Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. Inside the collapse of Venezuela. (2022). William Neuman

The things that get measured are the things that get done.

Regulation of Bad Things That Almost Never Happen but Could: Hipaa and the Individual Insurance Market

Since the collapse of the Clinton plan for large-scale health reform, Congress has approached the medical care sector of the economy very gingerly. One apparent lesson of the reform (though an obvious lesson in life) is that people are much less eager for improvements they have to pay for than for those that are supposed to come at zero cost. Once it became clear that the Clinton plan would hav...

When Things Get Worse before they Get Better: Regulatory Fit and Average- Reward Learning in a Dynamic Decision-Making Environment

This work explores the influence of motivation on choice behavior in a dynamic decision-making environment, where the payoffs from each choice depend on one’s recent choice history. Previous research reveals increased levels of exploratory choice among participants in a regulatory fit. The present study placed promotion and prevention-focused participants in a dynamic environment for which opti...

The peculiar longevity of things not so bad.

Intense hedonic states trigger psychological processes that are designed to attenuate them, and thus intense states may abate more quickly than mild states. Because people are unaware of these psychological processes, they may mistakenly expect intense states to last longer than mild ones. In Study 1, participants predicted that the more they initially disliked a transgressor, the longer their ...

Old Linguists Never Die, They Only Get Obligatorily Deleted

Martin Kay, in his speech delivered in 2005 on receipt of his ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, specified computational linguistics as follows: “Computational linguistics is trying to do what linguists do in a computational manner” (Kay 2005, page 429). I believe it is a legitimate question for a computational linguist to ask what linguists do. Coming from Prague, it is then quite a natural quest...