Searching for Mr. President
All politics may be local, but Google search data suggests that people are far more interested in learning about the president than they are in learning about their local politicians.
More issues
Confirmation Bias: Confirming Media Bias
It used to be that searches for "Fox News Bias" were more common than searches for "CNN bias." Not anymore. The other notable thing is the peaks around presidential elections.
Note also that searches around midterm elections barely rise above the noise.
God, Weather, and News vs. Porn
The Internet is for porn (Avenue Q). So it makes sense to measure things on the Internet in porn units.
I jest, just a bit.
In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens Davidowitz points out that people search for porn more than weather on GOOG. Data from Google Trends for the disbelievers.
Incentives to Care
A lot of people have their lives cut short because they eat too much and exercise too little. Worse, the quality of their shortened lives is typically much lower as a result of avoidable' illnesses that stem frombad behavior.’ And that isn’t all. People who are not feeling
Measuring Segregation
Dissimilarity index is a measure of segregation. It runs as follows:
where:
is population of
in the ith area
is population of
in the larger area from which dissimilarity is being measured against
The measure suffers from a couple of issues:
1. Concerns about lumpiness. Even in a small area,
Unstrapped
When strapped for time, some resort to wishful thinking, others to lashing out. Both are illogical. If you are strapped for time, it is either because you scheduled poorly or because you were a victim of unanticipated obligations. Both are understandable, but neither justifies ‘acting out.’ So don’t.
Whatever
How Do We Know?
How can fallible creatures like us know something? The scientific method is about answering that question well. To answer the question well, we have made at least three big innovations:
1. Empiricism. But no privileged observer. What you observe should be reproducible by all others.
2. Open to criticism: If
Peer to Peer
Peers are equals, except as reviewers, when they are more like capricious dictators. (Or when they are members of a peerage.)
We review our peers’ work because we know that we are all fallible. And because we know that the single best way we can overcome our own limitations is
(Software) Product Development Cycle
1. Solicit Ideas
Talk to customers, analyze usage data, talk to peers, managers, think, hold competitions, raffles,…
For each idea:
2. Define the idea
Write out the idea for clarity — at least 5–10 sentences. Do some due diligence to see what else is there. Learn and revise (including abandon)
The Innumerate American
In answering a question, scientists sometimes collect data that answers a different, sometimes yet more important question. And when that happens, scientists sometimes overlook the easter egg. This recently happened to me, or so I think.
Kabir and I recently investigated the extent to which estimates of motivated factual learning