Rotundus.com

On the accuracy, media representation, and public perception of psychological scientists’ judgments of societal change

Studying the predictions of psychological scientists through the COVID-19 pandemic: "neither domain-general expertise (i.e., judgmental accuracy of scientists compared to laypeople) nor self-identified domain-specific expertise improved accuracy. ... we show that the public nevertheless expects psychological scientists to make more accurate predictions about individual and societal change compared to most other scientific disciplines, politicians, and non-scientists, and they prefer to follow their recommendations."

Ethan Mollick on Twitter

"Links between physical and emotional states: 💊Tylenol dulls all pain, including emotional pain & the pain of social rejection. It also dulls reactions to pleasurable things. 🤢Anti-nausea treatment lowers disgust at various purity-based violations & also reduces moral judgement". The two studies

Western Australia's new solar redistribution policy

Not a terrible idea IMO: "will provide low-income households with free electricity between 9am and 3pm each day ...The state, like others in the country and further abroad, is working out how to deal with the sharp decline in demand for electricity from the grid during the middle of the day as more homes and businesses install solar panels on their roofs."

Tony Bennett’s Nazi Hunting Past Is Just One Reason He’s the Greatest Living American

Can you resist reading an article with an opening sentence like? "Only one man can say that he has both recorded a jazz album with Lady Gaga and liberated a Nazi death camp, and that man’s name is Tony Bennett." Unfortunately I only bumped into it on the date of his death so the title doesn't quite apply anymore.

Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow

"We find that relative to its Russian and Chinese counterparts, where access to ChatGPT is limited, and to similar forums for mathematics, where ChatGPT is less capable, activity on Stack Overflow significantly decreased. A difference-in-differences model estimates a 16\% decrease in weekly posts on Stack Overflow. This effect increases in magnitude over time, and is larger for posts related to the most widely used programming languages. Posts made after ChatGPT get similar voting scores than before, suggesting that ChatGPT is not merely displacing duplicate or low-quality content." As one of the authors observes on Twitter "LLMs like ChatGPT are displacing their own future training data".

To Fight Bias, Consider Highlighting Your Race or Gender

A sign that the situation is more complicated than many suggest (and, I'd say, not what this article suggests it is): "When female or minority senders explicitly mentioned their identities, they were just more than 24 percent more likely to receive a response, compared with e-mails that had the same signature but did not mention identities. E-mails that mentioned identities received higher-quality replies"

From this interview:

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world.