Top all-time · #2999
Jason Collins
Personal blog · jasoncollins.blogscienceeconomics
Jason Collins's personal blog at jasoncollins.blog covers science and economics. Since 2018, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Ergodicity Economics: A Primer”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jason Collins's posts on replication problems in psychology (Kahneman, the marshmallow test), ergodicity economics and statistical puzzles, mostly as sources or corrections to claims.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Ergodicity Economics: A Primer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-23
- Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-24
- Ergodicity Economics: A Primer (2020)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-04
- Aren’t we smart, fellow behavioural scientists – Jason Collins blog2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-12
- /2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-28
- /2018/05/31/the-marshmallow-test-held-up-ok/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-03
- Re-Reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-01
What Hacker News says?
Here are two other blogs I found through the same (now unknown) source: - https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - https://jasoncollins.blog/ Though they've gotten a bit more topical and/or political in recent times.
Comment linking /
on “Still alive”Submitted Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record as a story · 138 points
HN discussionThere was a bunch of hype around superior memory in chimpanzees for certain tasks[0]. However, this has subsequently been debunked[1]. Still impressive on the part of chimps! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNrWUS13th8 [1] https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/humans-1-chimps-0-correc...
Comment linking /posts/humans-1-chimps-0-correcting-the-record
on “Crows are even smarter than we thought”Submitted Ergodicity Economics: A Primer as a story · 17 points
HN discussionI have read the paper[1], and its discussion section supports the conclusions drawn by other readers, who are smarter than I am[2][3][4]. Here's one excerpt from the discussion: > "When considering how our results might inform intervention development, recall that models with con-trols for concurrent measures of cognitive skills and behavior reduced the association between delay of gratification and age-15 achieveme…
Comment linking /2018/05/31/the-marshmallow-test-held-up-ok/
on “No one who got Moderna's vaccine in trial developed severe Covid-19”Submitted The human benchmark is typically unimpressive as a story · 3 points
HN discussionResponse by one of the original authors: https://jasoncollins.blog/2018/05/31/the-marshmallow-test-he...
Comment linking /2018/05/31/the-marshmallow-test-held-up-ok/
on “The Marshmallow Test: What Does It Really Measure?”Submitted Ergodicity Economics: A Primer as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd you're well served with this response, as the actual work he did is basically not reproducible. No matter how many best selling books made into movies; it's still bullshit. https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow... https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/kahneman-and-tversky-re... https://jasoncollins.blog/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-th... I read it on advice of a good pal, and it sure see…
Comment linking /2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
on “Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]”Submitted Psychological and Genes' Eye View of Ergodicity Economics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI guess what I always find unconvincing about these kind of arguments is that they require 0-sum trades, and real world trades are positive sum. I think this is more of a gambling simulation than an economic one. However, even with positive-sum games, the nature of the transaction can have big impact on the wealth inequality. There's a great writeup on that in https://jasoncollins.blog/2020/01/22/ergodicity-economic…
Comment linking /2020/01/22/ergodicity-economics-a-primer/
on “Peter Norvig's Economic Simulation (2018)”Submitted Ergodicity Economics: A Primer (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat you are getting at is that for a single person, the chance of going bankrupt is high but for a population ensemble, the average wealth increases. This is absolutely true. All it takes is to understand that for the single person, the model isn't ergodic but all expected value based models assume ergodicity. See [section 4 here]( https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/ergodicity-economics-a-p... ) on losing wealth o…
Comment linking /posts/ergodicity-economics-a-primer
on “The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy”Submitted Re-Reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere are a few examples: https://jasoncollins.blog/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-th... I would just avoid factoids from psychology altogether for the next few years while the researchers in that field sort everything out. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo... Worse, some of the famous studies aren't merely underpowered or based on nonrepresentative samples (like college kids) or sloppily…
Comment linking /2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
on “How the brain 'approximates' without counting”Submitted Aren’t we smart, fellow behavioural scientists – Jason Collins blog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEvolution will take care of falling fertility. Probably won’t take that long, either: https://jasoncollins.blog/2018/10/11/an-evolutionary-project...
Comment linking /2018/10/11/an-evolutionary-projection-of-global-fertility-and-population-my-new-paper-with-lionel-page-in-evolution-human-behavior/
on “As U.S. fertility rates collapse, finger-pointing and blame follow”Submitted Aren’t we smart, fellow behavioural scientists as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWorking link https://jasoncollins.blog/2018/06/28/explaining-the-hot-hand...
Comment linking /2018/06/28/explaining-the-hot-hand-fallacy-fallacy/
on “The Inspection Paradox is Everywhere: a surprising statistical illusion”Submitted How I focus (and live) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is somewhat eye opening to me, in the same way that Miller and Sunurjo's work was. > In other words, selecting which part of the data to analyze based on information regarding where streaks are located within the data, restricts your choice, and changes the odds. [0] I'm not particularly great at statistics, so I fall trap to a lot of these kinds of misconceptions. I appreciate articles like this getting shared…
Comment linking /2018/06/28/explaining-the-hoACt-hand-fallacy-fallacy/
on “The Inspection Paradox is Everywhere: a surprising statistical illusion”Submitted Behavioral science policy recommendations early in the pandemic as a story · 1 points
HN discussionReminds me of the book “The Mind Is Flat” by Nick Chater, discussed in this blog : https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/nick-chaters-the-mind-is...
Comment linking /posts/nick-chaters-the-mind-is-flat-the-illusion-of-mental-depth-and-the-improvised-mind
on “The brain is not a computer (2016)”Submitted Ergodicity Economics: A Primer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThinking, Fast and Slow is still worth it, but anyone thinking of reading it should probably be aware that it's taken a pretty hard hit in the psychology replication crisis. A lot (the majority, at least at one point) of its cited studies have failed to replicate. They may still be true (I think Kahneman has said that he believes most of them will bear out eventually) but worst case there may be entire chapters that…
Comment linking /posts/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow
on “Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?”Submitted Bad Behavioural Science: Failures, bias and fairy tales as a story · 1 points
HN discussionis this a related problem to the how many times to flip a coin with a chance to increase your wealth by 50% ? https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/ergodicity-economics-a-p...
Comment linking /posts/ergodicity-economics-a-primer
on “A collection of quant riddles with answers”Submitted The case against loss aversion as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe experiment is part of a larger research program to study delayed gratification. It was never intended to help parents raise their children. Asking for immediate applications is an odd standard for basic science research. (Unless you reject the value of basic science research entirely.) Further, the result in a recent replication [1] was a correlation of .28 between the time to ring the bell (to get the marshmall…
Comment linking /posts/the-marshmallow-test-held-up-ok
on “Should this paper in Psychological Science be retracted?”
