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I’ve been doing a series on Claude code for “quantitative social scientists” on my substack. It’s not much a series I guess as much as I am regularly documenting what I’m learning. It started mid Dec 2025 and will continue.
scott cunningham
99.5K posts
scott cunningham
@causalinf
Economics professor paying it forward with 55 burgers, 55 fries, 55 tacos, 55 pies, 55 Cokes, 100 tater tots, 100 pizzas, 100 tenders, 100 meatballs
- I follow this couple on TikTok and saw them on Cameo so I asked them to help me manage my students' expectations for my new prep on history of economic thought. Best $11 ever spent.
00:00 - What perks did you enjoy as a kid bc of your parents jobs? My parents ran a computing company and they had a huge computer with a very primitive couple of games I’d play. They also has a coke machine on the honor system and I drank those all the time.
- What is the best TV series you’ve ever seen? And you can’t list Mad Men, Seinfeld, The Wire, Breaking Bad, GoT, sopranos, or The Office.
- Many students starting out for the first time ask "Which stats software should I use? R or Stata?" The debates have gotten stale so I hired the couple on TikTok again to come in and give their two cents.
00:00 - A senior colleague did me a favor and I told that person that I couldn’t repay them, and they told me “intergenerational favors aren’t supposed to be repaid, they’re supposed to be passed forward to the next generation.”
- Around 6 years ago, my best friend told me his wife was pregnant bc a 99% accurate pregnancy test came back positive. Like any good friend would, rather than congratulating him, I texted him 3 pages of Bayes rule showing there was only a 92.7% chance she was pregnant. #Friendship
- My 13yo daughter: “so what is bitcoin anyway?” Me: “argh. Ask me about sex or something else.”
- Absolutely causal. 100% not due to differences in unobserved factors related to leisure and wealth or even regions where there are museums.Want to live longer? Try going to the opera. Researchers in Britain have found that people who reported going to a museum or concert even once a year lived longer than those who didn’t. nyti.ms/2Q9AmZV
- Dude this is freaking hilarious. 20% of papers in the gene literature are screwed up bc freaking excel converted the gene identifiers TO DATE. I think this was on twitter before but a student showed it to me again yesterday genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
- This new article in economic inquiry coauthored by @nickchk is absolutely terrifying. Seven competent people were given two causal studies to replicate from scratch. No two people even report the same sample size and the standard deviation across estimates was 4x SE of original!
