Jay Daigle

@profjaydaigle.bsky.social

189 Followers 36 Following

Mathematician at GWU. I write about teaching, epistemology, math, and metascience, and how hidden assumptions shape our decisions and beliefs. I write at https://jaydaigle.net/blog

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there.

Excerpt from an interview of Mansfield by Tyler Cowen. Highlighted: "There are no accidents in a great book. Everything is as it should be. To understand it, you don't want to go to some second-rate explanation that doesn't take account, or rather departs from, the text."

Researchers are motivated to discover new and surprising things; and we, as news consumers, are most interested in new and surprising results. The wild overestimates that these low-power studies produce are surprising and counterintuitive, precisely because they are false. But they are surprising and counterintuitive, so they tend to draw public attention and show up in the news.

But a surprisingly large result isn’t as counterintuitive as one that’s the opposite of what you expect. (Imagine if a study “proved” that 5-year-olds are taller than 15-year-olds!) And low-power studies give us those results too.

But honestly, I feel like both the garden of forking paths and p-hacking are just versions of Bitcoin’s Proof of Work method. You get rewards for showing how much effort you had to go to get SIGNIFICANCE. If you have a study with a p-value on your first try of 1e-8, people will say “But that result was obvious! Why do they even bother with a test?” If you garden-of-forking-paths or p-hack your way to 0.047, you will be credited for your perspicacity.