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THE SUPERBOWL INDICATOR Discussing the Decision Science News correlation, causation post during one of our daily and always entertaining Yahoo! Research lunches, someone said “this battle can’t be won because people just want to believe certain things are causal”. In line with that, Jason Zweig sends along this very funny piece about a spurious correlation, […]
HOW TO STOP THE SELLING OF CORRELATION AS CAUSATION? Decision Science News does not read news often. (We took Herbert Simon’s advice that checking the news every week or so is enough and are much happier since). However, each time we do we see headlines of the following sort: Want to live longer? Get a […]
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BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS AS A COMPLEMENT, NOT A SUBSTITUTE Sisyphus finds some nudges harder than others George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel published this Op Ed in the New York Times entitled Economics Behaving Badly. It is not every day that prominent behavioral economists emphasize the limits of what they do, so we thought they deserved special […]
GELMAN’S FIVE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS There’s a nice article in The Browser in which Statistician and Political Scientist Extraordinaire Andrew Gelman recommends five books. It is definitely worth a read. We learned something about baseball from it and have decided to buy a book on child rearing based on its recommendations. [We already knew the stuff […]
December saw the passing on Robyn Dawes, without question a scholar who helped define the field of Judgment and Decision Making. The author of the field’s pre-eminent course text “Rational Choice in an Uncertain World”, Dawes was no doubt responsible for getting and keeping many students interested in the field. Dawes was an excellent writer. In addition to authoring what we think is the best-titled paper in the history of JDM “The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making”, his books were some of the few we read without skipping a word from start to finish. Dawes is unique: a mathematical clinical psychologist (some say the only one), a past-president of the JDM Society, a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an academic with no fear of controversy, and much more.
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RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the four questions. The correct answers […]
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HOW TO DISPLAY A LINE PLOT WITH COUNT INFORMATION? In a previously-mentioned paper Sharad and your DSN editor are writing up, there is the above line plot with points. The area of each point shows the count of observations. It’s done in R with ggplot2 (hooray for Hadley). We generally like this type of plot, […]
SOME EMPIRICAL BASES FOR CHOOSING CERTAIN RISK REPRESENTATIONS OVER OTHERS An example of an information grid This week DSN posts some thoughts (largely inspired by the work of former colleagues Stephanie Kurzenhäuser, Ralph Hertwig, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Gerd Gigerenzer) about communicating risks to the general public, providing references and delicious downloads where possible. Representations to […]
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FACEBOOK ALLOWS USERS TO GET (A COPY OF) THEIR DATA BACK After a few run-ins with the press and public over privacy and user control, and one not-so-positive movie, Facebook now deserves a hat tip for doing what many people thought it never would: allowing users to download a copy of everything they’ve uploaded. Now, […]
FASTER, CHEAPER, EASIER BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH ONLINE One thing Decision Science News particularly enjoys about being at Yahoo! Research is the brilliant colleagues. This week, two of them, Winter Mason and Sid Suri, presented us with this manuscript which is a guide to conducting research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Manuscript? Manuscript from heaven, we say, for […]
