All of nikvetr's Comments + Replies

Thank you for looking into this!

Did you happen to find out if any egg producers did in ovo sexing, or if they were close to adopting it? If Fifth Crown Farm raised all their own hens from hatchlings, what do they do with the male chicks? I‘m a lot less opposed to macerators than the typical person (who is opposed to them), but traditional chick culling alone is enough to dissuade me from egg consumption, independent of direct effects on hens. When I’d last looked into it for the S Bay I couldn’t find any place that did it (and all the producers using it we... (read more)

Working at a ritzy quant firm shouldn't impact your competitiveness for PhD programs too much (could even improve it), and if you're getting $1M+ / 5y E2G-worthy offers halfway through ugrad (and have already published!), you'll probably still be able to get comparable offers if you decide to e.g. master out. So in that regard, it probably doesn't matter too much which path you take, since neither preclude reinvention.

If it were me, I'd take the bird in hand and work in the quant role... but if I felt myself able to make more meaningful "direct" contributi... (read more)

Maybe so! Might just be the career questions are a bit too targeted (partner also has had trouble getting advice on how to best leverage her tissue engineering / veterinary background to best serve animal welfare, e.g. working directly with researchers using animal models vs. developing in vitro meat in a more wet bench role). Was just curious to get an outside view, especially from a more "value-aligned" group than might be found in your typical career center or through existing mentors etc. Thank you for your response! 

I'd second the Ng Coursera course -- very straightforward and easy to follow for those lacking technical backgrounds! Which may be a plus or a minus, depending on your desired rigor.

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Sure! Though unfortunately most of the stuff comes from scattered lectures, workshops, discussions, book chapters, seminars, papers, etc. But for intro multilevel Bayesian regression in R/STAN I'd say John Kruschke's "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis: A Tutorial with R, JAGS, and Stan" and Richard McElreath's "Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan" would be really solid (Richard also has his course lectures up on youtube if you prefer that, though I found his book super readable, so much so that when I took t... (read more)

Ah, gotcha. But re: code review, even the most beautifully constructed chains can fail, and how you specify your model can easily cause things to go kabloom even if the machine's doing everything exactly how it's supposed to. And it only takes a few minutes to drag your log files into something like Tracer and do some basic peace-of-mind checks (and others, e.g. examine bivariate posterior distributions to assess nonidentifiably wrt your demographic params). More sophisticated diagnostics are scattered across a few programs but don't take too long to run e... (read more)

Of course (though wheel reinvention can be super helpful educationally), but there are great free public R packages that interface to STAN (I use "rethinking" for my hierarchical Bayesian regression needs but I think Rstan would work, too), so going with someone's unnamed, private code isn't necessary imo. How much did the survey cost (was it a lot longer than the included google doc, then? e.g. Did you have screening questions to make sure people read the paragraph?). And model+mcmc specification can have lots of fiddly bits that can easily lead us astray, I'd say

Ah, I guess that's better than no control, and presumably paying attention to a paragraph of text doesn't make someone substantially more or less generous. Did you fit a bunch of models with different predictors and test for a sufficient improvement of fit with each? Might do to be wary of overfitting in those regards maybe... though since those aren't focal Bayes tends to be pretty robust there, imo, so long as you used sensible priors

"I used a multilevel model to estimate the effects among those with and without a bachelor's degree. So, the bachelo... (read more)

Ah, interesting! What package? I've never heard of something like that before. Usually in the cold, mechanical heart of every R package is the deep desire to be used and shared as far as possible. If it's just someone's personal interface code, why not use something more publicly available? Can you write out your basic script in pseudocode (or just math/words?)? Especially the model and MCMC specification bits?

Yep, and alongside it, of course, the raw data!

Yay for Bayesian regression (binomial, I'm guessing? You re-binned your attitude and donations responses? I think an ordered logit would be more appropriate here and result in less of a loss in resolution, or even a dirichlet, but then you'd lose yer ordering)! Those posteriors look decently tight, though I do have some questions!

I'm a little confused on what your control was, exactly. You have both points and distributions in your posterior plots, but you don't have any control paragraph blurb in you google doc questionnaire. How did you evaluate your con... (read more)