Lars P. Syll

Causal inference — what the machine cannot learn .[embedded content] The central problem with the present ‘machine learning’ and ‘big data’ hype is that so many — falsely — think that they can get away with analyzing real-world phenomena without any (commitment to) theory. But — data never speaks for itself. Without a prior statistical set-up, there actually are no data at all to process. Clever data-mining tricks are not enough to answer important...

The danger of teaching the wrong thing all too well It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the null hypothesis, and interpreting the p-value as some sort of replication probability or as the posterior probability that the null hypothesis is true … It is shocking that these errors seem so...

AfD — die dümmste Kolonne Moskaus .[embedded content]

Teachers — people that change your life .[embedded content]

The wide conviction of the superiority of the methods of the science has converted the econometric community largely to a group of fundamentalist guards of mathematical rigour. It is often the case that mathemical rigour is held as the dominant goal and the criterion for research topic choice as well as research evaluation, so much so that the relevance of the research to business cycles is reduced to empirical illustrations. To that extent, probabilistic formalization has...

Gedenken an Michail Gorbatschow .[embedded content]

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Fjorton gånger har priset delats ut, blott tre gånger har nâgon tackat nej: Göran Palm (2012, då det i stället gick till Sven Lindqvist), Susanna Alakoski (2013, hon ville inte förknippas med diktatorn Lenin) och Åsa Linderborg (2016, Myrdal gick emot styrelsens val av Linderborg som då tackade nej). Alla andra pristagare, däribland Mattias Gardell, Sven Wollter, Sven Lindqvist, Mikael Wiehe, Roy Anderson och de senaste åren författaren Nina Björk och journalisten Kajsa Ekis...

If you can’t devise an experiment that answers your question in a world where anything goes, then the odds of generating useful results with a modest budget and nonexperimental survey data seem pretty slim. The description of an ideal experiment also helps you formulate causal questions precisely. The mechanics of an ideal experiment highlight the forces you’d like to manipulate and the factors you’d like to hold constant. Research questions that cannot be answered by any...

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