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Ryan Briggs

@ryancbriggs.net
5.5K followers 1.1K following 1.4K posts

Raising kids & bread & grant money. Cleaning data & diapers & fish. EA (bed nets, not light cone). Social scientist. typos. twitter.com/ryancbriggs

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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 22/09/2026
Reminder to Toronto people: It is mooncake season. Get your mooncakes.
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🇨🇦 CPSA ACSP 🇨🇦 @cpsa-acsp.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The Call for Proposals #CPSA_ACSP27 is live. ⏰ Nov 10 2026 Meet the colleagues behind next year's programme — and send them your work! 📍 UBC-Vancouver-CANADA|May 26–28 2027 mycpsa-cpsa-acsp.ca/cfp/cfp_index @traceyraney.bsky.social @svallejovera.bsky.social @ryancbriggs.net @randybesco.bsky.social
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 14/09/2026
All academics fantasize of either opening a bakery or escaping to a remote cabin in the mountains
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 10/09/2026
When I was visiting my mom she gave me some bottles of alcohol that she was never going to drink, and I just opened this one and turns out it’s maple syrup
What looks like a bottle of tequila
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 06/09/2026
Nice place to take an APSA panel
Me in a canoe on a lake
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 04/09/2026
This is clever
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 04/09/2026
It has been embarrassing reading this and similar critiques, because they accuse the report of not doing things that it manifestly does do (like adjusting for time to accumulate citations). I hope everyone involved is more careful in their regular work. You hurt your causes by flubbing this hard.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 01/09/2026
The haskaps finally came in at my parent’s place! We made jam and haskap sour cocktails and a haskap pie is in the oven.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 18/08/2026
It's quite neat that the 1954 Salk Polio trial in the US had both a "matched" observational arm and a conventional RCT arm. There is an R package with the relevant data (PolioTrials in HistData) as well as an article about it by Paul Meier (webpages.math.luc.edu/~mgb/courses...).
graph of Polio vaccine trial results
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 12/08/2026
Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.
aiddata.org
Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned
Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 12/08/2026
I enjoyed this Asterisk article about taste: asteriskmag.com/issues/15/wh... My favourite little-known example of outstanding taste is cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli. Just while working at Norton her authors won 13 James Beard awards & at least 13 IACPs! Here are some of the books she edited:
asteriskmag.com
Why We Like Things
What Silicon Valley gets wrong about taste.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 28/07/2026
I’m late to this but the ninja creami is viral for good reason. It’s wild how good of a product you can get out of it, including vegan ice cream (almond milk + coconut cream).
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 26/07/2026
The food court in the Mississauga flea market has incredible food. We got Malaysian but just in general it seems very strong. maps.app.goo.gl/KkoR12QxjZsN...
maps.app.goo.gl
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Paul Nightingale @paulnightingale.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
We are seeing similar at RP. It's not just AI. Also a huge increase in Chinese social science. Which is often very good. But AI slop is flooding the system. One author with 30 submissions in a month... now they "could" be super productive.... or it could be AI slop.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/07/2026
Spoke to an editor of a good social science journal who reported submission volume is now 400% higher than during Covid. He entirely blames AI.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 02/07/2026
I think he deserved more than a dark corner in the Guinness museum
A photo of Gosset in the Guinness Storehouse. The quote reads “IN HIS WORK WITH BARLEY RESEARCH, GOSSET DREW CONCLUSIONS FROM ANALYSING SMALL SAMPLE SIZES....”
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 23/06/2026
Homemade ice kacang. I probably made lots of moderate execution errors, but it was good enough that the kids happily crushed it.
A large bowl of shaved ice (plain and mango), along wild bowls of taro balls, panda jelly, peaches, and evaporated milk. A bowl of ice kacang, with taro balls, panda jelly, peach, and evaporated milk.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 20/06/2026
I won’t get into the data or analysis here (yet), but I’m very confident that lower ranked journals do not publish more null results than higher ranked ones. I looked across 11 disciplines and all have this (lack of a) pattern.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 10/06/2026
This was a fun paper. We analyze results from a global survey of development studies (DS) profs and find that the income group of their country doesn't explain much about their views on DS. Instead, their discipline is huge.
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Daniel Lakens @lakens.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
New blog post: Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth. daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/05/eval... On an AI generated description of a non-existent study, incorrectly citing findings from studies, and the importance of scientific criticism.
daniellakens.blogspot.com
Evaluating Dr. Cuddy’s Claim that the Debunking of Power Posing is a Myth
In this blog post I will analyse the arguments that Dr. Amy Cuddy provided in a blog post “The "Power Posing Was Debunked" Myth: What the Re...
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 26/05/2026
You’ve got to be clafoutis maxxing
A cherry clafoutis
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 23/05/2026
@prachisrivas.bsky.social you would love the number of people wearing Habs jerseys at this Toronto Blue Jays game
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 22/05/2026
In the Fall I'll be teaching a new MA-level methods course entitled "Applied Statistical Evaluation of Development Projects". It will be 12 weeks, in R, and aimed around RCT evaluations. This is a draft outline. What am I missing? What seems redundant?
1. Course Introduction and Setup
 Course overview; installing RStudio; introduction to causal inference; ModernDive Chapters 1–2 for newcomers.
2. Data, Tidy Data, Wrangling, and Visualization
 Core R skills for importing, cleaning, reshaping, summarizing, and visualizing evaluation data.
3. Sampling, Uncertainty, and Inference 
Sampling variation, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and the logic of statistical uncertainty.
4. Difference in Means as Regression 
Equivalence between difference-in-means estimates and lm(y ~ treat); ATE as the treatment coefficient; control mean as the intercept; covariates for precision gains; simulations and re-analysis of Karlan–List charity data.
5. Interactions and Treatment Effect Heterogeneity 
Interaction terms, subgroup analysis, heterogeneous effects; simulations, Karlan–List charity data, and Thornton HIV data.
6. Standard Errors, Power, and Research Design 
Bias, variance, RMSE, clustering, power analysis, and how underpowered studies contribute to selection on significance and inflated estimates.
7. Noncompliance, Take-Up, and Instrumental Variables 
ITT, TOT, LATE, compliers etc, and randomized encouragement designs; Thornton HIV testing incentives; reading from The Effect Chapter 19 or Causal Inference: The Mixtape IV chapter.
8. Spillovers, Externalities, and Peer Effects
 How spillovers can bias experimental estimates; identifying, measuring, and interpreting spillover effects in development evaluations.
9. Pre-Analysis Plans, Measurement, and Cost-Effectiveness
 PAPs, outcome measurement, measurement error, index construction, and basic cost-effectiveness analysis.
10. Meta-Analysis and Evidence Aggregation 
Fixed-effect and random-effects meta-analysis; Bayesian meta-analysis using baggr; interpreting accumulated evidence across studies.
11. Case Study: Deworming Evidence I
 Critical re-analysis of the main deworming results; statistical interpretation; cost-effectiveness implications.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 22/05/2026
An interesting EA forum post that is an anonymized slack chat about GiveWell and EA-style CE analysis: "across EA cost-effectiveness analyses, much more typically goes toward estimating the effect than estimating the costs." forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ru3wyS...
forum.effectivealtruism.org
Global Health Charity Founders on GiveWell, Evidence Action, and M+E — EA Forum
The following is a lightly edited and anonymized transcript of a discussion among charity founders, researchers, and funders in Ambitious Impact’s Sl…
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 21/05/2026
I'll be teaching a grad methods class focused on experiments in the fall for a development studies dept. I'm looking for published development RCTs. Ideally they would have: 1. replication packages in R, or 2. fairly simple code I could rewrite in R. Anyone have recommendations?
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Lauren Gilbert @lgilbert.co · 21/05/2026
I'm hiring for In Development's first not-me hire. Help shape the future of development journalism; edit pieces that do serious cost-effectiveness analysis AND have jokes. Up to $90k USD, fully remote worldwide. indevelopmentmag.com/jobs/
indevelopmentmag.com
Jobs – In Development
evidence and argument for a developing world
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
We can estimate the resource cost of solving the Erdos problem. The calculations below seem reasonable, so using the best public estimates we have, it took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity & 3–31L of water Equivalent to < 3 almonds worth of water & the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 20/05/2026
“Stochastic parrots”
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"
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Eris @isolyth.dev · 20/05/2026
OpenAI has used a "general purpose reasoning model" to disprove that the square grid type construction is the best solution to the planar unit distance problem. I am sure the "AI is completely useless" crowd will now change their ways, right?
openai.com
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
An OpenAI model solved the 80-year-old unit distance problem, disproving a major conjecture in discrete geometry and marking a milestone in AI-driven mathematics.
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It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 11/05/2026
Jeremy right now
Hard to swallow pills meme
Hard to swallow pill:
An association, by itself, is not evidence for someone else to do a causal study.

The best way to create evidence for a future causal study is to do the best causal study with the data you have at hand.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/05/2026
We have a new version of this paper out. The headline results are the same—political science must filter results heavily for statistical significance—but we've added many extensions and rewritten much of it in response to feedback (thank you!). A quick thread on updates 👇
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 26/04/2026
Feeling pretty happy about these
6 chocolate chip cookies cooling on a rack
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 23/04/2026
How to post on a twitterlike: 1. spend 20 min listing edge cases and objections to your point, 2. compress each quibble into a single word choice that implicitly addresses it 3. finally, watch replies to the post ignore those qualifiers and perfectly recreate the original list of objections
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 22/04/2026
Come tell me why I’m wrong!
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Rohan Alexander @rohanalexander.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
All welcome at the workshop in 10 days. rohanalexander.com/tdw.html Also, if you read Ryan's piece and thought "hey, I have thoughts on AI and quant social science as well", please do get in touch.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 21/04/2026
I'll be at a workshop organized by @rohanalexander.bsky.social next week on how AI will change quantitative social science. This is my short paper, and this is the key argument. ryancbriggs.net/blog/as-ai-l...
Information manipulation is going to get cheaper much faster than interacting with the world will. I expect that this will lead to the bottleneck in research shifting from production to consumption. We should be preparing for this shift now by building infrastructure that allows us to adjudicate claims and filter work in a world where production is cheap. The current journal system is not well positioned to do this, and so we should be experimenting with new institutions that can.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 16/04/2026
incredible work indevelopmentmag.com/money-for-no...
A note to Santa asking for cash transfers
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 06/04/2026
Me just finishing reading a kid version of Wizard of Oz to 3 year old: “There’s no place like home.” “No” “Is home your favourite place?” “No” “What is your favourite place?” “Hot pot”
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Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
The more that folks outside of science hear of this, the more they should ask: why? open.substack.com/pub/joshuasw...
open.substack.com
Déjà vu All Over Again: The White House's Diminished Vision for Science in FY 2027
A first look into the proposed FY 2027 budget reveals an ideological commitment to reduce the size, scope, and capacity of American leadership in R&D.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 03/04/2026
There are no longer any great options in the twitter-ish social media space and it’s sad
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Carlisle Rainey 👨‍💻📊📚 @carlislerainey.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Feel free to borrow/steal---the source is here: github.com/pos5747/notes The goal is a *still relevant* course on parametric models that can sit alongside a course on more agnostic methods for causal inference. *These are in-progress and written in the pre-Claude Code era.
github.com
GitHub - pos5747/notes: Notes for POS 5747
Notes for POS 5747. Contribute to pos5747/notes development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 01/04/2026
You guys @carlislerainey.bsky.social has a free textbook online and it seems really useful pos5747.github.io/notes/
A screenshot showing:
Introduction

These are notes for my class on probability models. In these notes, I walk through the concepts and computation that support modern probability modeling in political science using both maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches.

The Goal

There are many excellent books on probability models. But I felt the need to write my own. Why? I saw three problems.

First, some classes assign a huge textbook. It might be possible for the strongest and most motivated students to become familiar with the range of topics covered in these textbook, but impossible to master. Instead, these textbooks seem like references, something you’re supposed to constantly be referring back to throughout your career. I know this because many of these books have instructors’ guides that suggest what should be covered in a single semester, what should be skipped, and how one might jump around. Instead, I want a book that students can work through beginning to end and master each idea.
Second, some classes assign a variety of sections from several books and a collection of articles. But then the story told in the readings isn’t coherent. The styles are changing, the author’s tastes are changing, and the notation is changing. Switching among authors can feel like whiplash when learning a difficult subject. Instead, I want a book that tells a continuous story with consistent style, tastes, and notation.
Third, some classes assign readings that support the lecture material, without exact alignment between the two. For better or worse, the content covered by the instructor in class feels like the most important material. Thus, I want a book that exactly aligns with the material I cover in class.
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 01/04/2026
probably a good time to share this again: asteriskmag.com/issues/10/ca...
asteriskmag.com
Can We Trust Social Science Yet?
Everyone likes the idea of evidence-based policy, but it’s hard to realize it when our most reputable social science journals are still publishing poor quality research.
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Nature @nature.com · 01/04/2026
A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W
go.nature.com
Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project
Results from massive, ‘eagerly awaited’ initiative reinforce concerns about the credibility of science — but raise hope for solutions.
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Joris Frese @fresejoris.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11
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Institute for Replication @i4replication.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇
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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 01/04/2026
Today is the day that a lot of social scientists get their first Nature publication
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