Books I read in 2024
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
1M ago
The books I enjoyed the most in 2024, although all were published in different years: Ashlee Vance, When the Heavens Went on Sale: For all the grumbling about how progress in software isn’t matched in the physical world, Vance tells some amazing stories. The tale about how Planet Labs got going using smartphone technology to make shoebox size satellites was fantastic. Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t: Wonderfully practical. I enter almost every psychology or behavioural science related book dreading the shaky scientific studies I will be drag ..read more
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Human-AI collaboration: is it better when the human is asleep at the wheel?
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
2M ago
In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes an experiment by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua: In a different paper, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua shows why relying too much on AI can backfire. He found that recruiters who used high-quality AI became lazy, careless, and less skilled in their own judgment. They missed out on some brilliant applicants and made worse decisions than recruiters who used low-quality AI or no AI at all. He hired 181 professional recruiters and gave them a tricky task: to evaluate 44 job applications based on their math ability. The data came from an in ..read more
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What we learn when we test everything
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
3M ago
The below are my speaking notes for a presentation in the Innovative methodologies in behavioural science session at BI Connect 2024, hosted by the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The notes reflect many of the themes discussed in more detail in a previous post on megastudies. When BETA posts the video of the session, I will link here. I’m going to start with a story about a competition held by Netflix. They offered $1 million to the team that could develop an algorithm that could predict film ratings with 10% bette ..read more
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The human benchmark is typically unimpressive
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
4M ago
If you ever read a claim of an AI outperforming a human, dig into the performance data to check out the human benchmark. The mediocrity of the human is often more salient than the competence of the AI. The AI has an easy job. Here’s an example from a paper by Ayers and friends (2023). They sampled 195 question and response exchanges on Reddit’s r/AskDocs and entered those same questions into ChatGPT 3.5. Responses by the Reddit physicians and ChatGPT were then independently rated for quality and empathy. ChatGPT responses were rated as higher quality, with 78% of ChatGPT responses rated as goo ..read more
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A comment on the manifesto for behavioural science
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
4M ago
I wrote this post based on notes for a proposed “lunch and learn” session. Illness got in the way, so rather than let those notes sit on the shelf, I’ve cleaned them up to share here. Many points were intended to be (provocative) conversation prompts rather than statements, so a few parts are light on evidence or end with a question. In the first half of 2023, A manifesto for applying behavioural science was published in Nature Human Behaviour. Written by the head of the North American arm of the Behavioural Insights Team, Michael Hallsworth, the manifesto “looks at the challenges facing the f ..read more
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Subject notes on behavioural economics
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
6M ago
Each year I teach an undergraduate subject in behavioural economics. I have pulled together the notes for the subject into a website, which you can find here. The notes include the subject content, plus “exercises” that form the basis for the tutorials. If you work through the content, you’re effectively getting the same content as my students, minus the interactive seminars with me, tutorials with the teaching assistants, and the assessments. I have also developed a set of videos to accompany the notes, which can be found here. The videos are effectively voice versions of the notes (or you ca ..read more
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The illusion of evidence-based nudges
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
7M ago
From a recent Journal of Political Economy paper by Stefano DellaVigna, Woojin Kim and Elizabeth Linos (2024): We study 30 US cities that ran 73 RCTs with a national nudge unit. Cities adopt a nudge treatment into their communications in 27% of the cases. We find that the strength of the evidence and key city features do not strongly predict adoption; instead, the largest predictor is whether the RCT was implemented using preexisting communication, as opposed to new communication. A nudge with a negative result is almost as likely to be implemented as a positive result. There is no differen ..read more
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Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
7M ago
In 2012, I wrote a post titled Chimps 1, Humans 0 after seeing videos of a chimp named Ayumu. Ayumu could recall the location of numbers, in order, flashed briefly on a screen. Ayumu’s performance far exceeded my feeble attempts. See the below videos to get a sense of the task. The human Ayumu This performance, documented by Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) in Current Biology, was used to assert that chimps have superior working memory to humans. The claim has spread widely, as a brief search on Twitter and Google shows. When I wrote that post, I didn’t know that this conclusion was already withou ..read more
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Using generative AI as an academic - July 2024 edition
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
7M ago
I first wrote a version of this post in April 2023. A lot has changed since then in both the tools and how I use them. As was the case then, if you want a sense of the frontier, others such as Ethan Mollick will give you a better flavour. But if you’re after some practical examples, you might find this useful. My toolkit I use multiple tools, switching between them depending on the task and comparing the responses. I want to gain a sense of the frontier. As an academic, I gain free access to Github Copilot. (Students can also get free access.) CoPilot provides code suggestions in coding enviro ..read more
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The psychological and genes’ eye view of ergodicity economics
Jason Collins Blog
by Jason Collins
8M ago
This post was my plan for a presentation at the Foundation of Utility and Risk Conference. I drew on my previous posts laying out the foundations of ergodicity economics and examining what ergodicity economics states about risk preferences. This varied somewhat from delivery (I’m easily waylaid and skipped a couple of sections). Given it’s to a technical audience, there are a few moments that might lose the lay reader. – Introduction This presentation started with a blog post. Around five years ago when I was ensconced in the corporate world, I wrote a couple of posts on an idea called ergodic ..read more
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