Spring 2025 workshops plus camping and personal things
Waking up in New Mexico at 3:00am
It’s 3:30am in Alamogordo NM. And I’m awake because I’ve been awake probably since midnight. I wasn’t half awake but rather wide awake just thinking. My phone died at midnight and I’d been using it to play the sound of crackling firewood burning but then the phone died and I’m pretty when it did was when I woke up.
I decided therefore to come to the car and warm up but unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to turn the car on without also turning on the headlights. I tried twice and turned all the buttons that are where you’d ordinarily turn off the headlights but apparently those either weren’t them or they are them and I don’t know how to turn lights off using them. I asked cosmos and he said in the Jeep Laredo, which is what this rental is, you have to hold down the parking brake, and that will do it, but that sounded too speculative and I’d already turned the beams on twice so I’m just going to sit here and update the substack about the spring workshops while my phone charges on ky laptop, and then I’ll post some videos and pictures from day 3.
Spring 2025 workshops
This spring there are planned six workshops, one of which is new but not yet pinned down with an exact date. But it’s an exciting one I think. But let me order it like we do on the webpage in terms of Classics, Singles, and Deep Cuts.
The Classics
The “Classics” are my own personal workshops. They are called that as they are the foundational material covered in excessive detail over four days and two consecutive weekends, except for part 3 which is a two day workshop. These follow the table of contents of my revised second edition of the Mixtape.
The first workshop is Causal Inference I. It’s four days and two weekends started January 25 and ending Feb 2. It covers potential outcomes model, randomization, selection bias, causal parameters like the ATE and ATT, directed acyclical graphs (DAGs), unconfoundedness, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity. The page to sign up is here and the prices are:
$1 for current residents of low income countries
$50 for students, pre docs, post docs, current residents of middle income countries or people in between work
$95 for non-tenure track or faculty on higher teaching loads
$595 for everyone else
Causal 2 is a four day workshop on difference-in-differences, one of the core tools for causal inference with longitudinal data. It started March 22 and concludes March 30 the next weekend. It’s designed by assuming you know nothing about diff in diff, maybe not even a lot about causal inference methods, and then takes you reasonably far to the contemporary edge which will be conditional parallel trends and covariates, triple differences, sampling problems (eg compositional change with repeated cross sections, imbalanced panels), differential timing, and a 9-stage “design stage checklist” plus replications, simulations and assignments.
Causal 3 is a two day workshop on synthetic control. It is on April 26 and 27. I’m keeping it to two day for a while longer but probably once the book is published I’ll focus more and get it longer. But it’ll cover the traditional synth model by Alberto Abadie and coauthors, then move towards how to handle poor fit through negative weighting as well as combining it with diff in diff. I’ll also discuss cover matrix completion.
The Singles
We have one, but possibly two, workshops in the “singles” category. But for now just one on the books.
Peter Hull from Brown will be teaching a workshop on instrumental variables. It’s two nights from 6-9pm EST on February 10 and 12. I highly encourage you to check it out. This is a great chance to a workshop on one of the most popular methods in causal inference with a future John Bates Clark award winner! Peter’s not yet 40 so I have plenty of time to be right.
A second workshop I hope to have this semester is an advanced diff in diff workshop but it’s not yet pinned down so stay tuned for that.
Deep Cuts
And finally, there is a workshop on heterogeneous treatment effects and machine learning by Brigham Frandsen at BYU. This is a one day workshop from 6-9pm EST on February 20. And because it’s one day, the full price is $295 down from $595, but all other prices the same.
CodeChella
And we also have a workshop in Madrid from May 27-30th called CodeChella. It is the second annual workshop of that name in that location. Last year 90 people came and we hope to have the same. Tickets are $220 for students, $300 for post-docs and $500 for faculty. Please email causalinf@mixtape.consulting for student or post-doc discount codes.
Personal stuff
On a different note, it’s day 4 of the road trip with my son and our second night in Alamogordo. Here’s some pictures of White Sands from yesterday.
We went sledding in the sand dunes and just walked out far and talked. It was nice. Then we went to a local burger place for an early dinner, came back, and made a campfire. We listened to music and talked and made s’mores until 8 and then I eagerly was ready for sleep. I would upload a video but the signal is too weak.
I’ve been up for hours ruminating though. It wasn’t as bad as it can get. Wasn’t bad at all other than it would be nice if I’d slept all night. But I came out and just looked at the stars. The sky is far larger than it is in Waco, as odd as that sounds. It’s something about how there’s nothing in any direction except for sky and mountains on either side of me. Here’s the mountains we are by.
Today though we head out. I don’t want to do the entire trip to the Grand Canyon in one day so I split it up, and we are camping tonight in Tucson, Arizona. then tomorrow we will make the trek to the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t get any camp sites there but I got a couple nights in the hotel inside the park. I wonder if it’s actually the same place the Brady Bunch episode was. Or did they camp? Remember that music when that tarantula would appear? Man I loved when that episode would come on. That and the Hawaii episode were a treat.
Ruminating all night was fine though. I crawled back into the tent now that the phone charged and so I can hear the fire sounds and maybe go back to sleep.
I started the Acemoglu and Johnson article and it’s very cool. I just didn’t get very far so can’t say much.
Anyway, going back to sleep. Check out the workshops. Tell your chair and others you’d like to come. Or just come yourself.
Sincerely
Scott