dbroockman
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
481
Submissions
54
Member since
Jan 30
Faculty at UC Berkeley. https://polisci.berkeley.edu/people/person/david-broockman
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Comment · 3 years ago
Another one: don’t program your own AB testing framework! Every time I’ve seen engineers try to build this on their own, it fails an AA test (where both versions are the same so there should be no difference). Common reasons are overly complicated randomization schemes (keep it simple!) and differences in load times between test and control.
Comment · 3 years ago
CA YIMBY has been making a lot of progress on this at the state level. If this stuff makes you mad it’s a good org to donate to: https://cayimby.org/
Comment · 4 years ago
This is a rewriting of history. Before we ever had results from the COVID vaccine trials, the FDA declared that the primary goal of the trials was to prevent any symptomatic infection in the first place. From June 2020: https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download.
Comment · 5 years ago
And that’s 95.6% efficacy relative to two shots! Relative to no shots it must be like 97%. Wow.
Comment · 5 years ago
This paper is intended as a sarcastic critique of the push towards conducting randomized trials in academia/medicine, but it’s an obvious straw man. You could write this sarcastic article for any research method - “see, why do research using method X when we already know the answer from other methods?”
The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
Comment · 5 years ago
I was similarly addicted and quit for similar reasons. https://www.weancaffeine.com worked really well for me - I bought 3 packs and was off caffeine in a few weeks. I was slightly slower those weeks but it wasn't so painful.
Comment · 6 years ago
Holy shit, this quote is crazy:
> While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
Comment · 7 years ago
Here's a great paper about how rent control is counterproductive: https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf.
> Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.