Scott Cunningham | Causal Inference (The Mixtape)

Scott Cunningham | Causal Inference (The Mixtape) Scott Cunningham (Baylor University) discusses the ideas of his book "Causal Inference: The Mixtape". Topics include trusting inference in the absence of counterfactuals and the challenges of apply scientific methods to social phenomena. 

Watch it on... YouTube: https://youtu.be/yNaCudDVTkY Podbean: https://dataandsciencepodcast.podbean.com/e/scott-cunningham-causal-inference-the-mixtape/

0:00 - COMING UP... 0:35 - What makes it into the mixed tape? 7:10 - Coding to learn 11:15 - More people are expected to work with data & code 12:50 - Design vs program vs estimators 20:40 - Causation with zero correlation 27:00 - Optimization make everything endogenous 28:45 - The hospital example 29:30 - Credible scientific discovery vs motivated discovery 39:55 - Different meanings of causality 43:30 - The impossible counterfactual  47:00 Counterfactual nihilism 49:20 Social experiments / Defund the police 53:35 - Skepticism about the science of social phenomena 1:05:20 - The Italian crime example 1:16:30 - Scientific debate