PinnedMatching for Causes without ExperimentsSometimes we have an experiment that we can run to figure out if something is working: give one person a pill and give another a placebo, one person gets a blue button and another gets a green one, one town gets a new health clinic and another doesn’t. Plenty of…Causal Inference17 min readCausal Inference17 min read
Aug 29Towards CommunalityWhy should we care about making communality possible? Not Big D Democracy (though that can certainly be supported by communality), not Commune Living or Communism, or really any kind of 'ism’, though all of those can be supported by communality. Just plain old little ‘c’ communities that exist, support, inform…Design Process11 min readDesign Process11 min read
Apr 23Senior Interpretability Enforcement OfficerA little while back I posted a little challenge on LinkedIn: Tell me about an individual, discrete, and actionable policy that would prevent harms by an AI. Please include the following What the policy would prevent with some level of specificity as to the who, how, and why Some actionable concept…Ai Safety9 min readAi Safety9 min read
Jan 18Small Studies, Bayes, and CausationI wrote a few articles last year that explored how we could look at how measuring what a redesign of a service caused. In a hypothetical customer service scenario, the hypothesis that a redesign might cause people to give the service a higher rating or to quit using it less…Quantitative Research17 min readQuantitative Research17 min read
Published inUX Collective·Updated Aug 3, 2022What (else) does your design cause?In the last article that I posted here I dug into what an experimental design to test the ease of use of a service design might look like. If you haven’t read that article, you definitely should read that article before reading this one because I’m going to skip a…Service Design11 min readService Design11 min read
Published inUX Collective·Jun 8, 2022What does your design cause?What does your design cause which is undesirable or unintended or at odds with the design intent? How does one ask and answer these questions? — In these next few posts I’m going to propose some ways of answering these questions that build up in complexity and propose some ways of thinking about causality and modeling effects that are relevant for thinking about ways to capture what’s most important in a design.UX Research17 min readUX Research17 min read
Published inUX Collective·Updated Nov 4, 2021How design needs dataWhy I went to Data Science school to become a better designer. — I am oh so very close to the finish line of the Masters of Information in Data Science at UC Berkeley and in between battling CUDA ‘Out Of Memory’ errors and underperforming neural networks, I’ve been thinking a little bit about what brought me to this point. Throughout the program…Data Science7 min readData Science7 min read
Mar 25, 2020Strange words, now more than everToday, March 24th 2020, when I see a word more than eight or so letters long that begins with a ‘c’ I know immediately what it is without reading the rest of the letters. Until that word is Communism. Or cubanelle, conscientious, cabbalistic, cachinnate, or cutlassfish. …Book Recommendations6 min readBook Recommendations6 min read
Jan 5, 2020Magical ThinkingBefore a work trip I was instructed to take an anti-malarial drug. We were going to Nigeria for work and the previous team that had gone there to do research had all come back malarial. Not a big deal for people who’ve developed a resistance to it but as folks…Mental Health8 min readMental Health8 min read
Jul 26, 2019Daily life gets designedThis little essay is, like so many of the things that I post on Medium, a wooly ramble that doesn’t end with a pat conclusion. Apologies in advance. I love the term “life-hack”. It’s been around long enough now to have entered the lexicon in a meaningful way and it…Design15 min readDesign15 min read
