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Social Science

A collection of 90 issues

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.

22 Oct 2017 1 min read

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,

31 Aug 2017 2 min read

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

18 Feb 2017 2 min read

Rasmussen vs. the Rest

For the data and scripts used to generate the graphs, see https://github.com/soodoku/pollbias.

12 Oct 2016 1 min read

Town Level Data on Cable Operators and Cable Channels

I am pleased to announce the release of TV and Cable Factbook Data (1997–2002; 1998 coverage is modest). Use of the data is restricted to research purposes. Background In 2007, Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan published a paper that used data from Warren’s Factbook to identify the effect

12 Sep 2016 2 min read

Teaching Social Science

Three goals: impart information, spur deeper thinking about the topic and the social world more generally, and inculcate care in thinking. As is perhaps clear, working toward achieving any one of these goals creates positive externalities that help achieve other goals. For instance, care in exposition, which is a necessary

12 Sep 2016 1 min read

The Value of Money: Learning from Experiments Offering Money for Correct Answers

Papers at hand: Prior et al. and Bullock et al. Two empirical points that we learn from the papers: 1. Partisan gaps are highly variable, and the mean gap is reasonably small (without money, control condition). See also: Partisan Retrospection? (and updated on 3/2025, A Gap in Our Understanding)

10 Jul 2016 2 min read

Some Facts About PolitiFact

I assessed PolitiFact on: 1. Imbalance in scrutiny: Do they vet statements by Democrats or Democratic-leaning organizations more than statements by Republicans or Republican-leaning organizations? 2. Batting average by party: Roughly n_correct/n_checked, but instantiated here as mean Politifact rating. To answer the questions, I scraped the data

27 May 2016 2 min read

Congenial Invention and the Economy of Everyday (Political) Conversation

Communication comes from the Latin word communicare, which means `to make common.’ We communicate not only to transfer information, but also to establish and reaffirm identities, mores, and meanings. (From my earlier note on a somewhat different aspect of the economy of everyday conversation.) Hence, there is often a large

31 Dec 2015 1 min read

The Technology Giveth and The Technology Taketh

Riker and Ordershook formalized the voting calculus as: pb + d > c where, p = probability of vote ‘mattering’ b = size of the benefit d = sense of duty c = cost of voting They argued that if pb + d exceeds c, people will vote. Otherwise not. One can generalize this simple formalization

27 Sep 2015 1 min read

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