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Feb 25 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Volkswagen killed 290 US kids, and led to low birth weights for 38,686 more, by cheating on diesel emissions.

Also an illustration that air pollution is much more dangerous than we think: just 1 cheating diesel per 1,000 cars upped infant mortality by 1.7%. via @jenniferdoleac ImageImage
If we understood the health damage of fossil fuel cars, we would be pushing for electric vehicles much, much more: "moderate amounts of car pollution impair population health at all pollution levels and across the socioeconomic spectrum." Here's the paper: academic.oup.com/restud/advance… Image
Another study demonstrating the danger of car emissions: when electronic tolls were introduced in New York, congestion at toll plazas dropped, lowering pollution. The rate of premature births to mothers near the plaza dropped by 8% & low birth rate by 10%! economics.yale.edu/sites/default/… Image
And these are just the health effects of air pollution. On top of that, I think people don’t realize how big the cognitive effects of air pollution are for even small amounts of particulates in the air. We would all be significantly smarter if air quality was higher. 👇

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More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 23
Short digital detoxes actually seem to backfire: a day-long break from social media does not make you feel any better & may even lower your sense of connection, according to preregistered experiments. Instead, the researchers had to deal with people cheating on their 1-day detox.
A week-long experiment where the treatment group reduced their online social media use by 50% also had no impact on either well-being or ability to concentrate (though people assigned to reduce social media use thought they could concentrate better - even though they couldn't!)
Careful studies on the effects of social media & screens on well-being find a lot of these null & small effects. For example, this study of 355k teens shows the impact of screen time on well-being for adolescents is only a little larger than the impact of eating potatoes 🥔
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 15
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!
Read 4 tweets
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

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