I’m not a fan of big idea books, in particular when they’re by journalists, who are basically dilettantes. I’ll challenge the very premise on two counts. One, it’s debatable that the US was never all that mobile (see the latest American Economic Review) and two, median household income is way up since 2001: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N.
This feels like a false equivalence. Splitting articles try to make broad generalizations about human behavior, but, as any social scientist knows, human behavior is extremely complicated and multidimensional. A critique of these articles is about falsity, which is binary.
I don’t see what the difference is between this performance and one of the earlier experiments in social psychology by Milgrom and Zimbardo. There’s no way she didn’t get the idea from them. So, to me, this is neither original nor interesting.
In general, I don’t see the point of conceptual art, as it presupposes that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that they can enlighten us all with. For me, this is a problem much better suited to the scientific method. And anyway, if the only point of your art is some abstract theory, why not write it out clearly on a single sheet of paper? I know it won’t win you the Turner prize, but it will save us all a lot of time.
I’m no expert on meta-analyses, but if the total pooled samples is 785 and there are 12 studies. That seems like quite a small average sample size per study. Is this not underpowered? An average of junk is still junk.
Writing is as much about organizing your thoughts and learning how to build an argument as it is about putting words on the page. It is about learning how to think. If students rely on an LLM, they will never get a chance to practice this essential skill, and, in my opinion, will be a lot dumber as a result.
They probably have, but that doesn’t mean they have the necessary data to actually address the confounds. Often there is a trade off between what is most provable and what is most novel. Publishing incentives being what they are, novel invariably wins.
I can’t see how anyone is harmed by this usage. Seems more hyperbolic to me, or rather obsessive compulsive, which I say as someone who has struggled with OCD in the past. The impulse to constantly monitor and revise the minutiae of language for the slightest whiff of offense seems unhealthy to me, but maybe that’s just because of my predispositions.
I don’t see what the problem is. If someone has just taken pills and is close to dying on the other end of the line, do you really think the optimal course of action is to just sit there and listen to them fade away?
A close acquaintance of mine just quit her job as a community college writing instructor because of chatGPT. Everybody is using it and it’s difficult to prove so it’s made her job impossible. I think students in general would lose a lot if we “adapted” writing class into prompt engineering class. Writing is as much about organizing your thoughts and assembling an argument as it is about putting words on a page. No amount of prompt engineering training is going to teach that. The only solution I see is making all assessment in class.
Could somebody do the same for “nonplussed”? We have now given that poor poor word two opposite meanings. Currently, I have no idea what somebody means when they say they’re nonplussed.
Get involved with your local YIMBY group and, most importantly, vote for pro-housing politicians. One of the problems with housing policy is that it is decided at the local level, and the only people who turn out are the highly motivated zealots. In SF we could make a huge amount of progress if only we could vote out everyone on the board of supervisors apart from Joel Engardo.
Questions like these test to see how good you are at remembering your algorithms class. But I thought we’d all learned that the best interview question is one that tests the kind of work that you will actually be doing at your job. This is the equivalent of hiring a journalist by testing how well they remember that class they took on the Critique of Pure Reason. Not entirely useless, but not far from it.
But that would always be the case and wouldn’t explain the pandemic bounce. You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic.
Not sure I’m understanding this. The post mentions that pre-registering was very helpful for the precise reason that it prevents researchers from altering their statistical criteria in order to suit their desired conclusions.
My impression was always that the main attraction of wealthy foreigners was the increased tax take. The higher rents could be solved by encouraging more housing construction, but why do that when you can just blame foreigners?
For a second, I thought this was about Homi K. Bhabha, notorious among other things for this gem of a sentence:
"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalise' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."
With the caveat that I do not know the specifics of this case, I agree in principle with giving health companies access to large amounts of data like this. Research like this could save a huge amount of lives, but it needs lots of data, which is currently quiet difficult to collect. Ideally there'd be some sort of central, deidentified repository of data that all researchers can access for free. But in the absence of that, I'll take what I can get. I've lost too many people to cancer; I'd sacrifice a lot to see better diagnostics. Maybe I'm strange, but I don't care if Google or any other healthcare has access to all of the x-rays, mris, and blood tests that I've ever done provided that they're deidentified.
I struggle with Feyerabend a bit. First, a big part of that book is case studies and the problem with case studies is that they are not representative of the underlying population. It’s very easy to simply cherry pick examples that advance your thesis, whereas what we really care about is population averages.
Second, let’s assume there is no method for arriving at truth. Well then how do we verify that some discovery is actually a discovery? Presumably if there was a way to do this, we could incorporate it into our method, thus undermining Feyerabend’s thesis. Well it turns out that his answer to this is to say that evaluation should consist entirely in the contribution of the discovery to happiness and flourishing. This could be useful at a general level, but seems useless when it comes to judging between theories and research paths within science.
I don’t have any real opinion about the direction of causality. If anything the idea of unions contributing to more wage equality makes sense to me. But, linking to a single study as “proof” of anything is a big no no. It is very easy to cherry pick studies so that you get the “true” outcome. The only way to make a halfway convincing argument is to look at every piece of evidence on the question and aggregate them. This is why we believe global warming is man made and severe despite a few studies that suggest otherwise. One other caveat I would add is that if you read the linked study, they’re only reporting correlations. There doesn’t appear to be a causal identification strategy there. Which isn’t to say it isn’t interesting and worthwhile. Only that one should take the results with an appropriate level of caution.
Didn't he amend this claim in a later article and now believes that we're headed for around a 3-3.5 degree heat increase, which won't render most of the earth uninhabitable? To be clear, I still think this is a terrifying number, which if it comes to pass will lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, in particular in the developing world. I think we should do all that we can to bring the number down as much as possible.
Maybe, but I wonder if it is especially easy to produce horrific code in R. For example, I remember trying to refactor an R codebase that made ample use `load`, leading to all these mysterious variables appearing from nowhere.
If they really just wanted to avoid taxes, there are ways to do it where they’d keep way more than 2% of the company. And with all that saved, money they’d still have plenty of political power. Is this the best of all possible outcome? Maybe not. But it’s a lot better than the estate planning of basically every other rich family. You’d think we’d try to encourage more people to do it.
The one experience I had with peer review before leaving academia was actually pretty nice. One of the reviewers was a bit of a hardass, but they made good points and I think made the paper much better.
As a consumer of papers now, I find peer review pretty useful. I can’t read everything that comes out. Even if I just read abstracts, I need some sort of filter. Publication in a top tier journal raises the probability that egregious errors haven’t been made and that the paper is worthy of my time.