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Jack comments on Is The Blood Thicker Near The Tropics? Trade-Offs Of Living In The Cold - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: diegocaleiro 28 March 2013 05:14PM

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Comment author: Jack 29 March 2013 06:03:21AM 4 points [-]

Shouldn't this be testable (with controls for most confounds) just by examining seasonal differences in productivity?

Comment author: gwern 29 March 2013 02:43:43PM *  3 points [-]

Yes. As far as I know, there's not much effect once you account for things like holidays or vacations (don't expect America to be getting much done in winter ie. December with Christmas, or France to get much done in late summer ie. July/August).

As it happens, I recently finished looking at my own personal data: I found no real* correlation of my self-rated mood/productivity with colder temperatures.

* The coefficients for the various variables are non-zero, of course, so one could argue that I found some small effects; but they didn't survive a complexity penalty and the estimates seem inconsistent to me: eg. there's a positive correlation between maximum daily temperature and minimum - but a negative correlation with mean daily temperature!