Anthony McCanny

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

@thsottiaux Latex notation for math rendering in the app. For those of us doing economics/statistics work that would really improve usability

What could we do better on Codex? App, model, strategy and features… what’s wrong in how we approach things that we should improve immediately?

@nickcammarata i'd love to know if it would replicate in the general population. maybe there are a bunch of lay person arhats out there centred in their heart and experiencing joy

@anthonymccanny or more phenonomology things where sense of self is which I think is closely related to suffering. it’s only been an hour but this is a pretty ridiculous

the science of happiness is the science of suffering, there is no step 2 after removing suffering. joy and peace is underneath and naturally arises academia’s study of happiness today isn’t working bc they’re trying to study happiness correlates rather than suffering mechanics

@nickcammarata it's interesting to think about what an academic study of suffering mechanics looks like though? we probably need much better measurement...

@nickcammarata if we're right, academics will get there, and hopefully bring some segment of society with them. we're in the willow bark stage of happiness science, folk experts know what works, but it will take a while for scientists to isolate salicylic acid

The McGill-UofT Wellbeing Seminar is back! Join us monthly for online talks with researchers on key well-being topics. Each 3-month mini-series features two perspectives, followed by a panel discussion. Talks are at noon EST on select Tuesdays. 📷

@phyllis_lun @pwb_lab Thanks Phyllis! Let the record show that the report could not have happened without Phyllis. I learned a lot from you about getting things done and out the door.

The Canadian Happiness Report with @anthonymccanny and @pwb_lab is out! Here we included a section about youth well-being and mental health. Learned so much from the talented Anthony who brings his passion and knowledge of measurement to the project

Oh, finally, we put up all our code and data (except the Gallup World Poll stuff, sorry) to replicate the report on OSF: osf.io/rdzhy/. If you want all the Canadian well-being data in one place, to play with, or for student projects, etc., it might be helpful! 11/10

This project has inspired the @pwb_lab to think about how we can do data collection well, how much subjective well-being data is being impacted by context, and to think again about what questions we ask and when they’re equivalent. I will follow up with a thread soon. 10/10

Today the @pwb_lab and I publish the 2024 Canadian Happiness Report! Confirming the findings of @HappinessRpt, Canadians do feel that the quality of their lives are declining, however they remain very satisfied with these lives (especially before the pandemic)! 🧵 1/10

@alz_zyd_ I also wonder if the systems you're trying to manage are public markets, governments, institutions if you do not have a responsibility to make your intuitions and predictions formal and legible. Is that what economists are up to?

@alz_zyd_ Just because complex systems are typically managed with poor prediction doesn't seem like a reason that economics (or whatever social science is trying to improve social systems) should not try to do it better.

People make fun of economists because we suck at forecasting, but, 1. Is "forecasting" one of the main goals of economics as a discipline? 2. What does "forecasting" even mean?