Deep question--and as a social scientist, I am not sure what candidate I would suggest. Is the social world too dependent on context or are there hard facts? e.g., take @rensec.bsky.social suggestion: would education produce the same outcome if a person lived in the Stone Age?

Topic @adeldaoud.bsky.social and I were discussing today at lunch at #ic2s2 and want to ask here:

What are the “known facts” in the social sciences? Which relationships between at least two social variables have been empirically found to have large effects and replicated by multiple groups?

Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: "One Map, Many Trials" in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting household-level wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-...

Debiasing ML predictions for causal inference—no new labels needed. We propose Tweedie’s correction to fix shrinkage enabling “one map, many trials.”
arxiv.org/abs/2508.01341
#CausalInference #MachineLearning #EarthObservation #PovertyMapping

Earth Observation Meets Adam Smith: Earth Observation AI in Policy Innovation for Global Development by Connor Jerzak

open.substack.com/pub/aiglobal...