dbecker

30 ms·

241.
by dbecker 14y ago
Good reference: For most things in econometrics, the publicly available lecture notes by Jeff Wooldridge and Guido Imbens are excellent. I don't recall their GMM notes specifically, but that'd be a good place to start (just google for it).
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by dbecker 14y ago
Oops. I wasn't thinking about macro when I disagreed with your earlier claim. Your explanation sounds consistent with my distant recollection of the field (though I'd also take your word for it.) I shouldn't have disagreed so strongly in t
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by dbecker 14y ago
GMM requires a weights matrix, which implicitly does the same thing as distributional assumptions do in MLE (and you can replicate most MLE models in GMM by appropriate choice of weights matrix)
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by dbecker 14y ago
Gmm's popularity among econometricians isn't motivated by anything related to rational agents. GMM is popular in econometrics because it is a natural expression of IV estimators. IV regressions aren't popular among statisticians or machine
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by dbecker 14y ago
Just a couple weeks ago, I met someone who works at an Amazon warehouse. He liked his job, and he seemed happy about the overtime he'd receive during the Christmas rush.
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by dbecker 14y ago
Agreed that fostering relationships with contributors promotes more contributions. But, if someone's first contribution had naive mistakes, and it took more of your time than it saved, I can sympathize with a leader who doesn't try to get s
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by dbecker 14y ago
That's a great question, and I'm afraid I'm not going to do it justice. But the place where I think you see the thermostat concern is in the paragraph: A 1983 study by Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago and Kenneth Singleton o
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by dbecker 14y ago
I don't think there is much doubt that increasing the capital gains tax has serious disadvantages/costs. Ideally, we'd like capital gains taxes to be as low as possible. Similarly, reducing government spending will have serious disadvantag
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by dbecker 14y ago
I am an econometrician... exactly the sub-population that the author faults most for not knowing about Friedman's thermostat. We haven't heard of the thermostat because it does not introduce new ideas to us. If the data includes hill heigh
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by dbecker 14y ago
I think the better question is why are (almost all) economists unaware of basic economic theory? Economists are largely unaware of what you describe as "basic economic theory" because you've defined "basic economic theory" in an unconvent
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by dbecker 14y ago
Everyone who has interacted with Alex says he is a stand-up guy... and that counts for something. But if I took people's money to build them an X, and I failed, I would feel really bad about it. I would offer a heartfelt apology, and I wou
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by dbecker 14y ago
That quote is relevant if he is still making progress on the project. But I haven't heard any evidence of that. Unless he at least announces that he's still working on it, I think it's reasonable to treat it as canceled.
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by dbecker 14y ago
Personally, my programming involves heavy use of the scientific computing libraries. But my comparison was for general programming that doesn't use these libraries, and which don't rely especially heavily on the standard library.
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by dbecker 14y ago
I was excited about Lisp for a while, primarily based on all the claims of increased productivity. I started going to Lisp and Clojure meetups while learning, and I was struck how much LESS productive the supposed gurus at the meetups were
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by dbecker 14y ago
The reason GSP is in the top 1% (more realistically the top 5 on earth) is that he works so hard at it. Despite his natural gifts, he wouldn't be able to compete at a high level without training... which he did because of his willpower.
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by dbecker 14y ago
That's fine. But if you take two people... and one is much more committed to becoming a better fighter, the committed guy will log more fight time. The exact mechanism by which one becomes good is really a tangent to the original article a
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by dbecker 14y ago
I don't think the willpower/training distinction is as clear as his post suggests. If I had more a much stronger desire/willpower than George St. Pierre to excel at fighting, I would train harder than he did... and I would be a better fight
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by dbecker 14y ago
The claim is basically that humans are incapable of manufacturing healthy food. You may disagree with the premise, but the conclusion "food manufactured on a 3d printer will not be healthy" does follow logically from it.
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by dbecker 14y ago
The most popular author claiming natural foods are better is Michael Pollan (who is admittedly a writer rather than a scientist, but whose views appear to be widely shared in the scientific community). Googling will show as many links as yo
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by dbecker 14y ago
One of the big trends in current nutritional thinking is that we should eat natural, whole foods... and processing foods, even when done to enhance nutritional qualities, has been a major mis-step. In-vitro meat and printing steaks on 3d pr
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by dbecker 14y ago
You are referring to 35% growth in 2.5 months as "glacial"? If growth is proportional to the number of users (exponential growth) that would lead to more than tripling in size each year. If growth is linear, it is still easily more than dou
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by dbecker 14y ago
If he was sitting around two weeks ago feeling forgotten, and he wanted more fame and attention, he's doing a good job.
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by dbecker 14y ago
Completely agree that a news aggregator isn't one of the world's 10 most pressing needs. It isn't in the top 100 either. But Prismatic has told me about articles that make me better at what I do. Depending how widespread that experience i
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by dbecker 14y ago
As a prismatic user, I think the product he's built is pretty far ahead of any competitors I've seen. I don't think the fact that others have tried with limited success is an indictment of prismatic at all. If anything, that strengthens th
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by dbecker 14y ago
All of this just begs the question of how good these guys are. Yes, you can find a job on your own. But not all jobs are the same. Maybe they'll find you a better job. Yes, you can learn on your own. But I don't think there's any questio
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by dbecker 14y ago
I've looked through old comments a few times, and my opinion of my comment quality had only a very weak correlation to the number of upvotes my comments receive. Specifically, comments that I thought made only small contributions to the con
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by dbecker 14y ago
Any comments on flot vs flotr2? I'm trying to choose which to use for a project, and I can't find much reason to prefer one over the other.
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by dbecker 14y ago
Enterprise is lucrative in part because, at least historically, most developers have been out of touch with big business (with the possible exception of big software companies). So, the best ideas hadn't been picked over. However, developer
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by dbecker 14y ago
Thanks for being open to that feedback. I was concerned it would come off more critical than I meant it. I would suggest you write a few posts about the topics you feel you have the most to contribute. This will tell your readers what top
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by dbecker 14y ago
I'm sure you are a super smart and accomplished guy. But this opening makes it sound like you don't have much to contribute. What should you write about? Write about your insights and interesting observations! If your readers need to tel

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