yourqiwi

Very interested in your app. I have had great success learning languages with flashcards / SRS, and I want a "smart" way to learn sight reading when I start learning piano.

> I can't turn an estimated -5 into positive 500 just because I want to.

I didn't have quite that much precision in mind. More like "flip the coefficient's sign" or "make the coefficient bigger" or "make it statistically significant", which are all often doable with enough experimentation (as much as I hate to admit it).

> I am going to guess you have never written down an economic model, much less presented one at an economics seminar. If your model can be "tuned to forecast whatever", you are going to be annihilated. You will never be able to get away with presenting a model like that. There is no place for it in the field.

A poorly specified model will get ripped apart when presented in an academic context. I've seen it happen in seminars. Questions about the standard errors (robust? clustered?), omitted variable bias, whether things have been detrended, fixed effects, quality of the instrumental variable, etc. When econometrics is done properly and by the book, it can be a useful tool for analyzing observational data.

But these tools get regularly applied outside of academia and the results are presented to people who can't critically evaluate them. Nobody knows that you ran a million other regressions in STATA, and kept the significant one. Or that your result isn't robust when you excluded/included such-and-such variables. When research is motivated in a particular direction (as it often is in politics and consulting), then you can often pull the levers and turn the dials until you get the result you want.

I collect interesting facts and tidbits I find in books, podcasts, and YouTube, and turn them into flashcards. It helps me remember various insights that I would otherwise forget. For example, I made cards for different Russell conjugates[0], definitions of certain words (eg culture, knowledge, optics, reify, ancillary, falsifiable), and quotes from books.

You can program yourself with flashcards[1]. EG I have a card that says "What should you do when someone is explaining something and you don't understand?" (Ask questions until you understand). When my colleague is explaining something and I just don't get it, this flashcard triggers me to ask questions, instead of pretending to understand.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iocMeRcSKf3gAxsTh/self-progr...