Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?
Nobel laureate, Princeton economics professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a brilliant man. I am not so brilliant. So when Krugman makes strident claims about macroeconomics, a complex...
View ArticleHow Betting Can Improve the Social Sciences
The conversation over how useful betting is for improving the quality of discourse has gone from a slow burn to a rapid exchange in the last week. It has focused mostly around Alex Tabarrok’s claim...
View ArticleTowards a Probabilistic Libertarianism
Armed with potent They Might Be Giants inspired metaphors, Noah Smith recently took aim at what he has long argued is libertarianism’s greatest blindspot: the local bully. Seen through the lens of...
View ArticleThe Golden Age of Social Science Has Begun
If there is one thing that has held the human sciences back more than anything else, it is the quality of the data they have available. Sure, we can do little lab experiments with college freshmen and...
View ArticleVirtue is a Desire Modification Technology
Pareto-based marginal utility theory is an exceedingly powerful tool, but like all tools, it is not fitted to every purpose. The topology of human desires is not nearly as simple as a set of ranked...
View ArticleDefending the Spirit of the Ideological Turing Test
An optimist might be tempted to predict that increasing awareness of the cognitive biases literature would cause a proportional increase in humility. After all, the basic message of the literature is...
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