There are certain people who have a better framework for thinking about things. It’s not that they are inherently “smarter” (although they probably are), but rather that their thoughts are better organized so that they see things more clearly, and can tackle new problems more easily. These are the people, like Gilbert Strang, Matt Levine, Bartoz Milewski, Mathew Johnson, that you want to learn from.
I am certainly not one of these people.
The one similarity I (might!) have is that I really enjoy thinking about how to think about things. And in my case — thinking about Causal Inference. I was fortunate to attend a fantastic graduate program where one was forced to grapple with the fundamentals of causal inference. I benefitted tremendously from professors who made time to engage in conversation as I stumbled through my own thinking.
The following is a collection of my thoughts on how to think about causal inference which is targeted at the level of a motivated undergraduate. Almost all of the examples correspond to papers covered in the tutorial the Economics of Housing and Homelessness.
Defining the Parameter of Interest