Per Engzell

That's why I wish journals would stop calling them "research notes" which frames them as side thoughts and practically guarantees they'll be ignored

I appreciate short papers. Sadly, they’re caught between two extremes: finding is too important for a full paper, or not important enough. Let’s push for the former.

Why are guinea-pigs the colours they are? Sewall's got a DAG for that.

We couldn't not rate this classic early DAG by our beloved collective granddagy, Sewall Wright.

14/10. Ten for the DAG, plus one for each cute guinea-pig node.

From Wright (1920) "The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in Determining the Piebald Pattern of Guinea-Pigs"

Jobs posted on EJM are down 12% over last year, while applicants are 12% up. I also checked JOE today and it's 28% down over last year. This will be a very difficult market!

econjobmarket.org/marketState

"the Afghanisdag", a massive tangle of arrows and noun phrases, possibly describing a counterinsurgency problem: lethal within 20ft in briefing environments.

Hello Bluesky!

We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all.

Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating?

1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"

Incredible plumage. To each node their own arrow. Truly the peacock of path diagrams. 14/10.

A bold DAG. Chaotic good energy. Might collapse under its own causal density. 13/10 would condition again.

the causal inference crowd should set up a WeRateDags account

I’m not procrastinating, I’m conducting longitudinal research on motivation

We live in an age of titans

Could have used one of these www.atlasobscura.com/articles/beh...

Your debunking is appreciated

Scientific Reports does not a Nature paper make

'Appears to' doing a lot of work in that headline

I guess the word limit at submission and acceptance don't necessarily have to be the same

Introduction: This paper is a slightly revised and updated version of a paper originally prepared for the European Symposium on the Status of Artists held in Finland on May 30 - June 1, 1992. The symposium was focused on the European experience with the UNESCO Recommendation on the Status of Artists. However, several other countries were invited to participate, including the U.S.A, and Canada. The author represented Americans for the Universality of UNESCO, Inc., a non-profit learning association registered in the District of Columbia.

Start with a hook, they said. Ideally, the location and date of a 1992 symposium.

Abstract We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.

Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality.

This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀

diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

A corollary of this is that the stated reason for rejection is rarely the actual reason (you had failed by page 3)

NYT headline: The U.S. Denounces Her. Multinationals Threaten Her. She Likes Her Odds.

One woman bravely defending odds ratios against the linear probability mob

Always trust Susan Fiske

Ooof the part about "Applications submitted ^ 46%" (is this real or a quirk of the platform)

the deadline came like a comet
visible
but somehow still
surprising

The Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction Model for Describing and Investigating Inter-cohort Deviations and Intra-cohort Life-course Dynamics Liying Luo, James S. Hodges Social scientists have frequently sought to understand the distinct effects of age, period, and cohort, but disaggregation of the three dimensions is difficult because cohort = period − age. We argue that this technical difficulty reflects a disconnection between how the cohort effect is conceptualized and how it is modeled in the traditional age-period-cohort framework. We propose a new method, called the age-period-cohort-interaction (APC-I) model, that is qualitatively different from previous methods in that it represents Ryder’s theoretical account about the conditions under which cohort differentiation may arise. This APC-I model does not require problematic statistical assumptions and the interpretation is straightforward. It quantifies inter-cohort deviations from the age and period main effects and also permits hypothesis testing about intra-cohort life-course dynamics. We demonstrate how this new model can be used to examine age, period, and cohort patterns in women’s labor force participation.

Finally reading up on Luo & Hodges Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction model! The idea is fairly straightforward -- model age, period, and their interaction. The more interesting part is their conceptual argument why cohort should be thought of as age*period.>

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Remember: No one ever rejects a paper based on what's in the last 10 pages

Always (and then self cite)

YouTube video by Sixties Garage Punk The Beckett Quintet - No Correspondence

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l5c...

Every collaborative academic project needs a corresponding author and a no correspondence will be entered into author.

or when Judea Pearl said that every time he reads the Book of Why, he learns something new