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by o09rdk 2460 days ago
I don't follow him regularly unless something he's saying comes up somehow, at which point I kinda look into him again.

He's famous for lambasting psychology, some of which is deserved, but some of which is just ignorant. Earlier this year he started complaining about psychologists ignoring long-tailed/skewed distributions, which is so absurd and widely written about I don't even know where to start, as it's a basic corollary of a lot of modern models. He also selectively miscites literature; god forbid he should do a systematic meta-analysis.

More of my concern is reinventing the wheel. I think he deserves a lot of credit for drawing attention to wrong models and assumptions in economics but model misspecification has been a topic that's been written about for decades in the statistics literature (e.g., "all models are wrong but some are useful", sandwich error estimators, pseudolikelihood ratio, model averaging, the work of Dawes, etc.). I agree with the general point he's making with these types of things, but his discussions would be a lot more interesting if he gave credit where it's due, expanding on others' past work rather than burying it.

Mostly I wish he'd tone himself down a bit, to get his signal:noise ratio in a better place. But then maybe he wouldn't draw attention to some of these issues.