Rotundus.com

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep among the Urban Poor

"Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research, increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations"

What Women Need to Know About the Covid Vaccine

"Women and girls can produce up to twice as many antibodies after receiving flu shots and vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (M.M.R.) and hepatitis A and B, probably because of a mix of factors, including reproductive hormones and genetic differences. A study found that over nearly three decades, women accounted for 80 percent of all adult allergic reactions to vaccines. Similarly, the C.D.C. reported that most of the anaphylactic reactions to Covid-19 vaccines, while rare, have occurred among women."

Personal stories have power in political arguments — and pitfalls

"a personal story that is false will have more power to create respect than facts, including those facts that would serve to correct the narrative"

Reputation Inflation

"A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters feeling pressure to leave “above average” ratings, which in turn pushes the average higher. This pressure stems from raters’ desire to not harm the rated seller. As the potential to harm is what makes ratings effective, reputation systems, as currently designed, sow the seeds of their own irrelevance."

What fraction of sources would you expect to mention both of these sorts of studies?

A study by University of CA finds teachers are harsher in grading black student’s writing than they are on IDENTICAL writing from a white student. White female teachers are most likely to show racial bias and black boys are most often the targets. https://t.co/Yvir6fgJS2

— chris evans (@chris_notcapn) April 5, 2021

Boys Lag Behind: A comparison of gender-blind vs. non-blind test scores reveals a teacher marking bias in favor of girls. This appears to be part of the reason that boys fall behind girls at school. https://t.co/CQFFflJVGi pic.twitter.com/fxgArNEOMj

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 8, 2021

3/ I think the fact that you cannot point out someone is twisting someone else's argument without being seen as 'defending' that person can partly why journalistic rigor is nosediving at the moment, including in the New York Times.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 13, 2021

4/ You often lack access to a reporter's process. But certain hints can provide a useful sense of how diligent they were in their reporting and how much you should trust them.

If they couldn't get the argument of a memo that is freely available online correct, well...

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 13, 2021

Those two tweets come from a thread looking at one particular series of false claims a recent New York Times article made, but it's not the only distortions the piece makes. I've decided to follow Antonio's suggestion here:

Cade Metz's doxxing of Scott Alexander/SSC finally came out, and it's even more of an underhanded hit piece of him and his tech readership than was feared. It's such shit I won't link to it, but encourage anyone interested to read and compare the NYT map to the SV territory.

— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) February 13, 2021

I'm still not sure it's worth following through with mass-blocking of NYT reporters as I think there are still interesting ones remaining working there. That said, it's not a very credible organization anymore.

Layla Saad: a curious case of false identification with black America

"Saad has never once commented on crimes, either historic or modern, committed in the country in which she has spent almost all her adult life. Although Qatar officially outlawed slavery in 1952, there are estimated to be more enslaved people now living in the country than in almost any other worldwide and the Qatari government’s tolerance for the practice — which I have written about previously in these pages — has led the UN to threaten international sanctions. It is quite possible that Saad is not directly implicated in any of these abuses. But her silence on the subject of this ongoing form of slavery is striking, given her own commitment to the idea of collective guilt."

Why Do Chinese Liberals Embrace American Conservatives?

"The issue of political correctness in particular fascinates them, with many seeing in it uncomfortable echoes of their own experiences in a society where speech is severely constrained. They perceive Mr. Trump as embodying the sort of no-filter approach to free speech that they dream of, while viewing American liberalism as having strayed from its core values."

Did people really drink bleach to prevent COVID-19? A tale of problematic respondents and a guide for measuring rare events in survey data

"In a series of studies totaling close to 1400 respondents, we show that 80-90% of reports of household cleanser ingestion are made by problematic respondents. These respondents report impossible claims such as ‘recently having had a fatal heart attack’ and ‘eating concrete for its iron content’ at a similar rate to ingesting household cleaners. Additionally, respondents’ frequent misreading or misinterpreting the intent of questions accounted for the rest of such claims. Once inattentive, mischievous, and careless respondents are taken out of the analytic sample we find no evidence that people ingest cleansers."

The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance

"In two preregistered laboratory studies, we approached a total of 209 ... with a highly intrusive request: to unlock their password-protected smartphones and hand them over to an experimenter to search through while they waited in another room. A separate 194 ... were ... asked whether a reasonable person would agree to the same request if hypothetically approached by the same researcher. ... Study 1 found that whereas most Forecasters believed a reasonable person would refuse the experimenter’s request, most Experiencers — 100 out of 103 people — promptly unlocked their phones and handed them over."