzzfeed in nyc summer

arcades project

managing a student design agency with designers far more skilled than I. Ju-jitsu with client needs

the good old days doing grad convex opt psets in a shared studio in 185 nassau st

fieldwork for bookmaking about place with danielle aubert