Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
In the last year or so, there has been a notable growth in people using Substack. This platform is essentially a platform for subscription blogs, where one can opt-in to pay the author some monthly/yearly amount. Usually though authors have a free option as they are more interested in influence and readership growth than monetization….
Last year’s post (2020) and scoring the predictions. These are goals and projections for my various productivity measures. These are all based on ignoring the tail risk of getting banned (which is now substantial across platforms). The method of doing projections is not difficult: gather some prior data, eyeball the data, project with simple models,…
We are always looking to expand our Arthur Jensen coverage (https://arthurjensen.net/). Recently, we got a tip that some video material exist somewhere that we don’t have. Specifically: While critical of most mass media coverage of the issue, Jensen has the highest praise for the presentations by some of the “quick studies” who have interviewed him—Joseph…
I wanted to wait until all the US election stuff resolves, but seems like this will take a while for the last few questions, so let’s proceed for now. As mentioned in the Goals for 2020 post, I decided to get into forecasting because I found a funnier website than GJOpen: Metaculus: I also want…
2020 was a productive year in terms of book reading. I set a goal of 25 and I ended up at 54. I track my book reading at Goodreads, and here’s the 2020 page. Saving you the work, here’s the books with links and comments. Other stuff Read this just to get some background on…
Slightly odd topic for a Christmas Even post, but some time ago, I talked with some people about the Myers Briggs personality model. As a contrarian, I am of course interested in pushing against the mainstream view of my social circle (if reasonable). In wide culture, Myers Briggs is very popular, but among psychologists, it…
Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Karlin, A. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11 Patient people fare better in life than impatient people. Based on this and on economic models, many economists have claimed that more patient countries should fare…
Researchgate link (ungated) Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Dumoulin, B. (2020). What Happened to Brussels? The Big Decline and Muslim Immigration. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.8 We examined regional inequality in Belgium, both in the 19 communes of Brussels and in the country as a whole (n = 589 communes). We find very strong relationships between…
In science, we are generally mostly interested in causal relationships because these are the ones that matter. Causality is generally defined in terms of counter-factuals: if things were such and such, or had been such and such, things would be such and such (instead). One can formalize this reasoning with the do-operator and related methods…
There is a list that’s floating around (meaning: copy pasted without sources), and it’s also got no exact sources, so it’s unclear how legit it is. So I did some searching to confirm, and this blogpost can then be the new reference post. I noted that some of the titles were wrong, sometimes they change…
