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Greg Faletto

@gregoryfaletto.com

380 followers 700 following 550 posts

Statistician, Data Scientist.

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Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · Jul 5

Interested in doing some causal inference over the long weekend? Version 1.5.0 of the {fetwfe} package for difference-in-differences under staggered adoptions is now on CRAN!

Details on what's new below:

cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

fetwfe: Fused Extended Two-Way Fixed Effects

Calculates the fused extended two-way fixed effects (FETWFE) estimator for unbiased and efficient estimation of difference-in-differences in panel data with staggered treatment adoption. This estimato...

cran.r-project.org

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 14h

The raise I entirely earned through my own exceptional effort and cleverness was almost entirely clawed back by the evil and sinister inflation imposed on me by Joe Biden personally

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

I've only used them recently so I also can't compare much. They're currently quite impressive to be sure. If they're astronomically better now than they were in January, then they were way overhyped in January, so somebody's been doing some overhyping at some point

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

True, maybe I should have also added the qualifier "economically viable"

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 1d

Feels like this year there's been a lot more shipping of dramatic essays about AI takeoff than LLMs that are tangibly much better at real-world tasks than what we had in January

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

I also suspect the concurrent rise in grocery delivery played a role--lots of people posting outraged accounts of the cost of their delivered groceries or restaurant food didn't appear to understand that they raise the prices of items in those apps

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 2d

Rationally you're indisputably right, and definitely media narratives play a role, but also ask anybody who works in the grocery business how customers respond to even minor price increases, and how they responded specifically to the inflation from 2021 - 2023

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Oh maybe you were being sarcastic? If so my bad

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

I really don't think so man. I think in 50 years people will look back and say: wow crazy that Biden could have stopped Trump 2 and just pissed away the opportunity. He basically ignored the most important challenge of his presidency because he just didn't want his presidency to be about that

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

depends on the task.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

when using gen AI to make stuff? 100% skill issue

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Man is 73 and has been making 8 figures for decades, does he not have enough saved up to retire?

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Research in selective inference works on this problem of "how do you look at the data and still have valid statistical inference afterward" and it's not easy

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

It is a real problem for statistical analysis though. The distribution of p values is uniform under the null hypothesis *over the distribution of all data sets,* not over the distribution of data sets that look a certain way after you poke around

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

care leading to more expensive required care later, more reliance on high-cost diagnostics that a doctor could have taken the time to diagnose themselves if they had more time, etc etc. I think there are a lot of downstream effects

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Certainly not an expert. But I think other mechanisms that doctor shortages lead to higher costs include more negotiation leverage for doctors on other terms of their work (e.g. gatekeeping who does certain tasks and how, preventing lower-paid people from doing them), delayed routine/preventative

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Shortage of doctors isn't the only reason health care costs have risen faster than inflation for a long time but it's absolutely a significant one

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Maybe more precise to say "in order to get substantial health coverage increases and start reining in health care costs we need to have way more doctors, and the primary pushback against that is that doctors know very well it will lower their salaries"

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

Seems to me that with ever-increasing demands on what the bare minimum is to be a good parent/friend/decent member in good standing of a subculture, at some point more and more people started just opting out altogether

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

It took me a long time to realize that while "you don't owe anyone anything" posts are a reminder to one's self that people share publicly, a lot of "a decent friend/coworker/etc should ALWAYS do X" posts are just them literally broadcasting a demand to the whole world the best way they know how

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 3d

There was this kind of twin trend originating in the 2010s that you can basically sum up as "ever lower expectations for myself, ever higher expectations of others."

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 5d

If it flags, say, that your employer retains rights to use your likeness in marketing and you hadn't caught that, you could consider whether you want to make a fuss about it. There are lots of things where you probably don't need a JD to decide if you think it's fishy or don't care for it

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 5d

Reading the explanation, deciding how you feel about the term, maybe doing some googling. I'm sure you're not going to get as good of results as what you'd get from hiring a top 10% lawyer. I'm sure it won't 100% of the time clear the bar of "better than nothing." But I bet it often will 🤷‍♂️

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 5d

It seems useful for legal questions where what most people use in practice is "basically nothing." For example, looking over apartment leases or employment contracts. If you were about to sign it anyway and the LLM says "seems fine," no harm caused. If it flags something, you can look into it.

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 5d

Dumbest guy in the district got the lowest-paying job, kind of checks out

Greg Faletto @gregoryfaletto.com · 5d

I will never forget that when a totalitarian federal government turned the military on its own citizens, not a single 2nd Amendment nut was anywhere to be seen. They told us this was the whole point! They told us this was why we had to tolerate all those school shootings