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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science
35.4K posts
B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science
@BBranisa
PhD Economist • Data Scientist • Director @ePC_UCB • Open data & AI for development (Bolivia & LatAm) • #rstats | Data → Evidence → Policy impact • Speaker
Bolivia Katılım Şubat 2015
4.4K Takip Edilen1.2K Takipçiler
B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
4266 pages of lecture notes by Dexter Chua for math related courses.
All pdf files are available at dec41.user.srcf.net/notes/
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Check out BioStat Quest — R Lab!
A full interactive R environment via WebR. 15 curated biostatistics lessons — descriptives, tests, regression, survival. Inline plots, comprehension quizzes, and key takeaways.
biostatquest.com
#rstats #biostatistics
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Esta quizá sea la gran obra de ontología del s. XX.
Una de las obras fundamentales de Zubiri donde nos propone un camino para descubrir qué es lo que hace que una cosa sea real, rompiendo con siglos de tradición filosófica.
Vamos a explicar brevemente sus ideas principales.🧵1/12
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
I helped write the manifesto. I also read the dissertation.
That's the part nobody mentions. Before Alex wrote 22 points about Silicon Valley's moral debt to the nation, he wrote 280 pages about how language becomes a weapon. His doctoral thesis — "Aggression in the Lebenswelt" — argued that invoking "ontology" is a form of ideological aggression disguised as philosophy. He said it at the Frankfurt School. Under Habermas. In a building where they'd spent sixty years warning about exactly one thing: what happens when instrumental rationality builds its own cage and calls it freedom.
He understood.
Then he named the product.
Palantir's core product is called the Ontology. He named it himself. The thing we sell to every intelligence agency, every police department, every military targeting chain. The Ontology. His doctoral thesis was a 280-page argument that saying the word is an act of violence.
That's not a contradiction. That's the manifesto. The real one. Everything else is typography.
The published manifesto has 22 points. I helped write them. Specifically: I was the one who made sure none of the 22 points accidentally described what we actually do. It's harder than it sounds. You have to read every sentence twice. Once for what it says. Once for what Alex's old professors would recognize.
"Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country."
That's Point 1. The moral debt is $2.87 billion annually. We invoiced it. Fifty-five percent from government contracts. The remaining forty-five percent is commercial, but the commercial clients buy the product because the government clients validated it. The debt is circular. The Frankfurt School had a term for this. Alex knows the term. He cited it on page 114.
"We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps."
Point 2. Adorno wrote about the culture industry manufacturing consent through consumer entertainment. Alex read it. Underlined it. Then he ran the numbers. Defense contracts have a 94% renewal rate. DoorDash has a 34% driver retention rate. We chose the rebellion that compounds. Adorno would have called this instrumental rationality. We call it our business model.
"Free email is not enough."
Point 3. What IS enough is a $145 million sole-source ICE contract. The system is called ELITE. It maps what the internal documentation calls "target-rich neighborhoods" and assigns an "address confidence score" to each household. Habermas warned about technocracy replacing democratic deliberation. We replaced it with a gradient. Dark blue to light blue. The gradient doesn't mean anything. People trust gradients.
"Hard power will be built on software."
Point 4. We are the software. Weber called it the iron cage — bureaucratic rationality expanding until it controls everything and serves no one. Alex wrote about Weber's iron cage on page 87 of his dissertation. Then we built the cage. Then we wrote the code that runs inside it. Then we wrote the book explaining why the cage is necessary. We printed the book on cream stock, 70-pound weight. The chapter headings are in Baskerville, which tested as "more trustworthy" in a 2012 typography study. We take trust seriously. Weber would have called this legitimation. We call it branding.
"The question is not whether AI weapons will be built."
Point 5. The question is who invoices for them. We answered that question in 2003. With CIA seed money. From In-Q-Tel. Which we also don't mention in the manifesto. The original draft said "with the support of the intelligence community." We changed it to "with the support of those who understood the stakes." Same meaning. Better font weight. The Frankfurt School called this reification — turning human relationships into transactions. We call it a sole-source contract.
There were 22 points. There could have been 23. Point 23 would have been: "The CEO who wrote this manifesto made $6.8 billion in the same year. His stock rose 200% after the last election. He told CNBC that bad times are incredibly good for us. Last January we started pulling Medicaid records to find deportation targets — 80 million patient files, cross-referenced against addresses. The system recommended which families to visit first."
We cut Point 23 for length.
His co-founder wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." That's Peter. Peter isn't in the manifesto. We had a style guide. The style guide was 14 pages long. Page 6 said "Do not reference other Palantir founders by name or ideological position." We called this the Thiel Provision. Someone in Legal laughed when we named it. She's gone now.
One of the thirteen who left. They published an open letter. Called it "The Scouring of the Shire." Said we were "normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs." Beautiful prose. Almost as good as ours. They signed their names, which was brave, given the NDAs.
They left. Our stock went up. It always goes up. That's not a political position. That's a market signal. We don't take political positions. We take contracts.
We named the company after Tolkien's surveillance stones. The palantiri. The seeing stones that Sauron corrupted. The ones Tolkien wrote as a warning about total knowledge. We read the warning. Nick read it twice. Then we filed a patent.
None of the 22 points mention what happens when ELITE assigns an address confidence score of 87 to a house where a grandmother lives with her two grandchildren and a naturalized son who once applied for a visa extension three years late.
But the binding is beautiful. The prose is elegant. The chapter headings are in Baskerville, which tests as trustworthy.
Alex read Adorno on the iron cage. Then he built the cage. Then he wrote the book about the cage being necessary. Then the book hit number one. Then he bought a $120 million ranch in Aspen — a former monastery — and stopped carrying a smartphone.
The CEO of a surveillance company doesn't carry a phone.
You understand. Privacy is a feature. It's just not in our product line.
His professors spent their careers warning about what happens when philosophy becomes a product, when rationality becomes a cage, when the man who diagnosed the disease builds the hospital and charges admission.
He understood all of it. That's what makes it work.
And not a single point accidentally describes what we do. That was my job.
That's moral architecture. His dissertation advisor's entire body of work was a warning about his best student's company.
Palantir@PalantirTech
Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
During the Crimean War, she uncovered something horrifying: around 16,000 British soldiers were dying from preventable diseases, while only about 4,000 died from actual battle wounds.
The military ignored her reports. So she created something they could not ignore—the polar area diagram.
Think of it like a pie chart, but far more powerful. Her colorful wedge-shaped charts revealed that soldiers were far more likely to die from filthy hospital conditions than from enemy bullets. She called them “coxcomb charts,” and they hit harder than any cannon.
When government officials saw those stark, glowing sections of preventable death, the truth became impossible to deny.
Her visual evidence was so compelling that it transformed military medicine across Europe. Hospital design, sanitation, and care practices were changed forever.
Nightingale had, in effect, weaponized mathematics.
She proved that sometimes, the pen—and the chart—really are mightier than the sword. One graph sparked a revolution.
Math Cafe@Riazi_Cafe_en
Florence Nightingale is globally famous as a nurse, but she was primarily a brilliant mathematician and statistician. She invented the Polar Area Diagram which is also known as the "Nightingale Rose Diagram"
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Book #18 2026
Greenspan and .@adwooldridge offer a compelling read in this sweeping popular history of American capitalism at the intersection of economic and business history, politics, technology, and society.
If it’s three cheers for capitalism and free enterprise, they make a persuasive case for building a broad American prosperity through entrepreneurship, innovation, and limited government, but grapple with problems honestly.
I enjoyed it and would definitely recommend as a survey for the general reader.
5/5⭐️
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Dario is wrong.
He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market.
Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic.
Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this, like @Ph_Aghion , @erikbryn , @DAcemogluMIT , @amcafee , @davidautor
TFTC@TFTC21
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”
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«Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution
Data from more than 15,000 ancient people reveal natural selection of hundreds of genes linked to immunity, skin tone, behaviour and other traits.» 🤔
nature@Nature
The biggest ever study of ancient human DNA shows that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years go.nature.com/4eq6ftJ
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Imputation matters.
Joachim Schork@JoachimSchork
When it comes to missing data imputation, predictive mean matching is often considered the go-to method. However, I recently came across an imputation approach I hadn’t seen before: NNS imputation from the NNS R package. After some testing, it seems to deliver results just as strong as predictive mean matching. How NNS imputation works: 🔹 Applies nonparametric nonlinear smoothing to identify structure in the data 🔹 Matches values based on observed patterns without relying on strict distributional assumptions 🔹 Flexible and well-suited for nonlinear and heteroscedastic settings The image below compares stochastic regression imputation, predictive mean matching, and NNS imputation on heteroscedastic data. Regression imputation clearly fails to capture the true data structure, while predictive mean matching and NNS imputation both preserve the shape well. I’d be interested in your thoughts. Have you already tried NNS imputation in practice? Do you think it could be a real competitor to predictive mean matching? Thanks to Fred Viole for creating this great package, for the insightful exchange about it, and for providing the R code for the NNS imputation shown in the image below! Check out the NNS R package here: cran.r-project.org/web/packages/N… Looking for guidance on best practices for missing data? Check out my online course Missing Data Imputation in R. More details are available at this link: statisticsglobe.com/online-course-… #datastructure #Rpackage #RStats #statisticians
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👩🏽💻🤖🧑💻🤖👨🏻💻🤖🧐
Brian Halligan@bhalligan
Should computer science and basic coding still be taught in schools at all? Should writing? In my interview with the President of @MIT, Sally Kornbluth, she asked "I am not sure how much you need to have in your head to think creatively versus how much you have to offload" One of the biggest concerns I hear from CEOs & engineering leaders: Junior devs who’ve never studied or wrestled with great code are skipping straight to letting AI write it for them. If this continues, in 10 years we’ll have very few engineers left who actually know how to think through it.
ART
🤔
Arnaud Bertrand@RnaudBertrand
If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated. What are they saying, essentially? They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure). Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software." It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there? Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument. But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates. In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly. So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others. The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them! Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order. I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish. Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets. But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest. So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project. They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours." Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action." For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: x.com/RnaudBertrand/…): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not. And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart. This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see. A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda. The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.
ART
B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
El uso simbólico del color como medio para registrar y transmitir información en el Antiguo #Perú puede encontrarse ya en la época de #Paracas Tardío, alrededor del año 200 a.C. Los habitantes de esta civilización elaboraban bastones envueltos en cuerdas de colores que representaban en su arte. En el envoltorio de estos bastones incorporaban principios de simetría y oposición binaria, como torsión en Z y S, una o dos hebras, coloración teñida y natural, y fibras vegetales y animales.
Es probable que estos objetos representaran un hito en el desarrollo de los #quipus, ya que los de tipo entorchado de #Wari y algunos quipus virreinales emplearon convenciones similares, y los cronistas describen la estrecha relación entre los bastones envueltos y los quipus incas. Algunos tejedores indígenas utilizan hoy en día bastones envueltos para modelar y recordar patrones de rayas, conocidos como musa waraña (un término aimara que significa "modelo para combinaciones de colores"), que a menudo representan de forma emblemática a las comunidades.
El principal descubrimiento de este tipo de bastones con cuerdas envueltas se produjo en 2003 en el sitio de #Cerrillos, cerca de #Ica. Cerrillos fue un sitio cívico-ceremonial Paracas habitado aproximadamente entre el 850 y el 200 a.C., y los objetos en cuestión pertenecen al período tardío de esta civilización, entre el 350 y el 200 a.C. Fueron hallados en la tumba de un individuo adulto, cuyo sexo no se ha podido determinar.
Se les denominó “bastones”, porque son aproximadamente del mismo tamaño y forma que una porra policial, y parecen haber sido destinados a ser sostenidos. Estaban envueltos con coloridos hilos de pelo de camélido y, unidos a ellos, se encuentran cordones igualmente coloridos con patrones. Las bandas de estos objetos envueltos contienen atributos de color, dirección de torsión y número, donde la cantidad numérica se determina contando el número de veces que un hilo se enrolla alrededor de un bastón o cordón. Cada atributo forma un patrón único con simetría especular.
El uso del color, la dirección inclinada o espiral y el conteo para crear patrones repetitivos y simétricos también se encuentra en textiles bordados de estilo Paracas Necrópolis (#Topará) y túnicas de tapicería Wari del Horizonte Medio, lo que sugiere que los patrones de envoltura encontrados en los objetos de Cerrillos podrían ser una manifestación temprana de un sistema #andino único, basado en fibras, que se utilizaba para registrar, procesar y difundir información.
📸 Conjunto de bastones encontrados en Cerrillos. Museo Regional de Ica.
📸 Ejemplo del método utilizado para unir una cuerda principal al bastón.
📸 Detalle de un manto Paracas Necrópolis decorado con una figura antropomorfa en damero, la cual porta una cabeza trofeo en una mano y un bastón envuelto de colores en la otra.
*Referencia: “Practice and meaning in spiral-wrapped batons and cords from Cerrillos, a Late Paracas site in the Ica Valley” por Jeffrey Splitstoser. En: Textiles, Technical Practice and Power in the Andes (2014).
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B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science retweetledi
Key to note that AI scientists are not experts on labor. Some other economists active on X doing work on AI & labor: @alexolegimas, @danielrock, @joshgans & @robseamans (among many others)
But worth noting that economists don’t have a consensus either: aleximas.substack.com/p/how-will-ai-…
Yann LeCun@ylecun
Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market. Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic. Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this, like @Ph_Aghion , @erikbryn , @DAcemogluMIT , @amcafee , @davidautor
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