I will try to do my best in responding to your requests for topic coverage, please leave those requests in the comments section…
Philosophy
- Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
- Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
- When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
- Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
- Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
- Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
- Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
- Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
- Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Hat tip: Brainpickings.
“Do studies about publication bias themselves suffer from publication bias?”
That is from MR reader Kevin Burke, who refers me to this post from the excellent Andrew Gelman.
Thiel’s law: A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
That is from the new section of Peter’s lecture notes, recommended of course. To pose a simple question, how many other people are there in the world you would rather listen to? Does that not mean Peter is one of the seminal public intellectuals of our time, albeit working through some non-traditional media of communications?
Hat tip goes to The Browser, which by the way is better than The Tatler ever was.
I have an essay in that book co-authored with Veronique de Rugy. Other contributors include Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, David Graeber, Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, Ariel Dorfman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jeff Sachs, and Nouriel Roubini, among others.
Our essay is an…outlier…in the volume. Here is one bit:
Wall Street has contributed to some very real problems, but the core issues for poor Americans are often health care, education, and the cost of renting an apartment of buying a house. The best way to improve living standards and increase options for future success is to move toward greater competition and accountability in each of those areas, areas that usually have little to do with the financial sector per se.
Our goal is to propose an alternative vision for what OWS should focus on. You can buy the book here.
It is here, now written out, courtesy of the excellent Jeff Kaufman. The original visual and audio of the interview is here. Here is one bit:
Cowen: …If we could imagine an alternative world, where people were, say, only 30% as committed to their personal projects as are the people we know, say the world is more like, in some ways, an ant colony, people are committed to the greater good of the species. Would that be a positive change in human nature or a negative change?
Singer: Of course, if you have the image of an ant colony everyone’s going to say “that’s horrible, that’s negative”, but I think that’s a pejorative image for what you’re really asking …
Cowen: No, no, I don’t mean a colony in a negative sense. People would cooperate more, ants aren’t very bright, we would do an ant colony much better than the ants do. …
It is one of my favorite outputs of me.
But there’s a good-versus-evil story just below my surface, pitting reasonable, constructive, iconoclastic people who agree with me against the benighted masses and their emotional, whiny, conventional intellectual apologists.
Here is more, from BC, interesting throughout. It starts with this:
I’m a libertarian, a natalist, an atheist, a credentialist, an economist, an optimist, a behavioral economist, an elitist, a public choicer, a dualist, a Szaszian, a moral realist, an anti-communist, a pacifist, a hereditarian, a Masonomist, a moral intuitionist, a free-market Keynesian, a deontologist, a modal realist, a Huemerian, a Darwinian, the other kind of libertarian (=a believer in free will), and much more. I could spend hours adding additional labels to the list.
Daniel Klein has a new paper, with Davis, Figgins, and Hedengren:
A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey, which asked: “Suppose you are reading or listening to an economist, and he discloses his own ideological proclivities. Which best represents your attitude toward his doing so:” The results surprised us. Sixty-three percent of respondents chose “I welcome it,” twenty percent chose “I am indifferent,” and only ten percent chose “I dislike it.” Most economists, it appears, welcome ideological openness, and only a small minority dislikes it. Follow-up questions asked reasons why the respondent liked (or disliked) it. These results suggest that economists – or, at least those inclined to complete a survey – are quite inclined toward natural discourse.
I suppose this is good news for the future of the economics blogosphere. Or do economists just say that they welcome this openness, without really meaning it?
From Susan Sontag:
On Intelligence
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence.”
There is also this bit:
Why I Write
There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written.
I write — and talk — in order to find out what I think.
But that doesn’t mean “I” “really” “think” that. It only means that is my-thought-when-writing (or when- talking). If I’d written another day, or in another conversation, “I” might have “thought” differently.
Here is more.
In the Netherlands, where else?:
In early March, the NVVE opened the world’s first euthanasia clinic. It’s called the Levenseindekliniek, the “end of life clinic.” It serves as a point of contact for all Dutch people who want to die but don’t have a primary care physician prepared to help them do so. The clinic has mobile euthanasia teams, each of which consists of a doctor and a nurse. When an individual qualifies for the program after passing a screening, one of the teams makes a house call to inject two drugs. One puts the patient into a deep sleep, while the other stops all breathing, leading to death.
The rest of the story is here. And there is this:
The sweets were distributed two years ago as part of a promotional campaign. At the time, her organization was calling for Dutch pharmacies to be allowed to sell lethal drugs to individuals with a prescription. Printed on the wrappers is the word Laatstwilpil, or “last will pill.”
Philosophically speaking that is:
I signed on to this doctrine of fiduciary responsibility but initially I thought it would mean cooperating with other high status people rather than ripping them off. I now feel uncomfortable about what I had agreed to do because I realize what it can mean. I can’t reject the doctrine of fiduciary responsibility outright, because that would crash advanced capitalism, and furthermore it would leave me unemployable, even to run a charity for Africa vaccines. Yet neither can I justify my GS-requested tasks on a rule-consequentialist basis, because a) I have read that rule consequentialism collapses into act consequentialism, and b) I still feel bad about ripping off high-status folks, even though I probably cannot demonstrate high welfare losses from those practices, at least not relative to the previous actions of the firm. I will instead sidestep these difficult issues by claiming that morality and self-interest point in the same direction, that I am right on both issues, that my former firm is wrong on both issues, and that everyone should respect my denunciation of them, and perhaps I am still in a fog after all.
Had I read such a piece, I would have been impressed. Here is my previous post on the economics of the situation.
On a related note, Energy Secretary Steven Chu “no longer” welcomes higher gas prices.
That is the new lunch time question for visitors. This week we asked Michael Mandel and Megan McArdle.
The old question was “What is your most absurd belief?” (Initiation here, and some answers here).
When should you ask about inputs and when should you ask about outputs? Someone might believe that planet earth is built upon “turtles all the way down,” and still expect 2.2 percent yearly growth in gdp and a lot of pennants for the New York Yankees.
It can be hard to judge how surprising various predictions are. Nonetheless I expect median real wages to continue to decline, over the next ten years, in the non-resource-rich wealthy countries of the world, no Norway please. TGS means that we cannot so readily outrace factor price equalization by keeping one step ahead, the exciting innovations are mostly labor-saving, educational stagnation will just be kicking in, and otherwise American workers really aren’t that much better than the competition.
Do I also expect another outbreak of conflict in the Falklands? The prediction of fascism in Hungary is no longer a surprise.
Readers, what is your most surprising prediction?
Addendum: Angus comments.
Reading Scott’s post induced me to write down these few points. I have noticed that right-wing public intellectuals are skeptical of more expansionary monetary policy for a few reasons:
1. There is a widespread belief that inflation helped cause the initial mess (not to mention centuries of other macroeconomic problems, plus the problems from the 1970s, plus the collapse of Zimbabwe), and that therefore inflation cannot be part of a preferred solution. It feels like a move in the wrong direction, and like an affiliation with ideas that are dangerous. I recall being fourteen years of age, being lectured about Andrew Dickson White’s work on assignats in Revolutionary France, and being bored because I already had heard the story.
2. There is a widespread belief that we have beat a lot of problems by “getting tough” with them. Reagan got tough with the Soviet Union, soon enough we need to get tough with government spending, and perhaps therefore we also need to be “tough on inflation.” The “turning on the spigot” metaphor feels like a move in the wrong direction. Tough guys turn off spigots.
3. There is a widespread belief that central bank discretion always will be abused (by no means is this view totally implausible). “Expansionary” monetary policy feels “more discretionary” than does “tight” monetary policy. Run those two words through your mind: “expansionary,” and “tight.” Which one sounds and feels more like “discretion”? To ask such a question is to answer it.
Within these frameworks of beliefs, expansionary monetary policy just doesn’t feel right. Yet I still agree with the arguments of Scott (and others) that it would have been the right thing to do.
Here is my initial post on the fallacy of mood affiliation.
There hadn’t been many – indeed any – rallies like it before in Russia. Last month saw dozens of toys, from teddy bears to Lego figurines, standing out in the snow of a Siberian city with banners complaining about corruption and electoral malpractice.
At the time, Russian authorities in Barnaul declared the protest “an unsanctioned public event”.
Now a petition to hold another protest featuring 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego people, 20 model soldiers, 15 soft toys and 10 toy cars has been rejected because the toys have been deemed not to be “citizens of Russia”.
“As you understand, toys, especially imported toys, are not only not citizens of Russia but they are not even people,” Andrei Lyapunov, a spokesman for Barnaul, told local media.
The story is here and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
