I’m a bit behind the outrage news cycle here, but In November last year, a student at the University of Cambridge by the name of Amelia (Ally) Louks unintentionally created quite the stink over her PhD thesis entitled “The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose”. It all started with a seemingly innocuous twitter post celebrating successful completion of her degree, and quickly spiralled into a furore that “broke the internet”.
In this post, I’m going to give an overview of some major theoretical issues in modern economics.
In a typical undergraduate economics degree, you spend a lot of time drawing pictures like this:
I’ve been very reticent to comment on the current AI hype train, mostly because it’s very easy to be wrong in a bull market. But you will be relieved to know I am now ready to put my hat in the ring.
First I would like to say that, like everyone else, I’m deeply impressed by recent advances in AI, particularly large language models (LLMs). They can give you flawless explanations of topological quantum field theory in one breath, then seamlesly switch to a nuanced discussion of the history of cartography. Tailor-made answers to your burning questions on heraldry, hermeneutics, object-oriented programming, epistemology, and just about any other domain of expert human knowledge your heart desires. They’re really quite amazing. I would be extraordinarily proud if I had been part of the teams that brought LLMs to the world.
Case control studies are a staple in the epidemiologist’s toolbox. The basic idea idea is that instead of carrying out an analysis on a random sample of a population, you instead sample from the population conditional on occurrence of an outcome of interest. Typically this will involve selecting all individuals who have the outcome (the cases), and only some people who don’t have the outcome (the controls). The motivation for doing this is that when the outcome is rare, most of the precision in estimates is driven by the cases, and adding a large number of controls often has little effect. Case control studies can thus be more efficient in terms of data collection/processing compared to e.g. a cohort study.
Imagine I offer you the chance to play the following game. The pot starts at \( $ 2\). I flip a coin repeatedly. Each time it comes up tails, the pot doubles. The first time a heads appears, the game ends and you leave with the pot. How much would you be willing to pay to play this game?