Atlantic Causal Inference Conference

I spent the last two days at the Atlantic Causal Inference conference which, this year, was held far away from the Atlantic at Michigan's School of Public Health.

The conference was great inter-disciplinary fun, as it included statisticians, biotstatisticians, epidemiologists and even a few economists. I got to meet some famous people from other fields and also learned a lot (though there were a couple of presentations where simultaneous inter-disciplinary translation would have helped).

Two quotes that I liked well enough to write down:

"My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity" - Amos Tversky

"Matching is an attempt to approximate what reweighting is doing directly" - Justin McCrary

In addition to providing the Tversky quote, Sander Greenland's keynote speech taught me the term "nullism", which indicates excessive reverence for the null hypothesis in classical hypothesis testing. I expect that term to come in handy in future.