Tyler Cowen reviews Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. "In this world, girls function as a form of capital." The podcast is good too.

Lots of good info on education: Why Conventional Wisdom on Education Reform is Wrong (a primer)

Scott Alexander on the life of Herbert Hoover.

Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics [speculative]:

Measured by deviations in a benchmark economic statistic, the real natural rate of interest, these responses indicate that pandemics are followed by sustained periods—over multiple decades—with depressed investment opportunities, possibly due to excess capital per unit of surviving labor, and/or heightened desires to save, possibly due to an increase in precautionary saving or a rebuilding of depleted wealth.

Do cognitive biases go away when the stakes are high? A large pre-registered study with very high stakes finds that effort increases significantly but performance does not.

Disco Elysium painting turned into video using AI.

Long-run consequences of the pirate attacks on the coasts of Italy: "in 1951 Rome would have been 15% more populous without piracy."

“A” Business by Any Other Name: Firm Name Choice as a Signal of Firm Quality (2014): "The average plumbing firm whose name begins with A or a number receives five times more service complaints than other firms and also charges higher prices."

Yarkoni: The Generalizability Crisis [in psychology].

Lakens: Review of "The Generalizability Crisis" by Tal Yarkoni.

Yarkoni: Induction is not optional (if you’re using inferential statistics): reply to Lakens.

Estimating the deep replicability of scientific findings using human and artificial intelligence - ML model does about as well as prediction markets when it comes to predicting replication success. "the model’s accuracy is higher when trained on a paper’s text rather than its reported statistics and that n-grams, higher order word combinations that humans have difficulty processing, correlate with replication." Also check out the horrific Fig 1.

Wearing a weight vest leads to weight loss, fairly huge (suspiciously huge?) effect size. The hypothesized mechanism is the "gravitostat": your body senses how heavy you are and adjusts accordingly.

Tyler Cowen on uni- vs multi-disciplinary policy advice in the time of Corona

...and here's Señor Coconut, "A Latin Tribute to Kraftwerk". Who knew "Autobahn" needed a marimba?