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

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

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

Social science a mess, journals no good, the meaningless of the label “misinformation”, Flipper Zero, and cleaning up the list of named “biases ..read more

Social science a mess, journals no good, the meaningless of the label “misinformation”, Flipper Zero, and cleaning up the list of named “biases”: Social science is a mess and it’s not getting better. A few years old, but a lot of gold. A few nuggets: Economics topped the charts in terms of expectations, and it was by far the strongest field. There are certainly large improvements to be made — a 2/3 replication rate is not something to be proud of. But reading their papers you get the sense that at least they’re trying, which is more than can be said of some other fields. … A unique weakness ..read more

These are the books I enjoyed the most in 2023, although they were published in different years: Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: I love the sense of place that Abbey creates. Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Harden’s politics seep through the text, and it is slightly irritating to be constantly labelled a eugenicist. However, it contains an accessible explanation of the science with many great examples. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles: I bought it for the kids, but I suspect it’s beyond them. Wonderful stories. The book I invested in the most was Douglas Hofstadter’s, Godel, Escher, B ..read more

In late April 2020, a group of behavioural scientists (Van Bavel et al., 2020) published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour, “Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response”. They provided a range of suggestions for policy makers. The paper sparked some debates about the readiness of behavioural science to inform the pandemic response. One of these critiques was in an article by IJzerman et al. (2020), which advised caution when applying behavioural science to policy. A new article in Nature (Ruggeri et al., 2023) has reviewed the policy recommendations in that April ..read more

I firmly believe in going straight to the source before sharing a story I’ve heard elsewhere. Here is another example of why. In a recent article in Behavioral Scientist, Adam Grant writes: In a clever study, economists wanted to find out whether students really learn more from experts. They collected data on every freshman at Northwestern University from 2001 to 2008. They investigated whether freshmen did better in their second course in a subject if their introductory class was taught by more qualified instructors. You might assume that students would be better off learning the basics from ..read more

Over a decade ago when I started reading the behavioural economics literature, John List quickly became one of my favourite academics. Whenever I read an interview with List he always seemed to ask great, critical questions. He was rarely happy taking others’ assumptions as given. I saw him as someone who, on hearing “in my experience….”, would be the first to say “Should we run an experiment?”. My impression of List has somewhat changed in the last year. His Twitter posts seem more focused on promotion than shooting down weak ideas. There goes my image of List as a cynic! But I also suppose t ..read more

The best books I read in 2022 - generally released in other years - were: Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: I find the argument compelling and somewhat disheartening. Stanlislas Dehaene, How We Learn: The optimistic case for doing education right. Despite Caplan’s argument, there is a niche where this is important. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: Generally great book, although the end about diversity fell flat. Below is the full list of books that I read in 2022 (starred if I have read before). The volume of my reading of books cover-to-cover was ..read more