Matt Blackwell
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mattblackwell.bsky.social
Matt Blackwell
@mattblackwell.bsky.social
6.6K followers 120 following 200 posts
data, causal inference, experiments, politics https://mattblackwell.org
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Reminder that I have a textbook on an introduction to mathematical statistics and regression, designed for first year PhD students in poli sci, but maybe useful to others. Let me know if you use it and have feedback!

mattblackwell.github.io/gov2002-book/
Haha, I have no memory of tweeting this!
Melissa Dell’s study of persistence of the Mita (forced mining labor) in peru would also be a pretty good reference point for a study like this. Though she didn’t look at political outcomes iirc
Losing the social choice theorist vote with this unforgivable gaffe
The final mission impossible is good but it’s hard to take a movie seriously when it uses the word “cyberspace” multiple times in dramatic scenes
(whispering into my phone during the job talk) grok is that true?
“that point is orthonormal to the discussion”
Thinking about saying “orthonormal” instead of “orthogonal” in normal conservation as a bit
getting asked to explain the 5 diff-in-diff estimators you used in your job talk
Narrative violation: Harvard is viewed more favorably than Trump, Vance, or Musk.
Unfortunately, partial identification is usually only achieved in terms of population parameters. Still have to deal with sampling uncertainty!
Seeing AI people refer to 100% confidence intervals, we’re ngmi
Yes, we call this omitted interaction bias. Hadn’t seen the ReStat article but glad to see people raising the issue in Econ as well!
Gen alpha lingo that is starting to grate my ears: “I ‘searched up’ Minecraft mods”
The other aspect of this is that LLMs turn us from creators to evaluators and editors. But to be successful editors and evaluators, we need to know enough to (a) judge the output accurately and (b) fix the output as needed.
The problem w this approach is that to get to the hard stuff, one has to spend a lot of time doing the stuff that a computer is very good at.

AI in education allows you complete work without mastery, leaving you without the foundations for the hard stuff
After listening to the Marxist, feminist professor rail against God, a Marine in the back of the class stood up and said “grok, is this true?”
I don’t think men are okay
Would love to hear about a specific time that Harvard proposed and supported “laws that explicitly dictate what can be taught”
One of the insane demands was the federal government forcing Harvard to hire faculty/admit students expressly on viewpoint grounds to balance depts that lack viewpoint diversity.

Garber could (and probably would) have gone along with the initial set of demands but these go too far.
My “there was was no insider trading at the White House” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt
Fresh YouGov/Economist poll has Trump going from -3 net approval last week to -8 net approval this week. Only a 5pt hit for creating this chaos is crazy
I think if I were a youngish Republican politician I would would worry about the looming tariff-induced De-Ba'athification