Mike Bishop 🇨🇦🇺🇸

Could look at outcomes like wellbeing, ambition, self-understanding, political views?

- find a natural experiment to study students randomly exposed to a more/less humanities curriculum

- or perhaps actively creating art is more important so study that.

I’m sure the impact of exposure to the humanities is varied and multiple, so no experiment could capture it all. But some examples of interesting studies might be:

- Explicit randomized experiments comparing the impact of e.g. reading a novel vs. non-fiction book.

Noting that a lack of scientific evidence of benefits is not proof of a lack of benefits. Disturbing as it is to be skeptical of claimed benefits it would be more disturbing if we did not seek what scientific evidence can be had.

If Michael Baum says it inspired him that’s certainly worth noting.

If anyone has more scientific evidence about the benefits of the humanities I’m eager to see it.

Ending the kidney shortage is a no-brainer.

I just contacted my elected officials, Click here to take @action and do the same.

actionbutton.nationbuilder.com/share/SPK-QE...

We Let an Immigrant Live in Our Home You should too, especially if you have young children

The ideal that all parents, but especially mothers, spend max time with their kids leads to a stigma against au pairs.

More people should consider it.

www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/we-let-an-...

YouTube video by Posit PBC Trustworthy Data Visualization (Kieran Healy, Duke University) | posit::conf(2025)

I watched @kjhealy.co's keynote yesterday. It is well worth your time if you often wonder about what a good visualisation should do, and if you are curious about how they fit or don't in a truth-challenged environment. It is funny too. I also like the 3 words slides! #rstats
youtu.be/ZamPCbvBAgE?...

Also note that internet poker pros earned a steady income playing 12 tables simultaneously… they weren’t deeply analyzing their opponents, they steadily skim money off players that are playing far from game-theory-optimal.

podcast.clearerthinking.org - transcript BARRY: And where the features that are relevant are easily quantified. It's easy to decide what bets to make at a casino. It is and should be formulaic. It's not so easy to decide how to play poker, because it isn't just about probabilities. You have to understand the people you're playing against and try to, in effect, see through the backs of their cards. So that adds some complexity, but you can still calculate expected values. You know that staying in on some hands is bad, chasing the odds are so far against you, and on other hands, you almost certainly have the best hand at the table. You can calculate that just by knowing the odds of various cards in a deck. But that doesn't make you a winner at poker. That's a precondition. If you can't do that, you'll never be a winner at poker. If you can do that, you at least have a chance to be a winner at poker. Because especially as that kind of calculation gets more and more automatic, you can devote yourself to trying to read the other people at the table. And my

People often say that being good at poker requires reading tells and psychological insight, but this is mostly false.

Poker AIs destroy humans despite not seeing physical tells, and with a very limited model of individual players.

@clearerthinking.bsky.social @spencrgreenberg.bsky.social

Title: A Justification for 80% Power Abstract: Cohen’s heuristic reason for choosing 80% power (balancing Type I and TypeII errors) conveniently arrives at approximately the same number as an approachwhere one maximizes the marginal gain in power per standard error reduction. Ihave yet to see someone point this out, and this is interesting because it providesa non-arbitrary justification for 80% power.

a derivation of the result

I think this is kind of neat and I don't think anyone else has noticed it (I've looked and I can't find anyone who has) osf.io/preprints/so...

Maybe I should back off "justification" language, but it's at least a remarkable coincidence. I still think someone else *must* have noticed it...

Making normies care about something is a great skill/vocation.

Sadly this isn’t the skill/vocation that gets politicians elected, nor does it lead to writing popular op-eds.

Why no polls in BlueSky?

Wondering if anyone on this site wants to comment on this from @ctulocal1.bsky.social

The social sciences face a replicability crisis. A key determinant of replication success is statistical power. We assess the power of political science research by collating over 16,000 hypothesis tests from about 2,000 articles in 46 areas of the discipline. Under generous assumptions, we show that quantitative research in political science is greatly underpow- ered: the median analysis has about 10% power, and only about 1 in 10 tests have at least 80% power to detect the consensus effects reported in the literature. We also find substantial heterogeneity in tests across research areas, with some being characterized by high power but most having very low power. To contextualize our findings, we survey political methodologists to assess their expectations about power levels. Most methodologists greatly overestimate the statistical power of political science research.

The pretty draft is now online.

Link to paper (free): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Our replication package starts from the raw data and we put real work into making it readable & setting it up so people could poke at it, so please do explore it: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

Suggestion for authors: go back to forecasters now and ask them if they’d like to update their 2030 forecasts.

Charts comparing BlueSky to X would be appreciated. Almost all comparisons are of interest to me including the obvious big two categories:
- user demographics
- post topics

August 1, 2025 AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Committee on Economic Statistics and Committee on Government Relations Statement from the American Economic Association on the Dismissal of the BLS Commissioner Leaders of the American Economic Association express their grave concern over the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier today. The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions. Undermining the independence or credibility of these agencies threatens the integrity of the information that markets, institutions, and the public rely on every day. Measuring the vast and dynamic U.S. economy in real time is inherently challenging. It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as more complete and higher-quality data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor-not failure or bias. The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions. We call upon elected officials to respect and preserve the independence of the nation's statistical infrastructure. Lawrence Katz President, American Economic Association Katharine Abraham President-Elect, American Economic Association Karen Dynan Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics Kenneth Troske Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Government Relations

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing

As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements

This is a big deal

❓Why do the Nordics & Dutch speak English so much better than the Germans, Italians & French?

➡️ New Working Paper:

Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills
w/ F. Baumeister & E. Hanushek

www.nber.org/papers/w33984

A 🧵 1/12

Realistically, either A.I. solves this for posters or it doesn’t get solved. Almost nobody gonna put effort into it.

I greatly respect your work but I disagree.

When normal people disagree with the scientific consensus it’s mostly because they don’t care much about the topic, or worse, because they don’t trust scientists.

Matt, I have to disagree with the gist of this.

The problem of academics overclaiming and overgeneralizing from their work is serious and confuses the public (and even other academics).

Window Heat Pumps Could Change the Game A new report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has some exciting data for anyone attempting to retrofit a multifamily building.

NYC experimented with new window heat pump models in some public housing units. in winter, "The window unit-heated apartments used a whopping 87% less energy than the rest of the building’s steam-heated apartments did, cutting energy costs per household in half."

heatmap.news/sustainabili...

Preventing fraud is best but bigger penalties would help too. At a certain level it should be literally criminal.

Happy Fête de la Fédération to those who celebrate! @franceculture.fr

Alex Cohen on X: "Do effect sizes/standard errors from econ studies predict future results? This paper finds they often don’t (CIs don’t contain future results) unless we allow for real diffs across studies (ie, low external validity). Requires assumptions but cool mix of empirical approaches. https://t.co/JURGQLCOty" / X Do effect sizes/standard errors from econ studies predict future results? This paper finds they often don’t (CIs don’t contain future results) unless we allow for real diffs across studies (ie, low external validity). Requires assumptions but cool mix of empirical approaches. https://t.co/JURGQLCOty

See link to paper in this thread x.com/alexwcohen/s...

Even social scientists that "get it" mostly abide by a norm against forecasting.

Including subjective probabilistic forecasts in serious scholarship might receive pushback from reviewers or editors even though it would help readers interpret research implications.

Most social scientists have never reflected on the epistemic virtues of forecasting.

I wonder what you mean by “we” and “allowed” … there was a resistance, both obvious and invisible. And those resisting were themselves diverse and sometimes in sharp disagreement about strategy.

Better late than never!