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founding
Oct 31·edited Oct 31Liked by scott cunningham

First post as a paid subscriber, but I'm a long time beneficiary of your Mixtape works, Scott.

I have to say, I'm impressed with NotebookLM (and have played a bit with it a while back), but does anyone else get serious Kristen Wiig and Will Farrell vibes when llistenlistening to these (worth a watch if you haven't: https://youtu.be/XDvZrubaEwA?si=cSnHjw1DRyEq82jV -- once you see it you can't unsee it). Regardless, it's a powerful tool.

That said, I was delighted by this episode on Charles F. Manski, though I want to hear you interview him. He's a hero of mine. I consider myself to be among of his intellectual "descendants," though we've never met in person--I sometimes think meeting him would kinda' be like Buddy the Elf showing up on his dad's doorstep. Though I'm more like a grandkid, as I was a pupil of two of his students, Jörg Stoye and Francesca Molinari at Cornell.

Francesca served on my special committee and is a letter writer as I head back on the job market this year. My dissertation research was originally based on some methods I developed based on an observation he made in passing in an article he wrote titled "Adolescent Econometricians" about how the individuals in our models (e.g. the Mincer equations on the returns to education) themselves face the same inferential problems we do as econometricians--I ran with this idea and this led to a couple projects with my favorite acronyms: Behavioral Econometric Estimators (BEEs) and Highly Integrated Vital Estimators (HIVEs). I founded a software firm called Hivemind Analytics in grad school to store capital I raised to execute on the idea and me and a team of CS friends developed an app called Predictament that streamlined the process of running prediction tournaments with strategic survey questions. His "Law of Decreasing Credibility"--about how the credibility of our inference decreases with the strength of the assumptions we maintain--is part of my credo and something that I've considered getting tattooed somewhere ;).

But, none of this is what I'd talk to him about if we were to meet or talk. I would actually just thank him for his work on medical decision-making.

It has been this set of work, above all, that I want to thank him for. In my 3rd year of graduate school, just as I was hitting my stride and working on my dissertation research, I got a call that changed everything.

Ended up patching together some other papers I had co-authored for my dissertation, moved to be closer to one of the country's best treatment centers and finished my degree in absentia. I never went on the job market (it's my first time, now), but was fortunate to find a position within a day's drive of the girls doctors. I backburnered the BEEs and HIVEs. Stuff happened, became a half-decent respiratory tech/CNA, and I had to close down Hivemind.

Our family has now been navigating life with two kids with an extremely rare variant of a terminal illness for 10 years.

This comment is already too long. Point is, Manski's work has helped my family make decisions in the face of all the uncertainty that has come. And, it's probably time I call him and thank him.

Anyway, if you would ever like a co-host if/when you interview him, let me know. I'd love to be a fly on the wall. I bet we could have a conversation that would give NotebookLM a run for it's money.

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They definitely have some kind of recognizable vibe interaction, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I was thinking of the Ringer's Binge Mode or maybe Reply All. I think may be there is a "deep dive" genre in podcasts, but I was sort of not sure of that until I hear this and then I wondered.

I will one day reach out to Dr. Manski, but I am going to do it after slowly going through students first. Same with Dr. Heckman. I want to build to them by learning from the ground floor up the overall sociology and history of the web of students around them, as I felt like maybe that would give me a bit more confidence.

And thank you Jeff for all your support!

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founding

I haven't seen Ringer's Binge Mode yet. I'll have to check it out. As for Manski's students, you can't go wrong with Francesca Molinari and/or Jorg Stoye. There's a point when you learn a language in another country where you start dreaming in the language. Taking classes from Jorg and Francesca got me dreaming in distributions. They are both also just fundamentally decent human beings. I've always wanted to ask Jorg more about his days as a DJ in Germany and Francesca about her prior life as a professional competitive rower. I miss getting to see them both. Cornell is lucky to have them.

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