No, It’s Not a Prisoner’s Dilemma (the second in a continuing series):

The prisoner’s dilemma is the original counterintuitive hot take. Some social scientists and journalists just looove that dilemma because of how delightfully paradoxical it can be. But some situations that are described as prisoner’s dilemmas aren’t really. I discussed one … Continue reading

The Ben Geen case: Did a naive interpretation of a cluster of cases send an innocent nurse to prison until 2035?

In a paper called “Rarity of Respiratory Arrest,” Richard Gill writes: Statistical analysis of monthly rates of events in around 20 hospitals and over a period of about 10 years shows that respiratory arrest, though about five times less frequent … Continue reading

Mental hospital, prison, and homicide rates

Bruce McCullough points me to this note by Bernard Harcourt on the negative correlation between the rates of institutionalization and homicide. Basically, when more people have been in mental hospitals, there have been fewer homicides, and vice-versa.

It makes sense since, presumably, men who are institutionalized are more likely to commit crimes, so I’m surprised that Harcourt descrbes his results as “remarkable–actually astounding. These regressions cover an extremely lengthy time period . . . a large number of observations . . . and the results remain robust and statistically significant . . .” With a large data set, you’re more likely to find statistically significance. Especially when the main result is so plausible in the first place.

Harcourt concludes with some interesting comments about the applicability of his results. (I’d also like to recommend the paper by Donohue and Wolfers on death penalty deterrence as a model example of this sort of analysis.)

P.S. See here for an update by Harcourt, where he explains why he finds his results surprising. I’m not convinced–I believe the results are important, just not that they’re suprising.

Funny stuff

Harcourt’s blog entry had some amusing comments: Continue reading

If the Nobel Prize winners and the bigshots at the National Cancer Institute are doing hype on the daily, then it makes sense that the loser wannabe bigshots at the Cleveland Clinic and the Scripps Translational Science Institute will imitate that behavior.

In a 2018 opinion piece, “Why was Theranos so believable? Medicine needs to look in the mirror,” Michael Joyner wrote: I [Joyner] watched the recent “60 Minutes” report on the rise and fall of Theranos, the test-everything-with-a-fingerstick company that recently … Continue reading

It’s Harvard time, baby: That thing where well-connected policy advocates can’t handle criticism and call it “Stasi” or “censorship”

Alec Karakatsanis writes: This is a long and upsetting post about the ethical conduct of two Harvard professors—Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani—who are seeding a media campaign to support their proposal of adding 500,000 more armed police officers. . . … Continue reading