Category: science

How good are opinion polls to capture election results in parliamentary elections? To answer this question, I collected data on 40,139 opinion polls, covering elections in 37 countries (238,019 unique party-election observations). The data comes from a variety of sources, including European Opinion Polls as Open Data, POLITICO Poll of Polls, Wikipedia, and country-specific datasets […]

In a new study, published in Scientific Reports, the authors find a correlation between rates of dogs biting humans and temperature as well as UV irradiation levels. That is, as the title suggests (“The risk of being bitten by a dog is higher on hot, sunny, and smoggy days“), dogs are more likely to bite […]

In a previous post, I outlined specific issues and concerns with a recent study finding that wind speed could “predict” the Brexit remain vote. Since then, a few other people have written about the study. First, Nick Brown has noticed a few basic factual errors in the descriptions of the referendum in a blog post: […]

751. People do not, on average, have an aversion towards randomized experiments in policy making (Mazar et al. 2023) 752. If there is a maximum limit to the human lifespan, we are not yet approaching it (McCarthy and Wang 2023) 753. Politicians consistently overestimate how conservative voters are (Pilet et al. 2023) 754. Loyal employees […]

Here is a list of issues, challenges, and problems with nudging. It is by no means an exhaustive list, nor am I sure whether I agree with all arguments presented below. I try to make as strong a case against nudging as I can, but this is not the same as my case is strong, […]