The GSS asks people about the morality of premarital sex between post-pubescent minors (TEENSEX): What if [a male and female] are in their early teens, say 14 to 16 years old? In that case, do you think sex relations before marriage are always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all? […]

You can browse free PDFs of the Statistical Abstract of the United States online going back over 100 years (under “Earlier Editions”). It is filled with data on population, commerce, education, and so on. Excellent for doing quantitative history — and not just boring things like how population size has changed over time. During the […]

Click the tab below the body of this post to read previous entries in the series about how previous generations were more depraved. One way to look at how civilized we are is to see how we behave in situations where our conduct can mean the difference between life and death for those around us […]

Since the world started falling apart, books on how crazy we are have never been more popular. Most focus on findings from behavior economics that show how human beings deviate from homo economicus in making decisions, and The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner is no different. Unlike the others in this newly sexy genre, […]

Since most people use online social networks like Facebook to keep in touch with people who they interact with in real life, it doesn’t make sense to sign up for a Facebook account unless others in your area have already. This predicts that we should see a spreading out of Facebook from its founding location, […]

SEED has a set of short video responses to the question “Are we beyond the Two Cultures?”, a reference to the split between the arts & humanities types and the science types. Steven Pinker discusses several ways in which the arts can benefit from working with the sciences, such as gaining a better understanding of […]

To test how sensitive Google Trends is to fundamental changes in the thing you’re asking about, I decided to see if it could pick up the seasonality of fruit availability. Sure enough, it does. Just check blueberries or pomegranate: when the fruits are plentiful, people are very interested in them; outside the peak season, interest […]

One thing that many of us worry about is how well educated the educatable public is about biology and evolution — are they reading superficial stories, or are they being exposed to the deeper ideas? (Set aside whether they’ll remember any of it in a few years.) Actually, what most really worry about is whether […]

A simple but powerful way to determine whether or not there’s a irrational bubble is to look for a lot of people who are participating in a trend who have no business doing so. For instance, a Mexican strawberry-picker making $15,000 a year who gets a $720,000 loan for a home. If these don’t-belong-there people […]

As a follow-up to the previous post on measuring the price-to-earnings ratio of composers, I’ve done the same thing for painters. The motivation is the same, and I’m still using the painter’s score in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment to measure earnings (the more objective valuation). Here, instead of measuring price (the more fashion-driven valuation) with […]

The concept of price-to-earnings ratio can be extended to anything that has an objective, fundamental value and a subjective value that people give to the thing — assuming these can be measured, however crudely. The ratio gets bigger when the price goes up while the thing is still generating the same amount of earnings, or […]

In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark provides data on interest rates to show that Europeans gradually developed lower time preferences. In other words, they were more likely to delay gratification and plan for the future — paying back loans, for example. He also interprets data on wills as showing that most people of English […]

I’m probably not the only person playing catch-up on economics in order to get a better sense of what the hell is going on. Just two economists clearly called the housing bubble and predicted the financial crisis, and only one of them has several books out on the topic — Robert Shiller, the other being […]

When I was a clueless sophomore and junior in college, 2000 – 2001, the cool thing that was sweeping through campuses was anti-globalization. It was more than just that, but this was the core. (There was also the Nader campaign, the Florida vote fiasco, Enron, and 9/11.) At the time I was incredibly far left […]

P-values come from null hypothesis testing, where you test how likely your observed data (and more extreme data) are under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true. As such, they do not allow us to decide which of a variety of hypotheses or models is true. The probability they encode refers to the observed […]

A new paper by Bilalic et al. (2009) (read the PDF here), tries to account for male superiority in chess by appealing to a statistical sampling argument: men make up a much larger fraction of chess players, and that the n highest extreme values — say, the top ranked 100 players — are expected to […]

On the topic of Razib’s atonement for war-blogging, at my personal blog I showed a decline in the media’s coverage of terrorism and of the individuals and groups involved in 9/11. How much broader does this pattern apply? Here I show similar rises and falls in the coverage of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well […]

[Updated] After declining pretty steadily from 1991 to 2005, in 2006 teen birth rates showed a slight uptick. Rather than swallow what the mass media and doomsaying blogosphere infers, read the report for yourself — what you want to know is contained in the first 5 to 10 pages. Since most people worry about the […]

In Jason’s post on the distributions of hair and eye color, it looks like women are claiming their hair is lighter than it is. The sex differences are the opposite of what is found when the hair is rated by others. Women are lying because they think it makes them look better. If they’re going […]

Previously I looked at changing fashions in academic theories and their associated buzzwords, using the articles archived in JSTOR as a sample: see part 1, part 2, and part 3. What about the thing that arts & humanities academics are supposed to study — the text itself? I mean, the vulgar consuming public may flit […]