In all honesty, I will be rather surprised if it really winds up being a truly random selection of the Oakland population. The political incentives for the city to find a way to put a thumb on the scales will be very strong.

> Participants will be randomly selected from the population of Oakland

So you are implementing a lottery.

Why not examine existing lottery winner stats? It's essentially identical to what you are doing.

I still fail to see what anyone gains by this "experiment", except for some good PR for YC.

Not to mention, you opted to use a brand new PhD, instead of (or under the supervision of) someone more established and experienced. For this work to be taken credibly, it must have weight behind the research.

If this thing was really just about gathering data, you would have just done it... not wrote-up a blog post about it, posted it to HN, and then spent hours defending it.