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joshuafkon

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Show HN: The Forecaster Test- based on Tetlock's superforecasting research

Posted by joshuafkon on Monday January 26, 2026 @01:25PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://www.forecaster-test.com/

In Tetlock's 20-year Expert Political Judgment study, domain experts performed no better in their own field than outside it — and "hedgehog" specialists actually did worse when predicting within their specialty. The Good Judgment Project (Tetlock & Mellers) later found that superforecasters weren't dramatically smarter than average participants — what separated them was thinking style. What...

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Show HN: Debugging conflicting U.S. sexual behavior surveys

Posted by joshuafkon on Sunday January 25, 2026 @09:06PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jcdbm_v2

I'm the author of a new preprint that tries to resolve why major U.S. sexual behavior surveys appeared to report contradictory trends over the past decade. The key move is separating never-occurrence from temporary inactivity among the experienced, rather than averaging them together. That decomposition is applied symmetrically across surveys and validated against an independent dataset. The...

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Show HN: Can you hit replacement? A fertility SIM with cited sources

Posted by joshuafkon on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @09:44AM
from the show-hn dept.

https://www.tfrsim.com/

America's TFR is 1.67. I wanted to understand what it would actually take to get back to replacement (2.1), so I built a simulator where you can stack policies and see the projected effects. Every policy has cited effect sizes (Cohen, Milligan, Raute, etc.) with confidence levels. You can click any policy title to see the methodology and sources. The model includes:Fiscal tracking (policy...

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Re:Near Perfect Variance Suggests China's Infected Numbers Are Fake on Saturday February 15, 2020 @08:13AM (#22335086)
Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200214010037/https://www.barro...
Re:Global debt surges to highest level in peacetime on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @07:06AM (#21069544)
Although the really bleak graph is when you look at the long-term debt projections given the retirement of the baby boomers.

The US and UK both publish long-term projections: https://imgur.com/PbyCJNJ

Re:Why the Federal Reserve is pouring money into the financial system on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @07:24AM (#21004114)
I thought the Financial Times had a more in-depth analysis of the structural reasons behind the spike in the REPO market than I've seen elsewhere. I've seen a few sources point out the tax payment due on the 15th, and the settlement of a large treasury sale, but as the article says:

"...Analysts say these two things alone should not cause the deep cracks in the repo market that we have seen this week. The underlying issue is more structural.

The Fed has been reducing the size of its balance sheet, letting the Treasuries and mortgage bonds it bought following the financial crisis roll off. In turn, that reduces the amount of cash reserves banks hold at the Fed... 'We have had tax payments in the past. What is different this time is that it has followed a period of quantitative tightening,' said Jon Hill, an interest rate strategist at BMO Capital Markets. 'Companies sucking cash from the market was just the tripwire that brought things falling down.'”

Re:Monetary Policy Is the Root Cause of the Millennials’ Struggle on Thursday September 05, 2019 @07:17AM (#20885586)
Short version of the argument:

The constant low (but steady) inflation that we now see as normal under the 2% inflation targeting in a major contributor to the significant rise in prices for interest-rate sensitive assets. (Interesting tangent: John Taylor on why he selected 2% as a target: https://economicsone.com/2018/01/09/the-feds-inflation-targe... )

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