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1: I‘m looking for an EEG expert, a TCMS expert, and a very-finicky-high-level statistics expert to (on a volunteer basis) review certain ACX Grants proposals. This would require anywhere between 10 - 60 minutes of work (depending on how thoroughly you wanted to review it) looking over one or two grant proposals in your area and telling me how likely they are to work. If this is you, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com. Please don’t apply if you’re involved in any of the grant proposals under review. Update: I’ve already gotten enough volunteers for this, thank you!
2: In my recent post In The Long Run, We’re All Dad, I said the best evidence suggests names have a causal, and not just correlational, effect on life outcomes. An alert reader sent me a Fryer and Levitt paper that claims the opposite. They found that distinctively black names (eg “DeShawn”) may decrease someone’s chance of getting a job interview in controlled resume experiments, but that this doesn’t seem to affect very-long-run life outcomes. The authors argue this makes sense: suppose someone named DeShawn didn’t get a certain job interview because a racist interviewer was able to infer based on his name that he was black. If his name was John and he did get the job interview, the racist interviewer would directly observe that he was black and still not hire him. These are the best-studied type of distinctive name, and plausibly the evidence for other types stands or falls along with them.
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