Month: March 2020

Categories Daily Posts

Saturday, 14.03.2020 – The Gender Pay Gap In An Anonymous Online Market

Link of the day: The gender pay gap in an anonymous online labor market

The gender pay gap is a subject that is both important and notoriously difficult to study. It is very hard to disentangle different effects as self-selection, societal expectations, market forces and discrimination all play a role. This piece I found very interesting because it looked at a market where active discrimination should be impossible since ’employers’ cannot know the gender of their ’employees’. Amazon Mechanical Turk… more

Categories Daily Posts

Wednesday, 11.03.2020 – How To Improve

Link of the day: 95-percentile isn’t that good

Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn’t help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it’s just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.

Quite interesting post about how easy it is (or should be) for people to get better at things in life. Also a good introduction … more

Categories Daily Posts, Economics, Environment

Monday, 09.03.2020 – China’s Economic Slowdown And Effects On The Environment

Link of the day: Airborne Nitrogen Dioxide Plummets Over China

NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) pollution monitoring satellites have detected significant decreases in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over China. […]

“This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Liu recalls seeing a drop in NO2 over several countries during the economic

… more
Categories Daily Posts

Saturday, 07.03.2020 – What’s the Best Way To Think About The Spread OF A Pandemic?

Link of the day: Growthers, base-raters and the spread of coronavirus

The term growthers refers to the notion of exponential growth, and indeed the number of Covid-19 cases appears (by some accounts) to be following an exponential pattern. Some scientists have estimated that the number of cases doubles about every seven days. If you play that logic out, it is easy enough to see how people might be complacent at first, then in a few months there is a public

… more
Categories Daily Posts, Rationality

Thursday, 05.03.2020 – Coronavirus and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Link of the day: Seeing the Smoke

About one to two weeks before the stock market crashed, people I follow on Twitter discussed how a looming pandemic should affect the stock markets and where wondering why it didn’t react at all. I was wondering the same, thinking about whether to tell my mum to sell her stocks. In the end we sold some of them, but quite a bit too late and also probably too few. I still have the … more

Categories Daily Posts, Science

Wednesday, 04.03.2020 – People Born Blind Seem To Be Protected From Schizophrenia

Link of the day: People Born Blind Are Mysteriously Protected From Schizophrenia

These findings suggest that something about congenital blindness may protect a person from schizophrenia. This is especially surprising, since congenital blindness often results from infections, brain trauma, or genetic mutation—all factors that are independently associated with greater risk of psychotic disorders.

More strangely, vision loss at other periods of life is associated with higher risks of schizophrenia and psychotic symptoms. Even in healthy people, blocking vision for just

… more
Categories Daily Posts, Technology

Tuesday, 03.03.2020 – Captain Joe And The Marvels Of Aviation

Link of the day: Captain Joe’s YouTube Channel

Recently, my friend Tobi showed me the YouTube channel of Captain Joe, a pilot who explains lots of very interesting details about planes and aviation. It’s a nerd’s dream come true. There is still a ton I haven’t watched, but some of my favorites so far are:

Categories Daily Posts, Economics

Monday, 02.03.2020 – Are Economists As A Whole Harmful?

Link of the day: Nobel Price Laureate Paul Romer on the question whether economists do more harm than good

In the 19th century, when it became clear that the net effect of having a doctor assist a woman in child-birth was to increase the probability that she would die, western society faced a choice:

– Get rid of doctors; or

– Insist that they wash their hands.

I do not want western society to get rid of economists. But to

… more
Categories Daily Posts, Science

Sunday, 01.03.2020 – Betting On the Reproducibility of Scientific Studies

Link of the day: Replication Markets

Replicatiomarkets is a scientific project that aims to assess how reproducible scientific studies are – and how we might know about it even without the study actually being replicated. The idea is simple. Everyone can sign up and make predictions (“Surveys”) or bets (“Markets”) about the replicability of around 30,000 scientific studies. During Survey weeks and Market weeks participants make claims or trade shares for certain bets. They can then win money according to … more