~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (563)

Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (D-H-M; 2007). The model asserts that when people […] The post Fair coins aren’t fair appeared first...

https://www.youtube.com/@abandonedfilms For a sampler, try The Hobbit: Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver. The post It’s happening, anachronistic imaginary movie preview edition appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to rsm. Good point. by EdRTechnically, very impressive. Artistically, physics are ... by aaronIn reply to rsm. Because its inflationary. See Covid bucks ... by HarunIn reply to Awake. But at what cost.. It...

1. “The largest office building in St. Louis has sold for $3.5 million, per WSJ. In 2006, it sold for $205 million.” 2. Robin Hanson on the world’s monoculture mistake. 3. An AI system to match silver medalists in geometry? 4. Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed. 5. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote: At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers are low, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math […] The post Pay For Performance Increases Performance (Water...

This movie was more cinematically serious than I was expecting, and with some odd (but mostly good) 1970s vibes.  It is also an interesting case study in anhedonia. Video and grenades seem scarcer than they ought to be, even given the constraints.  Good characters. The movie works very hard not to reveal its politics to […] The post *Civil War* appeared first on Marginal...

These topics seem underexplored to me: Montesquieu Economics in the Talmud Rise of econometrics in the 19th century The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered Works in any foreign language you might read Chinese economic thought Economic thought in India The funding of […] The post History of economic thought paper ideas...

1. Some progress on the Moderna cancer vaccine. 2. The culture that is New Zealand (excruciating, not recommended). 3. My podcast with Sean Speer and The Hub on GOAT. 4. Edward S.F. suggests: K. Omodo reviews G O A T: “It was amazing.  I took it in all at once!” Here is the short video. […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

For the first time in 75 years, Mattel is making a major change to the iconic board game Scrabble — and touting a “No More Scoring” gameplay option. The new launch is a double-sided version of the famous board game — one side with the original game for those who want to stick to the […] The post Scrabble markets in everything, okie-dokie edition...

I’ve long been an advocate of increasing the use of incentives in organ procurement for transplant; either with financial incentives or with rules such as no-give, no-take which prioritize former potential organ donors on the organ recipient list. What I and many reformers failed to realize, however, is that the current monopolized system is so […] The post UNOS Kills appeared first on Marginal...

In this paper, we introduce TimeGPT, the first foundation model for time series, capable of generating accurate predictions for diverse datasets not seen during training. We evaluate our pre-trained model against established statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, demonstrating that TimeGPT zero-shot inference excels in performance, efficiency, and simplicity. Our study provides compelling evidence […] The post TimeGPT-1 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

Introducing Udio, an app for music creation and sharing that allows you to generate amazing music in your favorite styles with intuitive and powerful text-prompting. 1/11 pic.twitter.com/al5uYAsU5k — udio (@udiomusic) April 10, 2024 The post Udio appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Not Woke. Are we prepared for a world where the ... by KSIn reply to KS. I'd go even...

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

1. Terminator metal. 2. An RCT on the economic benefits of vision correction. 3. “Claude 3 Opus is roughly as persuasive as humans.“ 4. Jon Haidt responds to the Nature review.  And Greg Lukianoff with his First Amendment concerns. 5. Interview with Nicholas Tabarrok, who works in the movies. 6. Samo Burja skeptical on nuclear. […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t […] The post The $20 bill gets picked up,...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit: …let me offer another theory: The anti-lab-grown-meat movement is about conservative cultural insecurity — the fear that, without the force of law, some conservative cultural norms will fade away… Imagine that lab-grown meat proves feasible at a reasonable cost. It might end […] The post Why is there a movement to...

Yes, India is doing well but the picture could be much better: During Modi’s tenure, GFCF [gross fixed capital formation] as a percentage of GDP declined and has remained low until the post-pandemic recovery. In fact the highest level of GFCF as a percentage of GDP during the first nine years of Modi’s leadership is […] The post Modi and investment appeared first on...

1. Skepticism about the beauty premium? 2. “On a cellular level, younger generations seem to be aging faster than their forebears.” (speculative) 3. Interview with Merve Emre. 4. William Stanley Jevons and eclipses (NYT).  And an Amtrak train ride across the country is less carbon-efficient than flying (NYT). 5. The ascent of high school wrestlers. […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Congratulations!  Here is the AEA announcement and summary of his work. The post Philipp Strack wins the J.B. Clark award appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsTalking of prize winners Peter Higgs has died. by deariemeIn reply to rayward. Ah Bonn, the most rigorous math ... by DaveIn reply to dearieme. The only correct way of spell it is ... by JamalIn reply to...

3 Body Problem (Netflix): Great! A captivating mix of big ideas, a compelling mystery, and spectacular set-pieces like the Cultural Revolution, strange worlds, the ship cutting and more. Of course, there are some weaknesses. 3 Body Problem falters in its portrayal of genius, rendering the British scientists as too normal, overlooking the obsessiveness, ambition, and […] The post What to Watch appeared first on...

1. Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  An amazing book, full of life and energy on every page, and yes there are 605 of them.  Imagine if Camille Paglia had stuck with it and produced case studies.  The main problem is simply that most people don’t know or care about […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

-Barbenheimer-Eras Tour-Swift-Kelce-huge football ratings-Sphere-Ohtani/Wemby-a fun Oscars-women’s basketball-heel Rock/Wrestlemania Avengers Endgame Pretty nice run for sports/pop culture. https://t.co/xdH3yH7hic — Conor Sen (@conorsen) April 8, 2024 The post The culture that is U.S.A. appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to jimmy. His hatred of Seth Rollins for betraying ... by Ali ChoudhuryIn reply to mkt42. Oh, I forgot Guadians of the Galaxy 1 and...

1. NYT symposium on smart phones and childhood.  And when do young female suicide rates start rising?  Tweet here.  And “Gen Alpha (my kid’s generation) has already optimized out of it and have figured out how to do the social play they need to in the new medium.” 2. Prize money for prompts. 3. Bridgewater […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group […] The post Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of...

Jon Hartley is one I know, here is the abstract: This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally […] The post 350+ coauthors study reproducibility in economics...