Economist John Cochrane wrote a WSJ article where he – no joke-- argues that the US GDP per capita could be around $160,000/year if it weren’t for that damn meddling government. He argues that regulations are solely to blame for low economic growth with this sort of rigor:

A couple of days ago, I took the “Big 5” personality test on FiveThirtyEight, and I got these results:

People are not good at discerning bullshit. Everyday I lose respect for someone new announcing their belief in something idiotic. Actors are seemingly all either anti-vaxxers or Scientologists. Others believe in far-right conspiracy nonsense. A few serious people even seem to think MMT isn’t nonsense

Intended Audience: Anyone who’s interested in machine learning for text processing and doesn’t mind a little math.

TL;DR: A study tests 171 theories on a sample size of 900 individuals and surprisingly finds a “statistically significant” result. Readers digest accepts this result as gospel to write clickbait.

Part of a series debunking bad economics on the internet

Reading time: 2 min. TL;DR Cantor pairing is a perfect, reversible, hashing function from multiple positive integers to a single positive integer. It’s cool. Its one drawback is that it can output very big numbers.

I fixed a keyboard problem I never found a solution to on the internet today, so I’ll add the solution here for posterity.

Part of a series debunking incorrect economics on the internet