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Stranger Than Fiction

posted to Overcoming Bias on Wed 8th Sep 10

Even Hollywood would pause before trying to sell this scenario. Imagine:Over twenty years ago someone invented a cheap car gadget that would cut the 30,000 annual US car crash deaths by 75%, and with government help proved it in a randomized experiment fifteen
Meaning of Meaning of Life

posted to Overcoming Bias on Tue 7th Sep 10

Rewatching Monty Python’s Meaning of Life led me to wonder: what exactly do most peoplemean by “the meaning of life?” Now first, it seems to me people mainly want to knowthe meaning of their life; they consider life in general mostly for hints
Tyler On A Roll

posted to Overcoming Bias on Mon 6th Sep 10

Five thought-provoking posts in six days:What Is Management About: “Business is much more about being organized and managing people than it is about ideas. Past a certain scale, ideas don’t seem to matter much … Much of the time spent discussing

Against Free Parking

posted to Overcoming Bias on Sun 15th Aug 10

Tyler’s latest NYT oped describes the inefficiencies of “free” parking. I didn’t think I’d have much to say on it, because he’s just using standard microeconomics, and pretty obviously right. But then I saw two econobloggers
Great Divides

posted to Overcoming Bias on Fri 20th Aug 10

When troops must be motivated to fight, “go team” speeches often invoke an ancient conflict, along a great divide:Our fight, of [A] against [B] over [C], is but one battle in the ancient war over [F], along the great divide between [D] and [E].
Why Schools Test Often

posted to Overcoming Bias on Tue 1st Jun 10

The latest Science:We modified the dictator game … and studied how inequality acceptance develops in adolescence. We found that as children enter adolescence, they increasingly view inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not

Why do I receive high quality comments?

posted to Chris Blattman on Tue 7th Sep 10

On small blogs, people typically comment when they have something to contribute or ask that is relevant to the post. These are frequently of high quality. On more popular blogs, this positive commenting dynamic is confounded by the presence of eyeballs. Every
What I'm Reading: 2, by Arnold Kling

posted to EconLog on Mon 6th Sep 10

Teach Like a Champion, by Doug Lemov. As a teacher, I find it helpful. However, with apologies to James C. Scott the book could have been entitled "Seeing like a teacher." An excerpt: the "plane" of your classroom is the imaginary line that runs the length
Education and Signaling: Rejoinder to Bill Dickens, by Bryan Caplan

posted to EconLog on Mon 6th Sep 10

Today I'm celebrating Labor Day by continuing my exchange with Bill Dickens on the signaling model of education. (Previous rounds here, here, and here). What's the Labor Day connection? Simple: If I'm right, we'd be collectively better off