dbroockman's comments

It's standard practice for states to salt their voter lists with fake names. If, e.g., a non-political solicitation shows up to the fake name, the sender is caught. Same thing with FEC data -- politicians have to list their donors publicly, but it isn't legal for other politicians to solicit those people, and the FEC enforces it with salting.

What's funny is the best study would involve picking some people at random and giving them a basic income -- something YC could easily do. Theory can only get you so far on this one (although would be necessary to interpret the results of an empirical study).

Full transparency could have negative unintended consequences. For example, if surgeons knew their success rate were public, they would be incentivized to take easier cases. Who would take a difficult case if they knew it would constitute a bad mark on their record almost for sure?

Fundamentally, the issue is that it's impossible to observe for any given patient if that patient's outcome would have been better with a different surgeon. This is the same challenge we face with evaluating drugs: many more people who take aspirin survive than those who take anti-cancer drugs, but this likely reflects the kind of person who is taking each (people with headaches vs. people who have been diagnosed with cancer). To solve the problem there's no way around randomized trials. So, one idea would be to randomly assign patients to surgeons.

(Transparency might still be better on net, but important to keep these issues in mind.)

Here are some guesses.

On (1), the mental model I have is more like an understanding of who the super-intense supporters are. 90% of people might say they support background checks for gun purchases, but it's the 10% who support it who are voting on the basis of that issue, in part due to organizations like the NRA. I think our findings are consistent with that, in the sense that politicians seem to believe they don't need to learn what public opinion is in order to get re-elected; they can focus on other forms of information-gathering.

On (2), I suspect there is something there, but it's hard to make sense of Democrats from that angle, as Democratic primary voters, for example, are more liberal than the average person, yet Democratic politicians don't seem to see their districts as more liberal than they are. My guess is the key group is something more like "the people who choose to write in and go to meetings."

There's two assumptions many in the civic tech space seem to share that I don't think are so obvious (not that I think they are wrong, just that I think they're not obvious):

A1: The world would be better if politicians paid more attention to public opinion or knew more about it. I don't think this is so clear. Citizens support many policies not in their interest, don't know everything that experts do, etc. Most democracies reflect a tradeoff between popular control on the one hand and expert judgment / elite control on the other. I don't think either extreme is the best, and don't know where we are on that continuum relative to the ideal. But for what it's worth, my sense is that citizens actually understand this to some extent and ofter defer to legislators' judgments: http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/papers/broockman_butler_legisla...

A2: In order to increase citizen engagement, we should focus on lowering the cost of acquiring information about politics, the cost of participation, or the cost of providing information to representatives. I think this misses the real challenge: increasing people's motivation to participate and the benefits to participation. It's never been easier to participate in myriad ways -- the cost is epsilon. But if people see the benefits as zero, which many seem to, they still won't engage. I don't think the cost side of the equation is where the action is.

Their age doesn't predict their accuracy. With that said, I like the idea of asking how they think various age groups think. Maybe they think their district is not as young as it is, maybe they think younger voters are more similar to older voters than they are, or maybe both.

This is my personal favorite interpretation of our results -- they could know if they cared to know, and so the fact that they don't know suggests that they don't care. With that said, this paper is at odds with that: https://www3.nd.edu/~dnickers/files/papers/Butler_Nickerson....

Author here. Not sure why this is showing up today but happy to answer questions!

FWIW, we have data from 2014 across many more issues and the basic story is the same. Haven't finished writing that up.

None of these studies are randomized trials. All we've learned is that aggressive kids prefer violent video games to non-violent ones. It's useless.

The question is whether the lack of competition reflects a natural monopoly (i.e., something inherent to this market given spread out suburban geography), like for electricity service, or other forces. It's probably some of both. At the very least, increasing competition won't be easy in the medium term. So, I disagree with the notion that net neutrality is a trivial issue ("just a symptom").

When Uber re-launched quasi-legally in Austin, TX, some drivers there told me Uber promised to pay any fines they incurred. Whether the German government fines Uber and/or the drivers, maybe they're just hoping to throw money at the problem.

Or maybe just "the kind of employees who get paid less also are the kind of people who have a harder time getting new jobs." Correlation != causation.

In Hawaii all beaches are public property and maintaining public access routes (and parking!) to all beaches is required by law. If rich Californians keep up this crap, they might just inspire a voter initiative that would make things even worse for them.

I assume most of the people who go to that review page are the ones with bad experiences? Otherwise, who would review a power adapter?

Listen in on the phone conversations a plumber has and you'd get the impressions that no one's pipes work.

The author subsequently scored a gig at the WSJ with multiple columns.[1] Funny how the ability to accurately comment on industry is not a useful qualification for being employed to comment on industry. :) (Written somewhat tongue-in-cheek obviously, I'm sure he has gotten lucky before with predictions before too.)

[1] https://twitter.com/mattlynnwriter

Should we change our beliefs based on this post? Based on Dorian's denials today, isn't this post just as likely in the world in which Dorian is Satoshi and the world in which Dorian is not? I don't have a strong belief one way or the other, but this doesn't seem like good evidence.

The "regression to the mean" and "novelty" effect is getting at two different things (both true, both important).

1. Underpowered tests are likely to exaggerate differences, since E(abs(truth - result)) increases as the sample size shrinks.

2. The much bigger problem I've seen a lot: when users see a new layout they aren't accustomed to they often respond better, but when they get used to it, they can begin responding worse than with the old design. Two ways to deal with this are long term testing (let people get used to it) and testing on new users. Or, embrace the novelty effect and just keep changing shit up to keep users guessing - this seems to be FB's solution.

There's a big (and common) error in statistical reasoning Google is making with the decision to down-weight GPA based on their data: That GPAs do not predict performance among those it hired does not imply that Google should not use GPA when hiring any more. Rather, it means that Google used GPA to exactly the right extent among those it hired under its old policy - there was no information left in GPA they didn't use, and therefore they should leave whatever policy they have in place as is.

Explanation: suppose there are only two things Google observes, GPA and coding ability, and that Google uses some correct decision rule to only hire those people where the sum GPA + coding ability > some threshold. Those who have lower GPAs will thus tend to have higher coding ability, otherwise they wouldn't have met the threshold to make it into the pool of hires they're analyzing - and, therefore, comparing "those with low GPAs that Google hired" and "those with high GPAs that Google hired" is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

In order to assess whether GPA should be used at all, they would need to look at how the people they didn't hire because of their existing policy would have performed.

More reading: http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-subtle-joys-of-s... and http://www.jamesmahoney.org/articles/Insights%20and%20Pitfal...

We know from randomized trials on legislators that calls do work in changing their positions. http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/berganco...

89k is actually a very large number.

On #1: If the TSA didn't frisk 80 year old men, any smart terrorist would begin recruiting 80 year olds. You can't have gaps in enforcement by policy or they will be exploited (sadly).