Media

MarketWatch op-eds

03.04.2024 A Wile E. Coyote Moment for Venture-Backed Startups

01.22.2024 Monetarist Madness

12.12.2023 The Dodgers are Getting Shohei Ohtani for a steal

11.28.2023 Here's what really matters when you buy stocks, real estate, and other investments

09.19.2023 Buying this annuity guarantees that you'll lose out on big money

08.07.2023 Startups are No Longer $100 bills on the Sidewalk

06.07.2023 Will ChatGPT and AI save money-losing tech companies from the short-sellers?

05.10.2023 Life Insurance Premiums are a Wealth Killer

03.20.2023 Inside SVB’s bankruptcy: startup company losses have threatened the financial system for years

03.13.2023 Prevent-defense” may work in football, but playing it safe isn’t a game winner for retirement investors

03.10.2023 Silicon Valley Bank survived the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, but SVB met its match in Powell’s hawkish Fed 

02.27.2023 AI stocks are the new dot-coms

11.29.2022 More Risk Doesn't Always Mean Greater Reward

09.29.2022 Rate hikes are spooking the market, but stock investors are focusing on the wrong rate

09.14.2022 Which Company Will Be the Biggest Unicorn Failure Ever?

09.08.2022 This Ain't No Bubble

08.11.2022 Real Profits, Not False Prophets

07.08.2022 If You Buy the S&P 500 Index Now, There is Only a 4% Chance that You are Paying Too Much

06.13.2022 Delivery Drones, Robotaxis, Even Insurance—Wildly Hyped Dreams for AI Startups are Giving Tech Investors Nightmares

05.05.2022 Once Richly Valued, "Unicorn" startups are Being Gored and Investors Have Stopped Believing

04.08.2022 Stock Buybacks are Washington's Latest Public Enemy

03.07.2022 "Fake it Till You Make it" is an Old Trick for Silicon Valley Startups

10.25.2021 AirBnb, Snap, Lyft and Uber are Just a Handful of the Debt-Ridden, Money-Losig Unicorn Stocks

 09.21.2021 In 2017 I wrote that U.S. Stocks Were Not Overpriced. That's Still True

08.17.2021 Bullish Optimism Boosting "Unicorn" Stocks is more like Delirium

01.18.2020 Apple Dividends

08.15.2019 Buy Stocks Because You Believe in the U.S., not a Trump Bump

07.27.2019 Bitcoin Bubble 2.0

11.19.2018 Bitcoin Babble

07.02.2018 Apple Still Okay at $200

06.21.2018 Curse of the Dow

06.20.2018 Good to Great

06.14.2018 Great to Good

06.04.2018 Money Machine, Not Slot Machine

05.25.2018 You Probably Have Too Little Invested in Stocks

05.07.2018 Apple Stock Buyback

03.28.2018 Stocks & Interest Rates

03.13.2018 Best Month to Buy Stocks

03.05.2018 Stock Market Indicators

02.09.2018 Don't Lock in Losses

01.04.2018 Bitcoin Could Have Been

12.31.2017 The Bitcoin Bubble

11.06.2017 Apple Could Become Even Better as its Growth Slows

10.29.2017 Take Advantage of Mr. Market

09.26.2017 Good News for Value Investors

08.31.2017 Black-Box Investing

08.21.2017 Stocks Still Attractive—Compared to Bonds

Mind Matters op-eds


02.23.2024 Retracted paper is a compelling case for reform

02.21.2024  Why chatbots (LLMs) flunk Grade 9 math tests

01.15.2024 Internet Pollution—If You Tell a Lie Long Enough...

01.09.2024 Computers Still Do Not Understand

01.08.2024 When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot

01.02.2024 Let's Dispose of Exploding Pie Charts

12.15.2023 Large Language Models are Still Smoke and Mirrors

11.10.2023 Computers May Know How But They Still Don't Know Why

11.08.2023 LLMs are Still Faux Intelligence

11.06.2023 A Modest Proposal to Save MLB

10.27.2023 The MLB Coin-Flipping Contest

10.23.2023 Blue Zone BS: The Longevity Cluster Myth

09.25.2023 Confusing Correlation with Causation

08.10.2023 The LK-99 BS Further Undermines the Credibility of Science

07.31.2023 Sabrina Ionescu's Hot Hand

07.21.2023 Using Data Like a Drunk Uses a Lamppost

06.12.2023 The LLM Deep Fake — Follow the Money

05.15.2023 The Death of Peer Review?

04.24.2023 A World Without Work? Here We go Again

03.31.2023 An Illusion of Emergence Part 2

03.27.2023 A Graph Can Tell a Story—Sometimes it’s an Illusion

03.06.2023 Learning to write and speak, writing and speaking to learn

03.01.2023 Text Generators, Education, and Critical Thinking: an Update

02.27.2023 Let's take the "I" out of AI

01.30.2023 Goodhart’s Law and Scientific Innovation in Academia

01.16.2023 Language Models Can Entertain but Are They Useful?

12.19.2022 Large Language Models are an Unfortunate Detour in AI

11.16.2022 Has the Bitcoin Supply of Greater Fools Finally Been Exhausted?

11.09.2022 This Time, Houston Was Blessed by More than Stolen Signs

10.31.2022 Education in the Age of AI

10.17.2022 Mindless Math

10.04.2022 The Hyperspecialization of University Researchers

09.19.2022 Step Away From Stepwise and Other Data-Mining Sinkholes

09.05.2022 Don't Worship Math: Numbers Don't Equal Insight

07.19.2022 Big Brother is Watching You (and Trying to Read Your Mind)

07.15.2022 We Love Baseball Because of—not in Spite of—Lady Luck

07.11.2022 Would AI Run the World Better Than Humans? Not Yet

07.06.2022 Can AI Really Predict Crime a Week in Advance? That's the Claim

06.13.2022 AI: Is Thinking Humany More Important than Acting Rationally?

05.25.2022 Some economic models are alluring, others are useful

05.11.2022 Turing Tests are Terribly Misleading

05.03.2022 Will Higher Prices Disarm Russia? It's Complicated

03.21.2022 The AI Illusion

03.16.2022 The Trump Coin Scam

02.28.2022 Detecting BS Research: If it seems to Good to be True, ...

02.23.2022 The Brady Bunch: Why Research Should be Guided by Common Sense

02.15.2022 Fool's Gold: Even AI Successes Can be Failures

01.31.2022 Get Your 8 (or 5?) Hours of Sleep

01.03.2022 Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years

12.21.2021 The Cult of Statistical Significance—and the Neglect of Oomph

12.01.2021 Zillow's House-Flipping Misadventure

11.23.2021 Fake it 'Til You Make It—The Power Pose Parable Part II

11.22.2021 Fake it 'Til You Make It—The Power Pose Parable Part I

10.25.2021 Destructing the Creative Destruction Myth

09.20.2021 COVID-19, Bayes' Rule, and Simpson's Paradox

08.16.2021 Insurance Company Gives Sour Promises

08.02.2021 An Epic Failure: Overstated Claims in Medicine

07.29.2021 The Word "AI" Has Become a Marketing Ploy

07.13.2021 Using Benford's Law to Detect Bitcoin Manipulation

06.30.2021 The Great American Novel Will Not be Written by a Computer

06.17.2021 A Vulnerable System: Fake Papers and Imaginary Scientists

06.15.2021 Gaming the System: The Flaws in Peer Review

06.14.2021 Publish or Perish—Another Example of Goodhart's Law

05.26.2021 A World Without Work? Don't Hold Your Breath

04.15.2021 Exercise is Medicine

04.09.2021 Artificial Unintelligence

03.29.2021 Doctors Won't Be Obsolete Anytime Soon

03.08.2021 Spot and Choose: Fair Play is Uniquely Human

02.15.2021The Illuminati and How Science Now Fuels Anti-Science

02.01.2021 Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble—Here We Go Again

01.25.2021 Will Mediocrity Triumph? The Fallacy that Will Not Die

01.04.2021 Steph Curry Got Red Hot—and Torched the Hot Hand Fallacy

12.27.2020 AI: Still just curve fitting, not finding a Theory of Everything

12.23.2020 The British Medical Journal's Top Picks in Offbeat Medical Science

12.21.2020 Torturing Data Can Destroy a Career: The Case of Brian Wansink

11.23.2020 The wisdom of crowds: Are crowds really wiser than individuals?

11.09.2020 Cancer maps—an expensive source of phantom patterns?

10.26.2020 It’s Hard to Estimate the Highly Improbable

10.12.2020 The Decline Effect: Most Medicines Disappoint

09.24.2020 Why Intelligent Women Marry Less Intelligent Men

09.14.2020 Computers Excel at Finding Temporary Patterns

08.28.2020 The Stock Market Keeps Rising Despite COVID. Is it Nuts?

08.19.2020 The A-Level Scandal

08.17.2020 Science is More than Data Clusters

08.16.2020 Female Hurricanes: A Hot Air Zombie Study

08.03.2020 Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas

07.13.2020 Election Models: Predicting the Past is Easy and Useless

07.07.2020 Stocks Are Not a Ponzi Scheme

06.29.2020 Inflation is the Least of Our Worries

06.01.2020 The Birds Aren't Real

05.19.2020 What Do Economists Do?

05.14.2020 Vitamin D and COVID-19: Is it Data or Noise?

05.11.2020 Data Mining: A Plague, Not a Cure

04.15.2020 The Stock Market: Gains, Pains, and Panics

03.25.2020 Is Chloroquine Really a COVID-19 "Game Changer"?

03.03.2020 Stanford's AI Index Report: How Much is BS?

02.14.2020 Is Hot Hands Just a Basketball Myth?

02.03.2020 Ransacking Data for Hidden Treasures Seldom Ends Well

01.20.2020 Why Shuffle the Deck 7 Times?

01.06.2020 Serious Investors Should Embrace Stock Market Algos

12.16.2019 Bitcoin is a Classic Bubble Investment

11.20.2019 Your Computer is an Autistic Savant

11.17.2019 Investors, AI Isn't Your Big Fix

10.22.2019 The World Series: What the Luck?

10.07.2019 Love Math and Computers? Love Can be Blind

10.01.2019 A BABY, a GEEK, and a COW

09.30.2019 Computers' Stupidity Makes Them Dangerous

08.16.2019 7-Eleven Babies

08.12.2019 The Paradox of Luck and Skill

Other op-eds

03.12.2023 Chronicle of Higher Education: When it Comes to Critical Thinking, AI Flunks the Test

02.21.2024 Retraction Watch: How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study

12.15.2023 Fast Company: New Ideas are Out There—We Just Need to Look for Them

09.01.2023 Salon: Can we defend against the online anti-science movement?

06.07.2023 Chronicle of Higher Education: How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research

04.30.2023 Salon: ChatGPT and its ilk are still "fake" intelligence

04.24.2023 Retraction Watch: Torturing data to predict bitcoin prices: A book excerpt

04.22.2023 Salon: Our misplaced faith in AI is turning the internet into a cesspool of misinformation and spam

03.23.2023 Campaign for the American Reader: The Page 99 Test of Distrust

03.19.2023 Salon: Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the “holy grail” of AI research

02.21.2023 Salon: AI Chatbots are having their "tulip mana" moment

01.22.2023 Salon: AI chatbots learned to write before they could learn to think

01.01.2023 Salon: Let's Call AI What it Really is: Faux Intelligence

09.25.2022 Salon: No, AI probably won’t revolutionize drug development

08.06.2022 Daily News: AI is helping workers instead of replacing them

07.15.2022 Medium: Baseball, Life, and the Mediocrity Magnet

06.30.2022 Bloomberg: Tesla May be Driving Itself Out of the Running

05.22.2022 Salon: Why "stealth research" is the bane of scientific Inquiry

05.11.2022 Medium: Turing Tests are Terribly Misleading

04.27.2022 Chicago Tribune: The NFL Draft and the Benefits of Trading Down

04.26.2022 Bloomberg: Believe in Science? Bad Big-Data Studies May Shake Your Faith

10.05.2021 The Education Report: Restoring the Luster of Science

07.21.2021  Fast Company: Why Our Fears of Job-Killing Robots are Overblown

06.04.2021 Quartz: AI Has a Long Way to Go Before Doctors Can Trust it With Your Life

05.04.2021 Slate: Why A.I. Moonshots Miss

03.19.2021 Promarket: Why We Need to Stop Relying On Patents to Measure Innovation

08.24.2020 IAI News: The Big Data Delusion

08.01.2019 OZY: Mahommes & the Madden Curse

07.30.2019 Fast Company: AI Needs Humans

01.11.2019 Wired: The Exaggerated Promise of Data Mining

11.20.2018 Fast Company: High-Tech Redlining

11.15.2018 OZY: Using Facebook to Predict Crime

10.12.2018 Fast Company: Beware the AI Delusion

11.21.2016 OZY: Think He's Perfect? He's Bound to Disappoint

10.03.2016 Forbes: Trump and Clinton's Unpopularity Upside

05.12.2015 ABC Science: What Does Regression to the Mean, Mean?

Interviews

09.21.2023 Vasant Dhar: Brave New World

w Books Network: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

08.15.2023 Renee Garfinkel, New Books Network: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

06.27.2023 Ed Fulbright: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

05.17.2023 unSiloed with Gregory La Blanc: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

05.12.2023 Tech Nation with Moira Gunn: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

03.31.2023 ThinkAdvisor: ChatGPT Use Could Spell Disaster for Advisors

03.25.2023 Theory of Change: podcast debate about the effect of ChatGPT on education

03.24.2023 The Avid Reader: podcast interview with Sam Hankin on Large Language Models 

03.15.2023 BuiltIn:  What Is the Eliza Effect?

02.08.2023 The Daily Beast

01.30.2023 Interview with Henrik Cronqvist

01.10.2023 NPR/wbur On Point: GPT-3 Can't Tell Reality From Non-Reality

07.17.2022 As AI language skills grow, so do scientists’ concerns

5.03.2022 March Madness

09.30.2020 Mind Matters re: Phantom Patterns

12.26.2019 Mind Matters Bingecast

08.21.2019 Steve Pomeranz Show: AI Delusion

08.01.2019 Mind Matters: AI Delusion 3

06.21.2019 Mind Matters: AI Delusion 2

06.14.2019 Mind Matters: AI Delusion 1

05.30.2019 Brain Bar 1

05.30.2019 Brain Bar 2

12.09.2018 Edward Fulbright: Big Data

12.03.2018 VoiceAmerica Business: AI Investing

11.07.2018 NPR Tech Nation: AI Delusion

11.05.2018 Think Advisor: Algo Trading

10.19.2018 Silicon Valley Insider: AI Delusion

10.15.2018 NBC Bay Area PressHere: Torturing Data

08.24.2018 Atheneum: AI Delusion

10.17.2017 All Things Considered: Dodgers Regress?

10.16.2017 VoiceAmerica Business: Value Investing

06.21.2017 Steve Pomeranz: Dividend Investing

06.01.2017 Think Adviser: Value Investing

04.27.2016 Patt Morrison: Statistics Mythbuster

08.14.2014 Brian Lehrer: Standard Deviations

06.14.2014 Bloomberg: Clever Tickers

06.14.2014 Your Money Radio: The Real Estate Market

06.13.2014 CNBC: Ticker Symbols

06.13.2014 CNBC: Ticker Symbols

12.XX.2008 MoneyTalks: Not a Time to Panic

XX.XX.2006 VoiceAmerica Business: Investing in Your Home

XX.XX.2006 Minnesota Public Radio: Mortgage Relief

Reviews

11.20.2023 Notices of the American Mathematical Society: Distrust

07.09.2023 Thomas Lumley: Distrust

06.XX.2023 Rigaku: Distrust

06.14.2023 MindMatters: Distrust

06.14.2023 Social Science Journal: Distrust

06.07.2023 Popular Science: Distrust

05.23.2023 Keith Raymond Harris: Distrust

05.23.2023 W. A. Gardner: Critic and Skeptic

05.22.2023 Nature: Distrust

04.25.2023 Retraction Watch: Distrust excerpt

04.11.2023 David Wineberg: Distrust

03.23.2023 Washington Post: Distrust

03.23.2023 Campaign for the American Reader: Distrust

03.23.2023 Engineering & Technology: Distrust

03.23.2023 Library Journal: Distrust

02.03.2023 The American Statistician: Phantom Pattern Problem

09.02.2021 MarketPlace: A Market for Cute Ticker Symbols

08.XX.2021 Robotic and Cognitive Automation: The AI Delusion

02.17.2021 Metascience: The Phantom Pattern Problem

01.25.2021 Bloomberg Businessweek on Steph Curry's 105-shot streak

12.23.2020 Phantom Patterns selected by David Auerbach as one of the top books of 2020

10.30.2020 Social Science Journal: The AI Delusion

08.10.2020 The American Statistician: 9 Pitfalls of Data Science

11.06.2019 Keith Law: review of Standard Deviations

10.26.2019 Telegraph: Overblown Claims, PR Stunts, and Dumb AI

10.07.2019 Economist article on clever tickers

10.01.2019 CNBC article on clever tickers

09.06.2019 City Journal review of AI Delusion

06.02.2019 Floris iL review of AI Delusion

04.23.2019 ING/Datatech: Data Mining absurde resultater

12.06.2018 NBC Think: Is AI Dangerous?

10.17.2018 Daily Star: Robots Thinking Like Humans

10.01.2018 Popular Science review of AI Delusion

05.14.2018 Quantamize Book of the Week: Standard Deviations

04.15.2017 New York Times review of Money Machine

11.15.2016 The Motley Fool: Catchy Symbol, Stronger Stock?

11.15.2016 The Motley Fool: The Most Admired Beat the Market

10.04.2016 Manhattan Book Review: What the Luck?

10.19.2016 The Week: Luck is Real

08.12.2016 Dual Momentum review of Standard Deviations

07.15.2016 Kirkus Starred Review: What the Luck?

04.26.2016 Patt Morrison: Celebrity Deaths

04.26.2016 Patt Morrison: Statistics Mythbuster

04.26.2016 Modern Machine Shop Review of AI Delusion

11.10.2015 Huffington Post review of Standard Deviations

08.16.2015 MathTango review of Standard Deviations

05.20.2015 Kirkus Starred Review: Standard Deviations

01.19.2015 SF2 Concatenation review of AI Delusion

12.11.2014 FifthEstate review of Standard Deviations

11.28.2014 Wired UK article on massaging statistics

09.24.2014 BookBag review of Standard Deviations

09.08.2014 LA Weekly Review of Standard Deviations

09.01.2014 Scientific American article on survivor bias

11.04.2008 CNBC: How to Calculate a Home's Value

08.23.2008 Los Angeles Times: Houseonomics book review

08.17.2008 Chicago Tribune: Pick Your Spots When Remodeling

08.03.2008 Los Angeles Times: Should You Buy a Home Now?

07.01.2008 MarketWatch: Tips for Homebuyers

05.20.2006 Forbes: Your Castle's P/E Ratio

04.01.2006 New York Times: New Math on Homes

04.01.2006 New York Times: Calculating What To Pay for a Home

08.13.2005 New York Times:  Assess Your Area’s Real Estate Bubble

06.13.2004 Bloomberg: Your Home By the Numbers

06.02.2004 Science News Online: Death Waits for No One

06.15.2003 Bloomberg: A Home Buyer's Froth Detector

05.30.2002 MoneyCentral: Follow the Pendulum to Avoid the Pits

01.21.2002 Sports Illustrated: That Old Black Magic