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11 Feb, 11 tweets, 7 min read
We're hiring for the engineering team at @OurWorldInData!

A rare chance to build data visualization and pipelines at a well-known and highly influential organization that is focused on how to make progress against the world's biggest problems.

ourworldindata.org/jobs
For those few who haven't heard of @OurWorldInData, it's probably the top site in the world that presents research and data on topics such as global health, poverty, energy usage, agriculture and nutrition, population growth, education, etc.
The data is presented in interactive visualizations and all of it is downloadable in CSV.

As a premiere example, check out our coronavirus data explorer: ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-da…
I cite Our World in Data all the time at @rootsofprogress, and I'm far from the only one. Our work is referenced in academic papers, newspapers (@FT, @nytimes), books (@sapinker, @HansRosling, @amcafee), podcasts (@planetmoney, @Freakonomics), and videos (@Kurz_Gesagt).
We also reach the general public: our site gets over 5 million visitors a month, and ranks highly for searches such as “population growth” or “global poverty”.
In the last year, we've also become one of the world's top sources for data about COVID-19. Our vaccine tracker is one of the most cited: ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinat…
I've been consulting part-time with the team for over a year, and they're a pleasure to work with. OWID is a non-profit that originated in academia, but internally it feels like a tech startup. We use modern tools like @SlackHQ & @NotionHQ, and work with a minimum of bureaucracy.
On the dev side, we have a modern tech stack using @typescript, @nodejs, and @reactjs; code on @github; hosted on @Netlify.

The team is remote/distributed. Work from wherever you want.
We're hiring software engineers, and also a technical team lead. See all our job postings here: ourworldindata.org/jobs
The team lead could be a technical engineering manager who is less interested in day-to-day coding, or an engineering leader who is willing to coach and mentor but would prefer to avoid formal management responsibilities. We're flexible about the role definition.
Still on the fence about whether to apply? I'll let @paulg have the final word:

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More from @jasoncrawford

Jason Crawford Profile picture
14 Feb
Curious about @slatestarcodex, but don't know where to start?

A little while ago a friend asked me to make a list of my favorite posts. So here's a beginner's guide: jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott…
What is @slatestarcodex about?

Like many great blogs, not any one thing: it’s the eclectic interests of a unique individual with a broad intellectual appetite.

He says he tends to focus on “reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics.”
What makes it so good? I tried to explain it here:
Read 19 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
22 Jan
After reading the post this afternoon, I read most of it out loud to my wife just now.

It was hard, because I was alternately laughing and crying.
Why does this move me so much? It's hard to explain.

As Scott says, it's just a blog, and at the same time, it's so, so much more.
Partly of course, I'm just happy he's back. I've positively missed his writing, which I've never felt about a blog. The insight, the humor, the incisive clarity, the relentless questioning, the exhaustive data analysis.
Read 18 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Only three chapters into @CharlesCMann's *The Wizard and the Prophet* and why didn't anyone insist that I read this book before? Super-relevant to progress studies.

Just finished the Borlaug chapter, which is jaw-dropping, even though I already knew the Borlaug story in outline.
The sheer amount of hardship Borlaug endured, the setbacks, the lack of support from almost everyone around him, the tedium of crossing thousands of varieties and planting them by hand… all to save the world's hungry. Someone needs to make a movie out of this.
Seriously, there are so many great scenes. Usually science is hard to make dramatic on the big screen, but this would be fairly easy.

Like this scene where he has no equipment and no one will lend him any, so he literally pulls the plow through the field himself, like a mule:
Read 7 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
27 Dec 20
This image gets posted a lot lately, and not everyone knows what it means.

It's a reference to “survivor bias”: a statistical problem in which a sample is non-representative because some elements have been eliminated before the sample was taken. Here's a brief explainer.
The story: You're Britain. It's WW2. Your planes are getting shot down. You want to reinforce them with armor. But you can't armor the whole plane (for weight among other reasons).

What parts of the plane do you prioritize for armor?
Your researchers collect data on where your planes are getting shot. Whenever a plane returns from a mission, they note where they found bullet holes. This diagram shows all the holes that were found across many missions.

Given this data, where do you put the armor?
Read 14 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
17 Dec 20
If you want a single, vivid, and frankly disgusting example to hold in mind to remember how much our lives have improved over the last ~150 years…

Consider *shit*.

Literally, excrement. How much previous generations had to think about it, be around it, even handle it:
Before the automobile, horses flooded the streets, and cities were mired in their muck. According to Richard Rhodes, in NYC, horses dropped 4 million pounds of manure and 100 thousand gallons of urine on the streets every *day*. (!)
And Robert Gordon quotes this passage from *The Horse in the City*. “On New York’s Liberty Street there was a manure heap seven feet high.”

Shoveling shit was literally a full-time job. And one of the key uses of horses was to pull the wagons that carried away horse droppings.
Read 21 tweets
Jason Crawford Profile picture
17 Dec 20
Good news.

A similar thing happened during the smallpox eradication program: a new applicator device, the “bifurcated needle”, used 1/4 the vaccine, and thus 4x'ed the supplies.
More in my thread from last year:
Close-up of a bifurcated needle, holding a drop of smallpox vaccine.

D. A. Henderson, who led the eradication program, made an award for his team called the “Order of the Bifurcated Needle.” His daughter made a patch showing the points of the needle bent into a zero.
Read 4 tweets

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