A great Chesterton's Fence moment: Many people have the general idea that the Fed is bad (or awful). Could it be that they haven't learned about history and economics—what happened before & after there was a Fed, what it actually does, the roles it plays in the economy, etc.?

Have any good randomized controlled trials been run to compare safety, driver satisfaction, arrival times, and other outcomes between "self-driving" and traditional driving modes? If not, aren't they overdue? If people are willing to try it, no problem running that experiment.

This is a very niche thread, but I’ve always struggled studying classic chess games, and yesterday I had a breakthrough when I realized that it’s the same thing as the case method used to teach first-year law students. 🧵

Our department Geisinger Research is adding a group of great new faculty members!

Happy to come out on the "much more rigorous" end rather than the "bad self-selected sample" end of this one 😀

On the invisible gorilla in fiction: "Many stories I’ve admired have a ‘gorilla’ in their midst, that unnoticed thing that was there all along but which I’ve only managed to spot in retrospect." crimereads.com/sarah-easter-c… via CrimeReads

Timeless

“People who are very, very sure of who they are can be pretty oppressive.” — Zadie Smith, interview in The Wall Street Journal, 2023

More art like this please! abc7ny.com/post/edward-ho…

Looks like it’s time for a Sharknado reboot

Can we retire the confusing phrase "gets under the skin" in psychology (e.g., "How does stress 'get under the skin?'")? Countless stimuli and events, including stress, affect the CNS/PNS (under our skin). Some cause long-term changes. But not because they got "under the skin."

Yes, as long as it’s the last thing you buy

Reminiscent of cults, in which the leader clears out wobblers and skeptics by saying increasingly absurd things until the only people who haven't left (or the only ones who will stay after joining up) are the ones who accept all of that nonsense as perfectly reasonable or true.

I wonder if any student will ever top this email.

This is a great one!

Finally out, our new study documenting the surprising extent to which 30 different groups of American high-achievers come from a narrow range of elite educational backgrounds (34 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities). Congrats and thanks to Jonathan Wai and our co-authors!

If only Starbucks hadn’t missed the chance to run the biggest field trial of bias training ever, as Matt Brown and I urged back in 2018: wsj.com/articles/starb…