A few weeks back I wrote about the importance of social learning. Yes, it’s important to try to think clearly and logically where you can, but in practice we’re mostly forced to rely on cues from others to reach our beliefs. Will Wilkinson makes this point well and in much greater depth in a recent …
Author Archives: Walter
Theory and replication
Economics studies tend to replicate at a higher rate than psychology studies. Why? One possibility is that economics has a more unified theoretical framework to help guide researchers toward hypotheses that are more likely true, whereas theories in psychology are numerous and not well integrated. Joseph Henrich has made this argument, and wants psychology to …
The politics of diffusion
Last post I pointed to a study noting the huge costs of delaying the spread of beneficial technologies. But I ended by adding a caveat: When the rapid spread of a technology makes it harder to regulate (broadly construed) that potentially strengthens the case for moving slower. So what does that look like? And how …
The benefits of tech adoption
Dylan Matthews has a good column in Vox’s Future Perfect newsletter (can’t find a link) that gets at something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the potentially large, but unseen costs of slowing the spread of useful technologies. He’s writing about a new paper estimating the benefits of the Green Revolution: The [Green Revolution] was …
Thinking clearly
Really nice piece from Aeon’s Psyche magazine on thinking clearly. I’ve quoted a few bits, but read the whole thing: In philosophy, what’s known as standard form is often used to set out the essentials of a line of thought as clearly as possible. Expressing your thinking in standard form means writing out a numbered …
Social learning
Via Bloomberg Opinion I came across this essay by David Perell on “How philosophers think.” It’s really a critique of shallow and conformist thinking. The point is, you can read all the Wikipedia summaries you want, but they won’t give you a holistic understanding of an idea. That only happens once you have a layered, …
Evidence in public policy
What counts as good evidence in policymaking? Here’s one rubric, from Nature’s journal of Behavioural and Social Sciences in summer 2020: The problem with a rubric like this is it seems it would score only one star on its own measure; we need better evidence about evidence. But still useful in my opinion. Update: More …
Innovation and well-being
Are innovative places good places to live? I’ve been thinking about that question, and what follows is a quick bit of exploration — not anything definitive. I wanted to see if the states with more innovative economies are also the states with better quality of life. To do that, I compared the Social Progress Index, …
The innovation agenda
Ezra Klein has a column about the coronavirus agenda of economist Alex Tabarrok: Here’s a question I’ve been mulling in recent months: Is Alex Tabarrok right? Are people dying because our coronavirus response is far too conservative? I don’t mean conservative in the politicized, left-right sense. Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University and a …
Loss aversion and politics
I was thinking this week about political economy and status quo bias, specifically how cognitive biases could fit into Mancur Olson-style models of bargaining. Well, there is a literature on everything, per Cowen’s second law, and sure enough here’s a paper by Alberto Alesina and Francesca Passarelli on loss aversion in politics. Here are some …
Nonrival 