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An Appetizing Question: Why Don't We Read Nutrition Labels?

A single wheat tortilla has 18% of the daily value of sodium. I discovered it just recently. The discovery followed my reading an article discussing serious negative consequences of excess sodium for heart health. In turn, the discovery was followed by two others: I realized that I insufficiently assimilated information

Macaulay's Confessions

One of the people who has benefited the most from Macaulay’s reforms recently sent an email, part of a larger email chain that now generally implies some travesty, which quoted Macaulay as having spoken the following (on Feb 2nd, 1835 in India, the same day his gave his Minute

Flawed Analyses in Deliberative Polls

A Deliberative Poll works as follows: A random sample of people are surveyed. Out of the initial sample, a random subset is invited to deliberate, given balanced briefing materials, randomly assigned to small groups moderated by trained moderators, allowed the opportunity to quiz experts, and in the end surveyed again.

Idealog: Internet Panel + Media Monitoring

Media scholars have for long complained about the lack of good measures of media use. Survey self-reports have been shown to be notoriously unreliable, especially for news, where there is significant over-reporting, and without good measures, research lags. The same is true for most research in marketing. Until recently, the

Coding Issues in the ANES Cumulative File

I have, on occasion, used American National Election Studies (ANES) cumulative file to do over time comparisons. Roughly half of those times, I have found patterns that don’t make much sense. Only a small fraction of the times when the patterns didn’t make sense have I chosen to

Prospect Theory in Retrospect

Tversky and Kahneman, in “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice”, “describe decision problems in which people systematically violate the requirements of consistency and coherence, and [â€¦] trace these violations to the psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of options.” They start

The Problem of Pakistan

The following article is by a regular contributor to the blog, Chaste. The article is a comprehensive analytic exploration of the extent of problem that we face in Pakistan, and a considered exploration of the possible alternatives. I will first sketch the history of and the situation in Pakistan, and

The Jury is Out: Correctness of Democratic Decisions

Rousseau saw majority preferences as an expression of the general will (The Social Contract). With Condorcet, the general will was also imbued with the notion of correctness. As contradictory evidence is ample, it is time to remove the false comfort of any epistemic benefit accruing from such aggregation. Condorcet Jury

Disproving God

A tribute to Charles Darwin on his 200th birth anniversary Some say that science should be absent from discussions about God is because while science concerns itself with the material, God concerns himself with the ‘spiritual’ ‘nonmaterial’ realm. But there are a number of theories of God that explicitly deal

Understanding Delhi and the Delhi Walla

The article was written for The Delhi Walla The Delhi Walla is a journalist’s blog, albeit without the drama and urgency with which journalism and journalists are often associated with today. The writing on the blog represents that prior tradition among journalists which was about subtle observation, gentle humor,