First post
After a long hiatus I set this up so I could post random musings on topics I couldn’t put anywhere else. Coming very soon, a project I have been working on– SimGradSchool.
View ArticleSimGradSchool, a study in new faculty hiring practices
[Attention conservation notice: 2000+ words about hiring in academia including an overly complex numerical model. Navel gazing surely to follow.] 1 Like many other social science graduate students who...
View Articlein which I comment on meritocracy
This link, which of course touches on many of the same themes as Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites, points out that an increasingly metrics focused way of weeding out potential candidates for some...
View ArticleWhy a focus on p-hacking is misplaced, or the coming co-evolution
There has been a lot of recent work on p-hacking (making things statistically significant through taking advantage of analysis degrees-of-freedom), which I think is good (it’s starting to make people...
View ArticleShameless self promotion
An interview with me, about life in business vs. the academy… http://indecisionblog.com/2013/03/25/into-the-wild-paul-litvak/
View ArticleWhy social science grad students would make great product managers
After my interview with InDecision Blog, a number of graduate students emailed asking me about careers in technology (hey, I asked for it). They were a very impressive lot from top universities, but...
View ArticleHyper-success and the globalization of envy
Economists have written about the star system and the impact of globalization on inequality 1. Capsule version: global markets mean that talent can be monetized at a much greater scale, e.g. the...
View ArticleThree authors misunderstanding nudges
David Berreby’s critique of nudging Jeremy Waldron’s critique of nudging Steven Poole’s critique of nudging I am being nudged and I know it. Worse yet, in some cases I literally know the person nudging...
View ArticleA modest proposal for solving the gender problem in technology
TL;DR – The way to get more women into tech is to pay women more than men. My starting point for this argument is the contention that diversity would improve the quality of tech companies’ products and...
View ArticleGeneralizability by Representativeness
TL;DR: Many psychological studies rely on reasoning by representativeness to argue that their studies capture the causes of important phenomena in the real world. This is fallacious, and psychologists...
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