David Roodman
@davidroodman
Senior advisor @open_phil. Formerly @GiveWell, @CGDev.
🚨 @I4Replication released my experiment with a new academic-literary form, a “replication opinion.” I made myself judge in a debate and wrote an opinion that is more credible than either party could muster. Piece: econstor.eu/handle/10419/3… Post: davidroodman.com/blog/2025/05/0… 🧵 follows
I'm flattered. But I know Stuart, as a wise person on metascience, means this as a concrete strategy for making the world better. I agree! I'm thinking now about what I can do to promote more in-depth vetting of important studies. Peer review alone falls way short.
The world needs more people like David Roodman who care about truth: replicationnetwork.com/2025/05/31/roo…
GUEST BLOG at TRN ("Appeal to Me – First Trial of a “Replication Opinion”) Comments. Replications. And now "Replication Opinions". A blog from David Roodman. Check it out! @davidroodman replicationnetwork.com/2025/05/31/roo…
Good illustration of how much the Texas grid has changed in just 6 years. yellow = solar; purple = batteries; dark green = wind; blue = gas; brown = coal; light green = nuke via @grid_status
Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations. retractionwatch.com/2025/06/30/spr…
"How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion." medium.com/the-quantastic…
My critical replication of a study of childhood vaccination and adult wages in India is final & effectively published Thread: x.com/davidroodman/s… Free pub: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73…
My new, short write-up about a flaw in a recent study finding that India’s universal vaccination program boosted future wages of babies who got the shots: arxiv.org/abs/2401.11100 1/
Whistleblower Raphaël Lévy on the systemic discouragement for calling out scientific fraud: "if a student or a more junior researcher had faced such a backlash it is unlikely that they would have been able to stand up to it." chemistryworld.com/news/how-i-ble…
👀Using an autonomous agent based on o3-mini and GPT-4.1, a team from Harvard, MIT & other institutions reproduced and updated an entire issue of Cochrane Reviews in two days… saving 12 person-years of work! The AI reviews captured more papers & were more accurate than humans.
"Many global health problems are thorny and difficult. Lead, unusually, is not one of those. We already know how to reduce lead exposure. Rich countries have already done it." Great new @WorksInProgMag piece by @C_Don7 @notanastronomer and James Hu
New podcast alert! Hard Drugs - a collaboration between @JacobTref at Open Phil and @salonium at @WorksInProgMag. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts: open.spotify.com/show/7CgKi9lO8…
LAUNCH DAY 🚀 Today I’m launching a new podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen (@JacobTref) Our first episode is about lenacapavir — a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and which could completely change the fight against HIV worldwide.…
A million lives at risk? @charlesjkenny and I estimate the possible toll from the aid cuts in the White House's FY26 budget request. There's huge uncertainty here, of diverse kinds, so we explore 3 broad ways we could be wrong and by how much. cgdev.org/blog/million-l…
Fantastic work. When I was at GiveWell, we had an "I was wrong" T-shirt you could wear when found to be wrong. It made it fun to admit error and was both a signal of and contributor to a culture of truth-seeking.
Each year, GiveWell makes hundreds of millions of dollars in grants aimed at saving and improving lives globally. My team's job is to look for ways we could be wrong and make our research better. Here's what we've been up to and what's next 🧵
We wanted to verify the evidence behind >$1 billion in grants we've made to our top charities — so we asked @I4Replication to see if they could get the data to replicate the underlying RCTs. It didn't go great... 🧵
10/ Please help share our extended replication to stop the spread of this erroneous policy evaluation! Read the new report here: econstor.eu/handle/10419/3…
Welcome @JustinSandefur! I take Granger-causal credit for this excellent hire. Justin came to @CGDev years after me, and now to @open_phil years after me. A few days ago he was even sitting at my desk.
Extremely excited to have @JustinSandefur officially joining @open_phil to lead our work on economic growth in LMICs! Lots of opportunities and challenges ahead and I think Justin will do a great job leading this work.