2023 Quiz #1 (Wednesday, March 15)

Rules for Parsing Unsigned Arrow Diagrams

For OLS to be unbiased, you need Cov(X,epsilon) = 0 (exclusion restriction for OLS)

For IV to be unbiased, you need

  • Cov(Z,epsilon) = 0  (exclusion restriction for IV)

AND 

  • Cov(Z,X) is not zero    (relevance of the instrument)

How do you tell if a covariance is zero or not zero?

It works the same way for all 3 cases. Let me call the two things you want to know if the covariance between is zero or not A and B. (A and B come from the set {X,epsilon,Z). 

The covariance is NOT zero if EITHER

  1. There is a path following the one-way signs from A to B

  2. There is a path following the one-way signs from B to A

  3. There is a path following the one-way signs from something else to A, and a path following the one-way signs from that same thing to B. 

To show a covariance is zero, you have to check a lot of things. You need:

  1. There is no path following the one-way signs from A to B

  2. There is no path following the one-way signs from B to A

  3. There is no other thing from which there is a path following the one-way signs to A, and from which there is a path following the one-way signs from that same thing to B. 

Paper on "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos"

This assignment is now posted on Canvas. If you are way ahead of the game, you could even submit it now!

3-5 pages

Due Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 11 PM

Choose one of the 12 rules that you think, if more fully implemented, would make a big positive difference in either your life or in American society (or in your home country’s society). Lay out how it could help you get more of what you want (or reduce your suffering) or help people in our society more generally get what they want (or reduce the suffering of people in our society). Go into depth. Also, answer: “Are there ways you would modify the rule to make it even better?”

If you disagree with all 12 rules, choose one and write about how it is bad.

Paper on "Happiness: A New Science," by Richard Layard

3-5 pages

Please put your name inside the document! I print them out to read them, and it is then hard to match up the pieces of paper with names. I will subtract points if you don’t put your name in there.

Documents can be Word documents or pdf.

Make sure to provide evidence in your paper that you have read the whole book. (For example, you might choose appropriate quotations from the book sprinkled from beginning to end, or simply address issues in the book that are raised near the end as well as issues that are raised near the beginning.

Due 11 PM Monday, February 13, 2023.

Themes/Questions to Answer:

What is the “conventional wisdom” about happiness that Layard presents?

Where is that conventional wisdom right and where is it wrong?

Where the conventional wisdom is right, what are the implications for your own life?

Note: Make sure that you don’t sound too much like ChatGPT. A hint about that is to be personal about “what are the implications for your own life.”

Assigned Readings and Videos

Ideas for Using ChatGPT

The key rule is that you need to treat text (words) from ChatGPT the same as any other text (words) that you find online. You need to clearly label those words as due to ChatGPT. And, of course, you shouldn’t have a ridiculously high percentage of words in your paper be someone or something else’s words. The same rule applies to any other AI. The way to cite text from ChatGPT is to clearly set out the prompt you gave ChatGPT before the text you got from Chat GPT.

That said, as long as you clearly label text from ChatGPT as coming from there, there are many interesting ways to use it in a paper. Here is an article with some good ideas.

In addition to being an automatic F if you are determined to have used ChatGPT without clearly labeling the words from ChatGPT as coming from ChatGPT, one of your tasks in each paper is to make your own words sound different from ChatGPT. You will get a lower score if you sound too much like ChatGPT.

Book Choices for the Group Oral Presentation; First Assignment

Timing: The presentations will be during the 6 classes from Monday, January 30, through Friday, February 10.

Six Books for Six Teams:

  1. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

  2. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

  3. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

  4. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

  5. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt

  6. The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel

First Assignment, Due 11 PM Friday, January 19 (I pushed this back a day because of our snow day on Wednesday; I’ll give you a preview of each of the books on Friday. But I need it at 11 PM Friday so I can assign you to book groups over the weekend and you can get started reading.)

1. Write a few sentences about what drew you to this class and what you hope to learn and get out of it. 

2. List in order your 1st, 2d and 3d choices for the additional book you want to read and do a group presentation on. 

3. Write a few sentences on why you are particularly interested in reading your 1st choice. (Optional: you can write about your 2d and 3d choices, too if you want to.)

Note:

I tried to post this assignment on Canvas. You can submit your answers there. (If you can’t figure out how to submit it on Canvas, you can send it to me in the body of an email.)

Not this time:

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (Related blog posts laid out here.)

Quiz

****The Quiz will be in class on Wednesday, April 20th****

Shorter Readings to be Tested on the Quiz (you do not need to read the appendices to any of the papers)

Note: If you have any trouble downloading these papers from the Dropbox link, just get them from the Norlin Library website.

Statistics Principles to be Tested on the Quiz

  • Statistical algebra

  • Whether or not OLS and IV are unbiased given an arrow diagram

  • Whether the direction of bias is 0, +, - or ? given an arrow diagram with +’s and -’s on the arrows

  • Using the false discovery rate to deal with multiple hypothesis testing. Note that “Who Leaves Mormonism?” and “A Well-Being Snapshot in a Changing World” use the false discovery rate approach. (These are optional readings that I won’t directly test.) On using the false discovery rate approach to a multiple-hypothesis-testing correction, remember that the 1st hypothesis has to be significant by the FDR standard before you can check for whether a second hypothesis is significant by that standard, and then the second hypothesis needs to be significant by the FDR standard before you can check whether a third hypothesis is significant by that standard, etc. That is, you have to go in order and be able to jump over each hurdle, or you have to stop.

Arithmetic with Diminishing Marginal Utility

Posts on Statistics

  1. Evidence that High Insulin Levels Lead to Weight Gain

  2. Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

  3. Cousin Causality

  4. Can Religion Reduce Suicide?

  5. Less is More in Mormon Church Meetings

  6. Who Leaves Mormonism?

  7. Mental Retirement: Use It or Lose It—Susann Rohwedder and Robert Willis

  8. Data on Asian Genes that Discourage Alcohol Consumption Explode the Myth that a Little Alcohol is Good for your Health

  9. Less Than 6 or More than 9 Hours of Sleep Signals a Higher Risk of Heart Attacks

  10. The Surprising Genetic Correlation Between Protein-Heavy Diets and Obesity

  11. Where is Social Science Genetics Headed?

  12. Exorcising the Devil in the Milk

  13. Are Processed Food and Environmental Contaminants the Main Cause of the Rise of Obesity?

  14. Livestock Antibiotics, Lithium and PFAS as Leading Suspects for Environmental Causes of Obesity

  15. How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with Rising Obesity: Both Can Be Caused By Environmental Contaminants

  16. How Lithium May Have Led to Serious Obesity for the Pima Beginning around 1937

  17. Henry George Eloquently Makes the Case that Correlation Is Not Causation

  18. How Dating Apps Are Making Marriages Stronger

  19. After Crunching Reinhart and Rogoff's Data, We Found No Evidence High Debt Slows Growth

  20. Examining the Entrails: Is There Any Evidence for an Effect of Debt on Growth in the Reinhart and Rogoff Data?

  21. Frightening New England Journal of Medicine Projections for the Rise of Obesity

  22. Hypotheses about Salt and Blood Pressure

  23. Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High School Sports (Betsey Stevenson)

  24. Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok: Fewer Guns, Fewer Suicides

  25. Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance

  26. Adam McCloskey and Pascal Michaillat: Calculating Incentive Compatible Critical Values Points to a t-Statistic of 3 as the 5% Critical Value after Accounting for p-Hacking

  27. Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable

Also, I referred to “Title IX and the Evolution of High School Sports,” by Betsey Stevenson.

Book Choices for the Group Oral Presentation; First Assignment

Timing: The presentations will begin in the third full week of the course.

Six Books for Six Teams:

  1. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

  2. The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (Related blog posts laid out here.)

  3. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

  4. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

  5. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt

  6. The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel

First Assignment, Due 1 PM Tuesday, January 18:

1. Write a few sentences about what drew you to this class and what you hope to learn and get out of it. 

2. List in order your 1st, 2d and 3d choices for the additional book you want to read and do a group presentation on. 

3. Write a few sentences on why you are particularly interested in reading your 1st choice. (Optional: you can write about your 2d and 3d choices, too if you want to.)

Note:

I tried to post this assignment on Canvas. You can submit your answers there. (If you can’t figure out how to submit it on Canvas, you can send it to me in the body of an email.)

Required Reading, Listening and Watching