Norman Topping Chair in Medicine & Public Policy, USC, Sol Price School of Public Policy
Los Angeles, CA
Joined August 2014
- Tweets18.7K
- Following1.9K
- Followers2K
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Jason Doctor retweeted
HUMAN ERROR - long book, grateful author, coming soon. @Cambridge_Uni @jasonfurman @Jabaluck @jasndoc
cambridge.org/core/books/hum…
Jason Doctor retweeted
I’ve learned so much from Henrique and Yuhta working on this paper. Extremely excited to see our paper published! Many thanks to the editor and referees for a smooth process.
A thread on the paper:
In their new paper, @smorgasborb, @xiaolin_econ, & Ishii tackle an important question: How should we make decisions using multiple information sources when we don't know their correlation?
restud.com/robust-aggregatio…
#REStud
#EconX
#EconTwitter
Jason Doctor retweeted
This paper is what I have been yelling about for a few years now: the true danger in empirical social sciences is more often "researchers degrees of freedom" in design, data curation, measurement, choice of method.
The big threat is not outright fraud or p-hacking (although these are problems) or even biases against publishing null results. Its those hundreds of small choices researchers make when preparing their papers -- none of which are sins of omission or commission. They're good faith human decisions with no malice.
Yet, two equally good faith moves can generate different results. This apparently forthcoming paper in Journal of Economic Literature asked 146 research teams to estimate the same causal effect using the same underlying data. In unconstrained setups, they arrived at massively different results. Even in more constrained setups (with more directives), they showed differences. All of which came from picking the design and curating the data (cleaning). Huge!
I would reformulate the problem as unexamined researcher degrees of freedom, rather than methodological freedom itself! Indeed, what we need is a strong contestability (and good faith) to point out what could be happening.
Jason Doctor retweeted
New study shows that naloxone expansion did not explain the decline opioid overdoses that began in 2023 - administrations of the rescue drug actually dropped.
statnews.com/2026/10/23/opio…
Jason Doctor retweeted
Berkeley's Morrison Library, a "computer-free" reading room, is close to that device-free norm.
I was there last week: overwhelmingly people reading physical books, a joy to behold.
Jason Doctor retweeted
The most important briefings of the day.
Karl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, shares the news of his Nobel Prize with his kids.
Jason Doctor retweeted
We have thousands of years of religious, philosophical, and legal traditions trying to “align” humans and make our behavior “safe.”
Now we’re trying to speed-run toward those goals with AI.
As we have often failed with humans, we should expect and plan for failures with AI.
Jason Doctor retweeted
“The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy,” Humphreys said.
sfist.com/2026/09/14/victim-…
Jason Doctor retweeted
All academics fantasize of either opening a bakery or escaping to a remote cabin in the mountains
Jason Doctor retweeted
Terence Tao made a very powerful point:
“In most cases in pure mathematics, the problems are posed not because we desperately want the solution to these problems in and of themselves, but because we have seen from past experience that human-directed efforts to solve these problems tend to spur further development of the field through the efforts to solve such problems, and then to digest any partial or complete solutions that emerge for further insights.
Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods—particularly without full transparency into the solution process—can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole.”
I’ve been following Terence Tao for like 20 years, and I have always been impressed by the clarity of his thinking.
This clarity stands out even more in this difficult moment, as AI labs turn mathematics into a battleground in their race for supremacy.
In this race, they risk damaging one of humanity’s highest intellectual endeavours.
Jason Doctor retweeted
New paper: What drives hiring discrimination against trans women—transgender identity, non-passing appearance, or their interaction?
Using passing and non-passing “twins,” I separate these channels experimentally and show that their interaction matters.
🧵👇 #EconTwitter
Jason Doctor retweeted
A psychology journal has retracted a seminal 2002 paper on deadlines and procrastination coauthored by Dan Ariely of Duke University just days after a team of sleuths published analyses of the original study data, finding it had been tampered with.
retractionwatch.com/2026/09/…
Jason Doctor retweeted
The first prescription for sleep medications may play an important role in shaping long-term use.
Patients initially prescribed drugs like Ambien for longer durations were more likely to still be using them years later, new USC Schaeffer research finds. schaeffer.usc.edu/research/s…
Jason Doctor retweeted
Dear followers,
I’m delighted to share this article which is finally forthcoming. We show that business school education is associated with managers paying lower wages, holding the labor share down and not sharing, revenues and profits with workers.
Forthcoming in the AER: "Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark" by Daron Acemoglu, Alex Xi He, and Daniel le Maire. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.12…
Jason Doctor retweeted
Turns out recycling is worse for the environment than using a landfill. What interests me about this is that we have developed secular religions to supplement for the lack of a coherent moral framework otherwise.
A few years ago, I would have made fun of recyclers as virtue signallers. But now I actually decry the lack of a better moral framework to channel the instinct to do good towards something more glorious (and more correct).
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Jason Doctor retweeted
In a statement, WSJ opinion editor Paul Gigot defends Druckenmiller's use of AI to write Monday's op ed, saying "AI is a fact of modern life," and "nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion."
