There is evidence that a higher minimum wage causes a lower suicide rate. I would not have guessed this: “Suicide is often connected to financial stress, so it makes sense that increasing income might reduce the risk of suicide. A recent study funded by NIMHD found that every $1 increase in the minimum wage of […]
This post is mostly an effort to summarize this interesting but long article in The Washington Post. The TL TL/DR summary of the article is: archaea bacteria in rumens (one of the stomachs of cattle) produce methane which is a major contributor to global warming. Genetic modification of competing bacteria called duedenibacillus (which does not […]
An archetypal first world problem is that we sites have (all?) decided to add two factor authentication (as the earlier first world problem of requiring irritating passwords with capital letters and special! symbols doesn’t work well enough anymore). This didn’t use to be a problem when they offered to send the 6-digit one time code […]
Last year genetically modified mosquitoes were released in Djibouti. The technology is new and the biology is interesting, but I am most interested in the politics. I am late to this story, since it was reported months ago. They released male Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes which bear a female lethal gene — they mated with females […]
This photograph of a new Chinese fighter scares me and reminds me of happy days of my childhood spent climbing on an actual decommissioned fighter in Wheaton Regional Park. I promise you there is a serious connection. The new Chinese 6th generation fighter is supersonic, has a delta wing and has no tail. The last […]
Many people including Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. and Ezra Klein predicted that the Affordable Care Act’s efforts to reduce Medicare outlays by squeezing providers would not work, because providers could opt out. I said they were wrong (fourth link here). Doctors with office practices can and do opt […]
There are a huge number of anomalies and biases which can be understood as confusing the claims that the probability of p conditional on q is high if the conditional probability of q conditional on p is high. One is diagnostic expectations – the conditional probability that a person has red hair if the person […]
An explanation of over-reaction to new data starts with a principal agent model. The idea is that the forecasts are made by agents who are trying to impress people who pay for the forecasts. Another, and more important, case is that of professional money managers who are investing other people’s money and trying to convince […]
There is an approach to cognitive psychology and modelling beliefs and forecasts which is natural for economists and very misleading. The assumptions are that we have a complete set of subjective probabilities updated with Bayes’ formula, that for any possible combination of events we have a belief about the probability that they will occur and […]
One of the first observed and best known errors people make when told probabilities is the Allais paradox. People put too much weight on rare extreme outcomes. This means that choices people make different choices when asked to choose between two lotteries with the same probabilities of the same outcomes depending on how they are […]