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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I also didn't see any useful connection as to how the information that the Real Estate Acquisition Specialists (REAS) have would actually generate more understanding of food access between different communities. Yes, the REAS for Stamford, CT is going to know a lot about access in Stamford, but almost nothing about access in Detroit, MI. Since the goal is to compare access across the country, using as-the-crow-flies data is preferred because it's universal and obtainable by a small research lab. The alternative is what, to interview a REAS from each of the 100 largest cities in the US, somehow convert their personal anecdotal knowledge into quantified data, and then use that to better understand access?

Expertise on a subject in one specific area doesn't necessarily translate to expertise in the general concept.

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The REAS is local to the community. They work for the real estate developer, not for the HQ at the bank, which decided “We need 10 new branches in Chicago but eff if we know where they go; bring me proposals for corners you think you could get under contract.”

The reason they’re better at this than a professor is a bit controversial but I will own up to saying it: banks actually care about people using their branches and need to design systems which will correctly site those branches. Professors need to design systems which get their papers cited. Making accurate observations about reality is not necessarily required.

Right, okay. I still think this is a bit of straw man. Professors don't generally claim to be an experts in local community access, so criticizing them for not being good at it doesn't help. Their focus is necessarily on publishing, and in making claims about access broadly that can be tested, or that can advance the field and be responded to, or cited.

"A grocery store on the corner of 24th and Main would help food access a lot and be quite successful" is not really a great research paper; but it is very useful to a business development person. "Food access is a significant problem in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas" is a fairly good research paper, but not something that you could ask the REAS in Community X to do for any area beyond Community X.

In the end, I think my question would be this. Let's take as true that Professors aren't all that accurate in their assessments of some issue, and that in their communities, REASs are more likely to be accurate in similar assessments. What then? How can we easily take that accurate, anecdotal REAS data, and turn it into broad comparative data that lets us better understand the problem nationwide?

The bank of course has much greater incentive to get their siting estimate right—but it’s hard for me to see how the bank-local REAS feedback loop would work in practice. There’s no ability to test a counterfactual, and local branch performance only becomes apparent years after the siting decision, and with many confounders.

In contrast if the professor’s paper a) actually gets noticed and b) the study conclusions are actually sensitive to the details of the distance estimation methodology, there’s a possibility (not guarantee) of someone writing a rebuttal in six months, which is embarrassing. B is important—spherical cows are frequently good enough!

Fundamentally, we shouldn’t be surprised that the methods appropriate for “decide where to spend $20M on a building” and “spend <$100k of researcher time to perform population-level analysis” should differ.

Even if you're right — I don't think you are, but even if you are — you're derailing your own point to indulge in petty sniping targeted at another profession. The aside makes the piece weaker because it detracts from the focus and makes you sound like a jerk. If I were your editor, I'd have struck out the entire aside about social scientists and compressed it to "as is often the case, the naïve method has problems, so what banks do instead is…"

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