More on why data helps

I’ve written before about the puzzle of why data helps. Why do even really basic, descriptive analytics seem anecdotally to be so useful? First, just one more time evidence that data sure seems to help. From a paper in Nature about forecasting social change: We compared forecasting approaches relying on (1) no data modelling (but …

On falsification

From Richard McElreath’s textbook Statistical Rethinking, via Data Elixir: …The above is a kind of folk Popperism, an informal philosophy of science common among scientists but not among philosophers of science. Science is not describe by the falsification standard, and Popper recognized that. In fact, deductive falsification is impossible in nearly every scientific context. In …

Notes on trade and globalization

I’ve been trying to revisit the arguments and evidence for global trade and trade liberalization recently. I want to post a few links so I don’t lose track of them. Overall, I came away suspecting that the pro-trade side, which I’ve been sympathetic toward, is a bit overconfident relative to the evidence. But also that …