Lars P. Syll

The emotive power of music  [embedded content] Davida Scheffers has lived her dream of​ winning a contest and the opportunity to play with the Dutch​ Orchestra. Davida suffers from an extremely painful neuromuscular condition that derailed her career, and she thought she would never get to play in a professional orchestra again. The young blond lady is her daughter and turned 18 years old that day.  [embedded content]

Bayesianism — a patently​ absurd approach to science Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, it is doubtful if...

 [embedded content] Though I speak with the tongues of angels, If I have not love… My words would resound with but a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy… And understand all mysteries… and all knowledge… And though I have all faith So that I could remove mountains, If I have not love… I am nothing.

Nationalekonomisk forskning om friskolor och skolkonkurrens På DN:s debattsida kunde man för några år sedan, apropå en Pisarapport, läsa följande: Bara för att det finns ett statistiskt samband behöver det inte finnas ett orsakssamband … Ett exempel på hur fel det kan bli gäller skolvalets och konkurrensens effekter. I Pisarapporten läser vi att det inte finns någon relation mellan länders resultat och andelen elever i fristående skolor. Samma slutsats...

Is ‘modern’ macroeconomics for real? Empirically, far from isolating a microeconomic core, real-business-cycle models, as with other representative-agent models, use macroeconomic aggregates for their testing and estimation. Thus, to the degree that such models are successful in explaining empirical phenomena, they point to the ontological centrality of macroeconomic and not to microeconomic entities … At the empirical level, even the new classical...

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We recommend dropping the NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] paradigm — and the p-value thresholds associated with it — as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p < 0.05 (or some other statistical threshold) to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more broadly...

Handy missing data methodologies On October 13, 2012, Manny Fernandez reported in The New York Times that former El Paso schools superintendent Lorenzo Garcia was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating​ a testing scandal. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is a state-mandated test for high-school sophomores. The TAKS missing data algorithm was to treat missing data as missing-at-random, and hence the score for the entire school...

Parachutes do not reduce death when jumping from aircraft Parachute use compared with a backpack control did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when used by participants jumping from aircraft in this first randomized evaluation of the intervention. This largely resulted from our ability to only recruit participants jumping from stationary aircraft on the ground. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community,...

What counts as evidence? What counts as evidence? I suspect we tend to overweight some kinds of evidence, and underweight others. Yeh’s paper is a lovely illustration of a general problem with randomized control trials – that they tell us how a treatment worked under particular circumstances, but are silent about its effects in other circumstances. They can lack external validity. Yeh shows that parachutes are useless for someone jumping from a plane when...