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: […]
Category: science
25 interesting facts #31
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 […]
Against nudging
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, […]
Honesty may still pay off in politics #2
In 2020, I wrote a post on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that politicians who are averse to lying have lower reelection rates. In other words, politicians who are less honest are more likely to do well in politics. In brief, I found that the results in […]
The paper is the preregistration of the replication
It is getting increasingly popular within the social sciences to preregister studies. That is, prior to collecting any data for a study, researchers register their theoretical predictions/expectations (i.e., hypothesis or hypotheses), the data collection procedure, the planned analysis, etc. I am generally in favour of preregistrations. All else equal, more information on how a study […]