Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
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,…
Continue ReadingI 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…
Continue ReadingSlightly 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…
Continue ReadingKirkegaard, 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…
Continue ReadingResearchgate 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…
Continue ReadingIn 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…
Continue ReadingThere 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…
Continue ReadingThe within-person (or intra-individual or within‐individual or …), design is a longitudinal design where we follow people over time as they change on some purported cause, and look at whether the purported effect also varies accordingly. This simple design is surprisingly underused despite having the strong advantage that it controls by design for both genetic…
Continue ReadingPolygenic scores are all the rage. Naturally, you want to know your own scores, and you have a reading of your genome from some company. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t provide you with interesting results? Fear not, you can download your ‘raw data’ (actually the genotypes from the SNP chip) and upload it to some other…
Continue ReadingAnimal breeding, human breeding (2015) Recent reviews in animal breeding (2019) Breeder genomics is way ahead of human genomics. Whenever something can be and is done in animals, it takes years for human geneticists to realize the same thing. Recently, media fuss has been all about using CRISPR, and there was that human baby born…
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