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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira

@micokoch.bsky.social
151 followers 810 following 13 posts

PhD student in epidemiology at UMass Amherst working on gambling

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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 07/12/2025
#OtD 7 Dec 1928 Noam Chomsky, legendary American linguist, radical, social critic, activist and member of the @IWW union was born in Philadelphia. Chomsky contributed the foreword for our first book, available here: shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/wor...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
This paper blew me away, because it is counterintuitive and shocking how baked in our human biases may be in these models that even simple optimization problems can induce problematic behaviors. arxiv.org/abs/2509.22818
arxiv.org
Can Large Language Models Develop Gambling Addiction?
This study explores whether large language models can exhibit behavioral patterns similar to human gambling addictions. As LLMs are increasingly utilized in financial decision-making domains such as a...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
I loved this deep dive into one of my favorite standards. There is a great playlist in the show notes, too!
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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
I have a theory. arxiv.org/abs/2501.03457
arxiv.org
A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics
This commentary proposes a framework for understanding the role of statistics in policy-making, regulation, and bureaucratic systems. I introduce the concept of "ex ante policy," describing statistica...
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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
Pablo Samuel Castro @pcastr.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them"
Dune book cover
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
@mattpfox.bsky.social - the article you mentioned as a preprint on the SERious EPI podcast on regression discontinuity is now in Nature. Ahead of the curve! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia - Nature
Using a natural experiment that avoids common bias concerns, this study finds that the live-attenuated shingles vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis within a follow-up period of...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
I went to an awesome solo ~guitar evening featuring @nbraddo.bsky.social and Paulo Angelino at the Drake in Amherst and was inspired to write about it: micokoch.github.io/me/blog.html...
micokoch.github.io
álvaro j. castro rivadeneira
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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
El hilo @elhilopodcast.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
En 2023, EE.UU. destinó cerca de $1.800 millones de dólares en ayuda a Latinoamérica. La suspensión de USAID obliga a gobiernos, ONGs y contratistas a cancelar proyectos, despedir personal y anular contratos. Te dejamos algunos ejemplos sobre las consecuencias para la región.🧵
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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
Gabriel Zucman @gabrielzucman.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
C'est ce dont s'acquitte quelqu'un comme Bill Gates, qui touche des milliards de dividendes Microsoft Certains milliardaires américains ont trouvé d'autres techniques d'évasion, mais en moyenne ils payent plus que nos Français (la barre est basse, certes) gabriel-zucman.eu/files/report...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
~Estafa, venta de cargos públicos, simulación de funciones públicas, robo de combustible, violencia intrafamiliar, delincuencia organizada y asesinato. 11% de los aspirantes a asambleístas (236 de los 2.089 candidatos) tienen denuncias penales desde el 2014. #Ecuador gk.city/2025/02/02/c...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Brilliant think piece on whether primary care physicians should do preventive medicine: "Considerably more effective and less costly interventions would be public policy such as taxes and regulations that may not be attractive politically but, unlike primary care, actually succeed."
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
~In Octavia Butler's "The Parable of the Sower" climate change has disrupted society. A new, populist pro-business, anti-regulation president gets elected, enacting policies that intensify inequality. Written in 1993, Butler’s prophetic book is set in 2024-2027. www.democracynow.org/2025/1/16/in...
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 28/12/2024
"Democracy is predicated on formal, substantive equality: one person, one vote. Capitalism is not, and is incompatible with substantive equality, because it is composed of workers and owners, success and failure, rich and poor." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
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Reposted by Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira
Pablo Samuel Castro @pcastr.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
📢 In Defense Of Atari 📢 New blog post in which I argue why the ALE is still a valuable resource for RL research! psc-g.github.io/posts/resear...
The Atari 2600 console and an image of some of the games used in the ALE
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Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira @micokoch.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
"The aforementioned results support that paternal caregiving phenotypes rely on the same neural and hormonal substrates as maternal caregiving, referred to as the global human caregiving network." [I wonder about the difference in magnitude of these changes] jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
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