One bit of economic theory that doesn't get talked about is marginalism. That is, that the value of things and how they affect our behavior is usually based on how much adding or subtracting a little bit from our current circumstances changes them. The classic examples is that we put a much higher price on diamonds than on water even though the total value we get from water is much higher than…
Metaculus is a website where you can make bets on the future. There are some websites like this, like Polymarket , where you make bets in real money but Metaculus isn't like that - generally the only thing at state is one's pride and what you can learn from the collective wisdom of everybody making predictions on a question. I say generally because occasionally someone will bankroll a tournament…
The recent 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima brought to mind some thoughts I'd had when I was watching the Oppenheimer movie a little while ago, and so I thought I'd finally get around to writing them up. Ultimately Truman thought that dropping the atomic bombs was the best way to bring about Japan's unconditional surrender and its hard to disagree about that. The…
With the rise of generative AI we've all seen a lot of discussion about whether AIs could be conscious, now or in the future. While many of these discussions are productive I've seen others that look more like the proverbial youths arguing about the question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" That's not a question you can just answer, but by…
What rating should you give the driver who just dropped you at your door via Uber or Lyft. Well, unless they messed up in some noticeable way you give them a 5 out of 5 rating unless they messed up somehow. That means you give the same rating to a driver who was just passable as to a driver who was outstanding, but you don't want to unfairly sink the career of the passable driver when everybody…
It might not seem likely from the title, but Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is an effective defense of democracy (previously reviewed by me here ). It's easy to come up with cases where most voters naturally favor policy proposals that experts in the matter think are crazy. The author of the book is an economist and it's easy to come up with…
There's a famous logical paradox put forward by Carl Gustav Hempel regarding observations and logical inference. Lets say we have some statement we're interested in like "all raven's are black". In logical terms you could write that as "if something is a raven, then that thing is black" or "Raven → Black". And by formal logic this is equivalent to the contrapositive statement that "if something…
Amid all the excitement of the last while I wanted to highlight one bit of good news. Last week a bunch of stuff happened with regard to space launches. Some bad as well with SpaceX's Starship exploded spectacularly (seriously watch if you haven't seen it). They're still sort of supposed to be exploding at this point in testing but it exploded much earlier than expected and the danger of debris…
A decade ago a scientist named Dr. Todd Rider had a clever idea for an anti-viral drug. In normal eukaryotic cells you have DNA that spends most of its time as a double strand except when being copied or transcribed to an RNA message. That RNA message is single stranded as is the rest of the RNA in your cells except for the occasional short length in some cell processes. But generally a big length…
On the long flight to China I tried to do as much sleeping as I could manage, but besides that I did some reading and one book that I was reading was Scott Sumner's The Money Illusion . I confess I haven't gotten around to finishing that book yet, but it had so many references to a much shorter work that I did manage to go out and read that. This was David Hume's Of Money , an essay that seems…
Hello, it's been a while since I've written anything and I'll try to do more going forward. I've had an eventful year, I got engaged shortly after the ball dropped in Times Square, bough a house with my fiance, commenced renovations of the house, got married, and went on a honeymoon in China. And I thought some of the stuff I saw in China would make a good topic to write about. There were a bunch…