Endogenous Variables and Measuring Protest Effectiveness
Linear Digressions7 Heinä 2019

Endogenous Variables and Measuring Protest Effectiveness

This is a re-release of an episode first released in February 2017. Have you been out protesting lately, or watching the protests, and wondered how much effect they might have on lawmakers? It's a tricky question to answer, since usually we need randomly distributed treatments (e.g. big protests) to understand causality, but there's no reason to believe that big protests are actually randomly distributed. In other words, protest size is endogenous to legislative response, and understanding cause and effect is very challenging. So, what to do? Well, at least in the case of studying Tea Party protest effectiveness, researchers have used rainfall, of all things, to understand the impact of a big protest. In other words, rainfall is the instrumental variable in this analysis that cracks the scientific case open. What does rainfall have to do with protests? Do protests actually matter? What do we mean when we talk about endogenous and instrumental variables? We wouldn't be very good podcasters if we answered all those questions here--you gotta listen to this episode to find out.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(309)

How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7)

How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7)

Knowing when an AI agent has failed sounds straightforward — until it isn't. Agents have a frustrating habit of finishing confidently while quietly doing the wrong thing, or looping endlessly without ...

1 Kesä 31min

AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6)

AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6)

Despite what the marketing hype might suggest, AI agents are far from infallible — and if you've ever actually used one, you already know this. Today's episode dives deep into the many, varied, and so...

25 Touko 32min

Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5)

Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5)

When tackling a complex, multi-step task, even the smartest AI agent can fail without a solid game plan. This episode dives into the research around agentic planning — how agents move beyond simply re...

18 Touko 24min

Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4)

Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4)

Context windows are powerful — but finite, and surprisingly easy to overwhelm. When an AI agent is tackling a long, complex task, the information it needs has to fit inside that limited real estate, a...

10 Touko 24min

Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)

Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)

Just like a memorable talk lives or dies by its opening and closing, LLMs have a surprisingly similar quirk: they pay close attention to what's at the beginning and end of their context window — and k...

4 Touko 19min

ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)

ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)

Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This epi...

27 Huhti 23min

What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)

What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)

AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agents from every angle, building u...

20 Huhti 19min

Unfaithful Chain of Thought

Unfaithful Chain of Thought

What's actually happening when an LLM "thinks out loud"? Research on human decision-making suggests that much of the reasoning we believe drives our choices is actually post hoc rationalization — we d...

13 Huhti 24min