Day one in Madrid

I guess the title is doing the work — but greetings from Madrid. I am going to tour the city today, and prepare for this week’s workshop. I wanted to also share a few things as I do. So at times I will sound as if I am writing from my hotel, but other times elsewhere in this lovely city. So think of it as a travel scroll.

Growing up in Mississippi, it wouldn’t even have dawned on me that me or anyone I would know would ever come to Europe, let alone do so as much as I have. I am trying to remember when I first left the United States and I think it was sophomore or junior year of college when I spent a summer at the university of urbino in Italy. It’s a walled town, renaissance era maybe, somewhat like Lucca but I think maybe smaller, and the university was located just outside of the walled part. I still remember vividly the hospitality of the Italians I met. One young man in particular who helped me find my lost luggage in a story that I won’t be able to do justice retelling this morning, so won’t attempt it.

But all that is to say, I do love Europe. I don’t want to say where is my favorite. I’ve never quite liked ranking in front of people as I have a habitual personality trait where I worry I will offend. Not the best trait. But I will say each summer I seem to spend 2-3 weeks in Spain, mostly San Sebastián and Madrid, and then 2-3 weeks in Italy, usually at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and last year at Lucca.

So, this summer it is that again. I will spend a week in Madrid this week, then I return at the end of the trip to my favorite city, San Sebastián. I go now annually and part of the ritual is to eat at Amelia’s, a two star Michelin restaurant near to La concha bay. I don’t know if they know me but they remembered me last year, and I took notes, and hope to see the ones I remember.

I am not a foodie, and in fact have what I feel is a complicated relationship with food. I love food as much as the next person. But I do not have a great memory for food. So even at the end of the meal, when the staff ask what was my favorite, I am always sheepish about the fact I can’t seem to remember all that we had. And part of it is because I value the experience and the theater of it more than the food. I love the drink, the conversation, the soft pop and classic rock music that Amelia’s plays. I love the connection, and I love the feeling that feels like home. I love those those things which are wrapped around food, not really the other way around, and so if they were to ask “what was your favorite feeling” I could answer it easily. I would say things like “I liked it when my daughter kept laughing and telling me about things at school.” Or maybe I might say “I liked it when I saw the chef talking to the other staff very seriously, but then walked over to me like they knew me”. Things like that.

So I go back every summer. I won’t say I will go back every summer, as what’s the point in planning things like that which are not yet real? I should strive to do the next real thing, not the never real things.

Speaking of, I have two new mantras. I move through mantras often. And not surprisingly, when one of them gets dropped, I largely can no longer remember it, the phrase or why it was useful at all. But for some reason they are the handrails for me. And this trip, I have had some recurring stressors, which I tend to not really notice because what happens with the stressors is I focus on something else, not the cause of the stressor. I’ll typically do one of two things. I’ll rehearse and relive old grievances, and attempt to relive them only this time know how to respond better. These will be ancient, though not always. Sometimes they are only a few months old. And then I will give a speech. My dad did it too. You’d often hear him mumbling and rehearsing an argument, something that clearly had gotten under his skin, and he’d work it over and over. I figure it’s some shared intergenerational anxiety we both have.

But sometimes it isn’t the past. Sometimes it is the future. It’ll be events, usually painful ones, that haven’t happened. Almost like premonitions. Hyper vigilance type stuff, as if I’m bracing for the next shoe to drop and so practice it by thinking of it dropping, and practicing it.

Positive intelligence says I do this because these are the best response strategies I chose a very long time ago as part of my efforts to live and survive, most likely going back to adolescence, and I can buy it. Thinking of it that way — that these tendencies and traits are my body and minds way of protecting me no matter how counter productive they may be — has helped me feel compassion for myself. But ultimately I want to gently observe it, and then make a turn. And the turn is to live a different way, to say to myself that I appreciate the help by rehearsing the past and predicting the future, neither of those are real, and shouldn’t I try to move towards what is real? The past and the future are not real things.

So my new mantra is this. 1) thoughts are not instructions, and 2) do the next real thing. I decided on “do the real thing” as opposed to “do the next good thing”, which is the more popular phrase these days. I decided to replace “good thing” with “real thing” because I don’t think I lack for moral character or moral courage. I think rather I cannot let go of various hurts and wounds, which are always wrapped in morality already. But most of them, if not all of them, I cannot do anything about. And thus they are not real. If you cannot change them through your choices, then they are maybe sunk costs, or they simply are fiction, and sometimes both.

I have also been toying with the idea of integrity as an off equilibrium path concept. Off equilibrium path is something you’ll often hear in game theory, and particularly in sequential games. A person who works out the subgame perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium, for instance, will have to work out the subgames, then work out the best response to take against the opponent in those subgames, and then work out the Nash equilibrium on those subgames. Since Nash showed that all games have at least one Nash equilibrium, usually an odd numbered one too I think according to a theorem by Selten once you included mixed strategies, then a subgame has a nash, and if it has a Nash, it has a payout. And therefore you can collapse choices into off equilibrium payouts such that you may never play in those subgames, but you can imagine them and then seeing them, choose to avoid them.

Well, maybe integrity is a subgame off equilibrium path concept in this sense. Consider two situations. One situation says you do something because of virtue, ethics or duty. Whatever — doesn’t matter. Plenty of ink has been spilled on that.

But maybe there is another type of ethical life living, one in which you imagine that off equilibrium path, and you ask yourself could you be the person who lives there? Would you want to? And maybe if the answer is no — that you cannot be that person, do not want to be that person, then that is an off equilibrium payout you consider and reject. The cost of living in that path is simply too high because to do it you would have to deny your whole identity and cease to exist in the form you recognize.

I think maybe I am driven more by that kind of technical integrity than I am by virtue, or maybe as much, or maybe it’s just more visible to me in the hard choices I’ve made. I have made choices that others have questioned, and I think now I realize — that some see the off equilibrium path for me. They see the cost of my actions but not this other thing, and frankly, I don’t need them to. I don’t anyone to understand that because it doesn’t matter either way. If I became that person, I’d be the one paying the price not them, and that is what makes it my life task, not theirs. And a large part of living is becoming better at separating the life tasks such that I focus on the ones that are my own, and off equilibrium considerations are part of that.

And therefore sometimes, oftentimes, I have round myself, again and again, in the catch-22 places where the only options to me were the ones where I’d have to incur a hefty cost gladly.

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That was all written yesterday in a somewhat reflective mood. Today is the first day of the workshop. I wonder if CodeChella is a workshop or a conference and what the difference is.

Anyway, today is the first day of CodeChella third annual workshop/conference, and I’m looking forward to it. Agustin Casas, Mark Anderson, Dan Rees, Kyle Butts and I do this every year. It’s a real conference (okay let’s call it a conference) to me, and so feels like a neat accomplishment.

This year, we will cover covariates and continuous, as well as staggered, and Claude Code. I will spend the last three hours on Thursday talking about using Claude Code for research. I will also spend a ton of time on continuous diff-in-diff.

In typical fashion, yesterday I made a note that I had dinner reservations with Mark, Dan and four other people for 10:00pm. I checked my email and sure enough I had the hours wrong — dinner was at 8:00pm not 10:00pm! But that’s okay, I told my friend. We just had to cut our phone call early. I could still make it.

I texted Mark at around 7:45pm that I would be around 10 minutes late, and then switched from FaceTime to normal phone so I could continue my phone call with my friend. I walked to the restaurant which was a mile away, and when I arrived, said goodbye to my friend. It was 8:10pm. I looked down at my phone and saw I had several missed texts from my friend Mark.

So I didn’t just have the time wrong. I had the day wrong too. I have the absolute worst eyesight or something. I blame Europe’s use of military time. I was too busy subtracting 12 from 20:00 incorrectly to see that in fact the reservation was Monday not Sunday night.

I continue to intermittent fast, and had waited until dinner to open my fasting window. When in Europe I basically just carry the window around with me wherever so that every day I only eat within an 8-hour window. I don’t have a scale, and I can’t count calories and I can’t make my own meals, so I just try to be consistent with the window. This may not look like what a man on a diet eats, but this is what I got. I when to “SteakBurger” and had mozzarella cheese sticks and a hamburger.

I dreamt all night about diff-in-diff, and specifically with 2x2 calculations, so I was ready to get up when the alarm clock went off. So wish us luck! CodeChella 3 is here!