Share this page!

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Twitter logo
Feb 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Fellow academics, what is a powerful concept from your field that, if more people understood it, their lives would be better?

This paper surveyed every economist in Sweden and found the overwhelming choice in economics was "opportunity cost." The paper: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
In entrepreneurship, one contender is disciplined experimentation for assumption testing. Whether you are starting a company or exploring a career, you should think of cheap tests that you can run before you commit to reduce your uncertainty & improve odds
In learning, I think a very useful concept is "desirable difficulties" - the idea that, just like any other kind of training, you need to be challenged to learn. This is a problem because being challenged makes us feel ignorant, so we think we learn less!
And for more on opportunity cost and why economists view it as the most important economic concept for people to understand, see this thread inspired by the paper. It is, unfortunately, kind of boring, but hopefully useful:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 13
We don't talk enough about a core reason for the fracturing of elite control in politics: the end of board interlocks, the bedrock of the ancient "old boys networks." Sociologists have studied them for a century, now they are rapidly unraveling. Summary: theconversation.com/corporate-amer…
The end of board interlocks (where directors sit on multiple corporate boards) was caused by the scandals that led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and the Act itself. It made sitting on multiple boards risky.

100 directors sat on 5+ major boards in 1974, now only one does.
Elite control via overlapping boards of directors has been concern for so long that soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a book about it in 1914. Highly connected board members also had links to government and charities, allowing elites to coordinate their action
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 5
The problem with unmoderated online spaces is that a few people will always ruin them. Most conflicts between Reddit can be traced to a handful of active users with a history of angry comments. A mere 0.1% of all Reddits generate 38% of attacks on others, and 1% accounts for 74%.
A second paper shows that, while unrepentant trolls often need to be banned, most other conflict can be fixed by quickly removing bad posts & educating people about why the content is gone. Trolls aside, giving these explanations reduces future bad behavior by most users.
Here is the paper on community conflicts on the web: arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03697…

And here is the one on moderation: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114… (which basically boils down to an XKCD comic, as is fitting)
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 5
Management is like a technology that makes companies better, and the source of US business success. 11,000 interviews in 34 countries shows that over 30% of the productivity advantage of US firms comes from better management. But management can be learned! hbs.edu/ris/Publicatio…
Improving management has a long-term impact. A decade ago, teams of consultants introduced basic management practices to some Indian plants & left others as a control. The practices boosted performance then. A followup study shows about half the effects persist 10 years later!
Management training boosts startups success, too! Learning about how to conduct experiments, manage teams, pitch ideas & network all increase growth for startup companies in controlled experiments conducted around the world.
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Jan 31
The famous illustration of survivorship bias was not drawn by Abraham Wald (who developed the concept in WWII). It was made for Wikipedia in 2016 of a Ventura bomber, which was mostly retired when Wald wrote his report. Wald had no illustrations, just math ams.org/publicoutreach…
This is likely the first bullet-holed plane illustration of the semi-apocryphal Wald story (he apparently did tell the military to armor where there were no holes, but the story is second hand).

We just forget the earlier illustrations... for some reason.
Incidentally, Abe Wald was the statistics professor in this amazing (and true!) story right out of Good Will Hunting.
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Jan 28
This is a paper on how irrational beliefs persist that I think about often.

Bocconi University, like many colleges, has a superstition: if you walk between these lion statues, you won’t graduate. The paper finds 20% of students wouldn’t walk between the lions for $1,000! 1/4
But 80% of students will privately take much less 💰 & break the superstition if others do. They conform from peer pressure, not belief. If others stop acting like they believe, so will they. But the 20% of people who really believe are validated by the 80% who conform. Cycle! 2/
A relevant lesson: as true believers are enabled by others: “...policies that target false beliefs with the intention to change individual & group behavior may face substantial headwinds so long as those false beliefs are validated by the conforming behavior of the majority.” 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Jan 26
We REALLY should be investing in better indoor air filtration; it isn't just for COVID. This paper finds a shocking 26% higher error rate for professional chess players when PM2.5 increases by just 10 μg/m3 (outdoor air in the US & Europe averages over 10 μg, Asia is much higher)
Add that to the research on how much test scores are affected by air conditioning on hot days, and it is pretty clear that good HVAC systems will often pay for themselves in schools, offices, and anywhere else thinking matters.
Here is another example of the effect of low levels of air pollution on our ability to do complex thinking. It sounds funny at first - the speeches of politicians get dumber on high pollution days - but it gets more alarming the more you think about it.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @emollick has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @emollick!

Read all threads by @emollick

:(