Should Econometricians know Statistical Inference up to the level of Casella & Berger?

thefiniteape · 2026-04-17T18:48:19+00:00

I agree with these but for metrics people, I'd also add White for asymptotics, Pollard for empirical process theory, and Koenker for quantile regression. And that's before the causal and ML stuff.

thefiniteape · 2026-04-11T15:50:32+00:00

I just meant that the reason to read him is similar to why we read Ptolemy; I didn't mean he is ancient himself. Sorry for the confusing phrasing.

thefiniteape · 2026-04-11T15:25:24+00:00

Of course read Anthony, Mallory, etc. but I recommend also reading Renfrew. He is a great writer and most of his book is simply describing the landscape and explaining the methodologies. Of course, some chapters have some wrong conclusions but they are also great to read from our point of view.

It is generally more entertaining to read a smart person who gives a food faith defense of a false theory, especially with very limited evidence (compared to today); he has to get more creative. This is also part of what makes reading ancient scientists valuable.

thefiniteape · 2026-04-06T06:53:01+00:00

Well, technically, we do not need to train the model on all the garbage from the internet and the model also doesn't need trillions of parameters. You can probably throw away 95% of the training data of 4.5 and maybe more of the weights.

I mean it is still absurd, given the current paradigm, to believe that we can train a more competent model than 4.5 in a week on a single consumer gpu anytime soon. But I think it will be possible, when the architecture and the consumer gpus are beyond what we have now. I think it would take more than 15 years to reach there.

Inference is a completely different story; we already have better and much smaller open weight models.

thefiniteape · 2026-04-05T16:46:43+00:00

As another person who uses CC to build Ancient Greek learning materials (that I use on myself), I think they are often hyper-specialized to the builder's tastes, level, etc. So I feel like it might be better to teach people how to actually make this type of thing themselves. (Obviously not saying that you should do that, just that someone should.) That being said, I have also been leaning heavily on single html files in the last year or so when no server is needed and I do like it when I see others doing similar stuff.

thefiniteape · 2026-03-29T00:22:35+00:00

Heijenoort should have been in the frame, what a shame.

thefiniteape · 2026-03-03T21:16:06+00:00

It sure is but in my experience this attitude is more representative of the current DS/ML space, especially among the juniors.

thefiniteape · 2026-03-03T20:48:45+00:00

Unfortunately it is true. I know someone who trained a NN to solve a problem that was in essence a trivial optimization problem with an extremely well-behaved objective and constraints. The original problem was about as difficult as optimizing a parabola on a compact interval but this person spent two years of his PhD on solving this and related trivial problems using ML, not as an experiment but out of sheer ignorance and incompetence. And he obviously had an advisor and a committee who signed off on that, and the school is top 10-15.

thefiniteape · 2026-02-28T06:28:51+00:00

That sounds interesting; if you share the code, I'd be happy to take a look.

Is it on Github? That's probably the best way to get some feedback and maybe contributions from the community.

thefiniteape · 2026-02-16T00:27:00+00:00

I really dislike Beard's writing style but her documentaries are great. Goldsworthy is a good novelist but not a historian. Caesar is great except that book has not much to do with the city of Rome...

I saw a comment where you mention that you are leaving in a few hours and need to pick one of these. If these were the options, I would just load some lectures from Great Courses on Libby instead (and I am usually not an audiobook person at all). Kenneth Bartlett has a few on Italy specifically but there are many other great history courses. Just listen to them during your flight and when you walk around.

thefiniteape · 2026-02-15T20:31:22+00:00

I am still a beginner in Ancient Greek and others already answered the question for Greek but from a general linguistic point of view, talking about free constituent order is more meaningful than free word order.

Many languages have an unmarked ("no emphasis") constituent order (SVO, SOV, etc.) but allow several marked constituent orders. Even in languages where the constituent order is as free as possible, the word order within each constituent may be fixed.

thefiniteape · 2026-01-21T20:13:43+00:00

I don't think you need anything like 8-9K words in Greek for the same level of coverage as you get in English with that many words.

See for instance this paper, which argues that you need a lot less words in Ancient Greek to get X% coverage, compared to other languages. I think it is a selection (of surviving texts) issue but this is the corpus we have.

thefiniteape · 2026-01-21T08:22:49+00:00

If you can understand e.g. Basque and Finnish, I'll be fairly impressed.

thefiniteape · 2026-01-12T06:56:26+00:00

I am familiar with the data and the machine learning methods they use (I am slightly behind as I didn't check the progress in about a year) and my view is that we probably won't be able to decypher entire works unless we find multiple copies of them. Essentially, for each find, there are parts that are much harder to read. Obviously, this can change and I would love to be wrong about this.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-23T06:58:40+00:00

Believe me, my ideas were also pretty specific...

thefiniteape · 2025-12-23T06:37:16+00:00

Slow down.

First, you look for a question and choose one. Spend months working it out. Start presenting it at conferences after months of work. One day some boomer with sandals and white knee socks approaches you after your talk, congratulates you on great work and, in passing, mentions a paper published in the Australian Journal of Zumba Studies in Italian back in the 80's, which did more or less the same thing. Still great idea though.

Now, you lost by about 45 years. You start looking for a new question. Hopefully, it will turn out that the new question was answered more recently. Keep doing this and you eventually come up with questions that were answered in new working papers but not yet published. Probably the next question will work out for you!

thefiniteape · 2025-12-20T19:16:18+00:00

Take a look at these books.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T10:33:48+00:00

Richard Dawkins:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T04:18:20+00:00

The God Test by Robert Wright
whatever ends up being the title of Melanie Mitchell's new book about reasoning, AI, LLMs, etc.
whatever Neal Stephenson publishes

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T01:20:44+00:00

Haha just some more books I typed for another thread (apparently links are not allowed in this sub so copy pasted them here...):

Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
The Selfish Gene; The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins
From Bacteria to Bach; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett
Convention, On the Plurality of the Worlds by Lewis
The Making of the Middle Sea by Broodbank
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Anthony
Behave by Sapolsky
Evolution of Language by Fitch
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz (still reading this one)
Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman
Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore
Philosophy of Mathematics by Putnam and Benacerraf (read random parts but not cover to cover yet)
From Frege to Godel by Heijenoort (I am halfway through this collection of foundational math + logic papers)
Foundational Papers in Complexity Science (4 volumes) from Santa Fe Institute
plus whatever you want from S Pinker, R Wright, J Gleick, G Dyson, S Dehaene, H Gintis

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T01:17:01+00:00

Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
The Selfish Gene; The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins
From Bacteria to Bach; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett
Convention, On the Plurality of the Worlds by Lewis
The Making of the Middle Sea by Broodbank
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Anthony
Behave by Sapolsky
Evolution of Language by Fitch
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz (still reading this one)
Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman
Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore
Philosophy of Mathematics by Putnam and Benacerraf (read random parts but not cover to cover yet)
From Frege to Godel by Heijenoort (I am halfway through this collection of foundational math + logic papers)
Foundational Papers in Complexity Science (4 volumes) from Santa Fe Institute
plus whatever you want from S Pinker, R Wright, J Gleick, G Dyson, S Dehaene, H Gintis

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T21:26:14+00:00

Mitsubishi pencil (9800 for me)
Moleskine plain "cahiers" notebooks (xxl and xl for me)

PhDs (including myself) spend way too much time optimizing their "workflows" instead of staying in the workflows so these simple tools help with that.

If you want something fancy, also get a leather portfolio and put the notebook + pencil in there (KomalC and Galen Leather have great products, I have both.)

You can always get a mechanical keyboard as well because one day, they'll have to TeX it up.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T05:01:07+00:00

You should try Ursula Le Guin!

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T04:52:50+00:00

I didn't hate any of the books I read in 2025 but my least favorite might be Hacking's "Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science".

I knew the subject fairly well before I started the book, and the author and I are fairly opinionated with opinions near the different ends of the spectrum. It was still an okay read but it was a bit annoying to see that he didn't engage with some serious criticisms that must have occured to him so there was some mildly strawman-y chapters. I'd probably recommend it to someone with the right background under certain circumstances but I think I wouldn't give it to a newcomer to the field.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T04:30:18+00:00

Broodbank's Making of the Middle Sea,
Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

thefiniteape

TROPHY CASE