Jon Mellon

Adam McKay get in touch! library.oapen.org/handle/20.50...

But who knows, maybe there's a "Big Short" style version of electoral shocks you could make

Something tells me this very legitimate agent may not have read my book

What’s actually going on in this statement is he’s using insider terms to sound credible to influential people within the defense policy community

There’s a lot of interbranch rivalry that ends up fueling weird terminology stuff like this

I think it can refer to marines too so possibly it covered most people who were in Iraq. But sailors and airmen definitely aren’t usually called that.

soldiers and troops are army specific

It’s a very common term in the defense world. It’s mostly just because you want a single term to refer to members of the army, navy and Air Force

Identification K9 puts professional ethics over personal attachments

Time to repost some causality memes #IdentificationK9

I remember reading a paper at one point that drew a distinction between polling vote share error (how far off the vote shares were) and polling narrative error (when the wrong party was said to be ahead). Does anyone remember the reference?

I haven’t had a chance to dig in but more recent evidence maybe looks more like an epidemic (may well change my mind again) bsky.app/profile/digt...

If someone has newer data that shows something very different I’m very happy to have my mind changed on this again. No one’s pointed to anything very conclusive that I’ve seen so far

See Per's thread here
bsky.app/profile/peng...

Looking at a couple of panel studies my current working hypothesis is that sustained participation in panel studies decreases respondents life satisfaction.

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

Giving me flashbacks to the giant ISCED mapping spreadsheet I've got for one project

A world where 90% of people are getting degrees is a world where you’re sending a very strong signal by not getting one

In other words, high graduate premiums are compatible with a world where non-graduate prospects have worsened as credential requirements have increased for medium skilled jobs

I think it’s worth bearing in mind that graduate premium is a measure of difference not the level of achievement within the graduate group.

Great work in this paper figuring out the scaffolding to get this to work

I've been interested when we were going to reach the capability threshold for this.

Once the tires have been kicked, all social science journals should adopt computational reproducibility on submission.

Huge reduction in reviewer burden by eliminating a whole class of errors up front.

No. There isn’t. Those of us who work on this issue try to debunk that regularly. But there is a persistent level of loneliness that is very damaging for those who experience it - and the solutions they need bring wider good. There is also some evidence that some people’s loneliness is deepening.

Thanks again to @pengzell.bsky.social for setting me straight on this!

but it turns out that this seems to be driven by that question battery being long and interviewers who were paid per interview encouraging respondents to skip it!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The other thing that comes up is that young people seem more lonely than older people which has been interpreted as a period/cohort effect. But it turns out young people have always been lonely.

That study finds strong interviewer effects on that question but only in the mode where interviewers are paid per interview (CAPI) and not in the mode where interviewers are paid hourly (CATI)

but it turns out that this seems to be driven by that question battery being long and interviewers who were paid per interview encouraging respondents to skip it!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Perhaps most interesting, the original loneliness epidemic claim traces back to a highly cited 2006 study using GSS data that showed an increase in people who named zero friends

Good summary for the lack of a loneliness epidemic here ourworldindata.org/loneliness-e...

Case in point, @pengzell.bsky.social just sent me 5 papers proving that there’s not actually any evidence for a loneliness epidemic. My mind is highly changed