Links Jan-Feb 2020
fish + music = bass
fish + friend = chum
fish + hair = mullet
fish + struggle = flounder
oink - pig + bro = wassup
yeti – snow + economics = homo economicus
music – soul = downloadable ringtones
good : bad :: rock : nü metal
Related, The (Too Many) Problems of Analogical Reasoning with Word Vectors.
We always knew meta-analyses are somewhat flawed because of publication bias and the "file drawer problem", but exactly how bad is it? A new paper compares meta-analyses to pre-registered replications and finds that meta-analyses overstate effect sizes by 3x.
In related news, registered reports in psychology have 44% positive results vs 96% in the standard literature.
Female orgasm frequency by male income quartile. Obviously confounded in all sorts of ways, but still.
Effective Altruists tackle the problem of tfw no gf. h/t @SilverVVulpes
Mark Koyama reviews Scheidel's Escape from Rome, with some very interesting comments on the use of counterfactuals by historians vs economists doing history. "There is no control group for Europe had Archduke Ferdinand not been assassinated."
A review of Dietz Vollrath's new book, Fully Grown:
Vollrath’s preferred decomposition of the causes of the 1.25% annual slowdown in real GDP per capita growth is:
- 0.80pp - Declining growth in human capital
- 0.20pp - The shift of spending from goods to services
- 0.15pp - Declining reallocation of workers and firms
- 0.10pp - Declining geographic mobility
Pay-as-you-go pension systems are going to have serious trouble in countries with rapidly aging populations. Just how bad is it going to be? If you're a <40 yo worker today, it's probably safe to assume you won't be getting much out of the money you're paying into the pension system.
RCA summarizes his views on US healthcare costs with a ton of great charts: Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer).
Should we be worrying about automation in the near future? Scholl and Hanson argue no.
Disco Elysium (which I highly recommend) lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz talks about the development process and how twitter inspired their dialogue engine: The Feature That Almost Sank Disco Elysium.
It has long been established that asking the same question twice in the same questionnaire will often result in the same person giving two different responses. But what happens if you place the repeated questions right next to each other?
Human-cat co-evolution: "We found that the population density of free-ranging cats is linearly related to the proportion of female students in the university. [...] suggests that the cats may have the ability to distinguish human sex and adopt a sociable skill to human females."