Thread by @besttrousers

Lots of discussion about the role of objectivity in research, jumping off of @Lauren_Farre11's blog post.

https://twitter.com/Lauren_Farre11/status/1439969147631276034

I think these conversations can often benefit from specific examples.

Here's one: an @ideas42 blog post from my former colleague Nuha Saho about how his experience as a NYCHA resident gave him a lot of knowledge that aided the design of our RCT: ideas42.org/blog/street-sm…

This is just a nice example of the tensions that are often in play here. When we were designing the posters, we initially just did a mail merge with the administrative data to get the name for each house.

But no one actually uses the "official" name for those complexes.

This one is a bit of a personal failure - as the research lead, I could have done a better job of listening to Nuha on this.

Anyways, all this is to say that while a lot of the writing on this tends to take a 30,000 foot view (what *is* objectivity?).

But I think a most of the important stuff is happening at a fairly low level, where there are specific tactical decisions about research and project management.