Best of Twitter - Week of March 29, 2021
German division and reunification and the “effects” of Communism
Some caveats from f/c JEP paper with @LukasMergele & Ludger Woessmann @ifo_Education
warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom…
Issue #1: The GDR can be spotted before it even existed. (1/13)
Hot new blog post. On the surface it is about deploying code (fun!) but really it is about how slowing down to increase quality can backfire and compound slowness.
collected a bunch of comments from "People living in third world countries, what is something that is a part of your everyday life that people in first world countries would not understand / cope with?" old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/co…
this Ioannidis thing is an excellent reminder that the gap between heroes and villlains is a lot smaller than one might intuitively suppose. nearly all of us have the latent capacity to be both many times over, depending on starting conditions. 1/
consider the possibility that traits that dispose a person to write papers with titles like "why most published research findings are false"—iconoclasm, overconfidence, utilitarianism, etc.—might also dispose them to write papers saying that everyone else is wrong about covid. 3/
but you don't have to. people are complex. it is possible for Ioannidis to be a nice person who cares about others and wants to help the world, but also has a strong iconoclastic streak and a huge ego—and occasionally finds himself hoisted by his own petard. no tension here. 7/
personal news:
boarding a plane out of Russia rn, hopefully to never return. Tbilisi, Georgia for now. Boston - soon. (and apologies for not replying to any messages for the last week, have been trying to finish *everything* in Moscow)
TIL that America, under Woodrow Wilson, pushed propaganda, including via a govt pub The Official Bulletin,
It is the closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda or China’s People’s Daily
^ whenever thinking about current day politics, it’s helpful to remember that LBJ literally stole a bunch of state and federal elections, Roosevelt unsuccessfully tried to pack the supreme court and then successfully managed to break the most important democratic tradition of the country getting elected for his 4th term while fighting against dictatorships (and is remembered as a great president!), “Benjamin Franklin carefully faked an entire issue of the Boston Independent Chronicle, filling pages with blatantly false stories about American colonists being scalped on British orders” etc etc
Quarantined section
Meanwhile in Europe:
Belgian police breaking up young people hanging out at... a park. A big, vast park. We’re more than a year in. We know where transmission primarily occurs and how. (Young ones are being encouraged to hang out indoors, I guess, where they won’t risk being trampled by horses.) https://t.co/dx5J0M1NzU
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania