Category: Society

Social scientists can influence policymakers, but their studies may be skewed—as evidenced by new study that shows how ineffective AI is at predicting our lives.
Three sociologists from Princeton asked hundreds of researchers to predict six life outcomes from 13,000 data points on 4,000 families—using AI or plain statistics.
“None of the researchers got even close to a reasonable level of accuracy, regardless of whether they used simple statistics or cutting-edge machine learning.”
The data came from a 15-year long sociology study, which was designed to find out the life outcomes of children born to unmarried parents.
Experts say this is not surprising, and research has repeatedly shown that simple algorithms are better for assessing risk than complex black-box deep-learning algos.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on April 7, 2020

After analyzing data from several decades, researchers warn of American corporate giants paying less tax than smaller companies, yet being less effective businesses.
In the past, the biggest corporations paid slightly more tax—but for 2015-18, their effective tax rate was a whopping 13% lower compared to smaller corporations.
The same goes for foreign taxes, with the largest corporations paying less than the small ones.
Huge corporations give a lot of their profits to shareholders, but the top 10% of US households own 84% of all corporate shares.
Despite their advantage, even Big Pharma companies failed to address the COVID crisis effectively, which begs the question: should we keep easing their taxes?

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on April 7, 2020

Based on data from over 1 million laid-off Norwegian workers aged 18-40, researchers find that job loss leads to an increase in criminal charges.
It is one of the first studies to show that losing a job can be the cause of criminal activity.
One explanation is that job loss disrupts the daily schedule, creating too much free time—much more crimes happened on weekdays than on weekends.
Male participants were followed for over 15 years between 1990’s and 2000’s.
What’s interesting, there was not enough crime among women participants to include them in the study.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on March 16, 2020

ua.edu

Social scientists find that a troubling majority of North American films contain torture scenes.
They found 275 torture scenes in 27 R-rated movies, 108 PG-13 movies, 58 PG and 7 G movies.
What’s troubling, is that research proves that torture doesn’t work, whereas these movies almost always show that it does.
Right now it’s impossible to say how this affects society at large, answering this question will require further studies.
For now, this is a sort of warning to us, and to screenwriters who should reconsider using torture as a plot device.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on March 9, 2020

nytimes.com

Insane start-up market growth is slowing down, with over 30 start-ups cutting 8,000 jobs in just the last 4 months, and much fewer investments in young companies.
Startups like Casper, a mattress market disruptor that raised over $300 million in venture capital, are plummeting as soon as they enter the stock market.
Other examples include e-scooter giant Lime that pulled out of several countries, or WeWork, which announced a 2,400 people layoff last November.
Even marijuana start-ups are facing significant difficulties, despite having collectively raised $2.6 billion in 2019.
This might not become the next dot-com bubble, but it is a sign that start-ups cannot do irrational things anymore, like forgoing profit in order to disrupt markets.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on February 24, 2020

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