Good Fucking Point

The teacher took a breath. "He took the road that less people take. What does that mean to you?"

At least three girls around the room were waggling their hands in the air while clutching their opposite shoulders. "Ooo Ooo Ooo . . ."

"What would be the advantgage of taking a road less traveled by?"

"No traffic?"

Laughing.

Richard Price, Lush Life, p. 299

Ends and Means

In my view, the most dangerous phenomenon is not hatred. It is power. Hitler's hatred would have amounted to nothing had he remained a Bohemian painter. Many political leaders have caused great harm in spite of the best of motives. I am no fan of hatred, but I think what is really important is not to condemn hatred but to check power.

Arnold Kling, "Crime without Hate, Hate without Crime"

The Partisanship Package

Partisanship feels good – you get intellectual clarity, a sense of morality, and the warmth of fellowship all in one.

John McWhorter, "Nice Speech, But We Won't Be Coming Together"

Ratios of Small Numbers

Then someone at the table – and I couldn’t believe this – said, ‘My uncle smoked a hookah pipe all his life, and he lived until he was 90 years old.’ And I had a sudden flash of insight, which was this. Suppose you have something that actually kills half the people. Even if you’re a heavy smoker, your chance of dying of lung cancer is not 50 per cent, so therefore, even with something as extreme as smoking and lung cancer, you still have lots of cases where people don’t die of the disease. The evidence is certainly all around you pointing in the wrong direction – if you’re willing to accept anecdotal evidence – there’s always going to be an unlimited amount of evidence which won’t tell you anything.

Andrew Gelman on Statistics

Sounds Like a Win-Win to Me

Grading diamonds is a subjective business, and the better a diamond looks to you when you're grading it, the more money it's worth -- as long as you can convince your customer that it's the grade you're selling it as. Here's an easy, effective way to do that: First lie to yourself about what grade the diamond is; then you can sincerely tell your customer "the truth" about what it's worth.

As I would tell my salespeople: If you want to be an expert deceiver, master the art of self-deception. People will believe you when they see that you yourself are deeply convinced. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact it's easy -- we are already experts at lying to ourselves. We believe just what we want to believe. And the customer will help in this process, because she or he wants the diamond -- where else can I get such a good deal on such a high-quality stone? -- to be of a certain size and quality. At the same time, he or she does not want to pay the price that the actual diamond, were it what you claimed it to be, would cost.

Clancy Martin, "The Lie Guy" (via)

Redistribution vs. Public Provision

I think we (who are Austrian/libertarian-leaning) have to be very careful about separating arguments against public provision from arguments against redistribution.

There are serious issues with many kinds of subsidies and public ownership that do not exist with simple income redistribution or vouchers. The arguments against redistribution per se I think are a lot weaker, and many can be overcome by redistributing (a basic income or vouchers) to ALL citizens, funded by a flat tax.

liberty, comment on "An Assignment for Progressives" by Arnold Kling

In Defense/Praise of Income Inequality

I [...] worry that eliminating status competition on the income margin pushes it to less productive margins. If we’re hard wired to be status seeking, isn’t it generally a good thing that that’s channeled towards producing economic value for others rather than towards military exploits, feats of warmaking valor, potlach, or other more destructive forms?

Eric Crampton (quoted here)

Also: Neuroscience

Economics has a bad habit of routinely rediscovering (and taking credit for) ideas that are well-established elsewhere. Sometimes, whole fields are victimized in this way—social networks, institutional analysis, and culture—as smart economists assume an idea that is new to them, is new to everyone, and go off and reinvent some wheels.

Kieran Healy, "A Wealth of Notions", Sociological Forum 22: 119–25 (p. 124)

Taking Popper Seriously

The world is extremely complicated and doesn’t make sense – at least not in the way we want it to. We don’t want to understand the world simply by following some complex routine of intellectual gymnastics. We want it to makes sense intuitively. We want it to bound up in a single completely digestible ball. The world, sadly, does not always comply.

So we build miniature models of the world in our minds – fictions that do make sense. When we run into a part of the world that doesn’t co-operate we either shoehorn our observations into that miniature model or tear through, blogs, articles and books until we find someone who can.

The statement “it makes sense” is, however, a statement about how pleased we are with our efforts to shoehorn observations into our miniature model. It is not a statement about our understanding of the world.

To check our understanding of the world we have to ask not “does it make sense”, but “how would I know if I was wrong?”

Karl Smith, "The Curious Incident of Financial Theft in the Broad Daylight"

Psychology of Learning: The Road Not Taken

Learning is the central theme of experimental psychology and perhaps all academic psychology. Psychology professors have done more experiments about learning than anything else. Practically all of those experiments have been about efficiency of learning: The amount of learning (e.g., percent correct) in Condition A is compared with the amount of learning in Condition B, where A and B “cost” about the same. As a result, we know a great deal about what controls efficiency of learning, at least in laboratory tasks. I think many psychologists are surprised and disappointed that this research has had almost no effect outside academia. I have never heard a good answer to the question of why. If you’d asked me this a month ago I would have said it’s because they haven’t discovered large non-obvious effects. That’s true, but says nothing about how to discover them.

[...] Hedonics matter. Learning exactly the same material can be more or less pleasant. When Learning X is pleasant, it is learned easily; when Learning X is unpleasant, it is learned with difficulty or not at all. In the real world, hedonic differences matter more than efficiency differences. If they want to improve real-world learning, psychologists have been measuring the wrong thing.

Seth Roberts, "Three Observations about Walking and Learning"

The Social Production Function

Everything has become so strange. A year ago, the Communists ran the country. Today, you can't find a Communist anywhere.

"A Hungarian", qutoed in "True Lies" by Cass R. Sunstein

"False Consciousness" Explained

Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most.

Tyler Cowen, "The Inequality That Matters"

It's a Problem of Semantic Networks

[N]o punishment system with a wide enough range of punishment levels is more “cruel” than any other, at least from the convict’s point of view. It is the level of punishment that a convict finds cruel, not the method of implementing it. A prison system is just as cruel as a torture system; it is large punishments, e.g., long prison sentences or severe torture acts, that are cruel, not prison or torture itself.

Robin Hanson, "Prison Is Cruel"

(Knowledge Is Power) Squared

What’s unique about finance, I would argue, is a crucial kind of information asymmetry – not merely that outside observers cannot know as much as insiders do (this is also generally true, not merely true of finance), but that in finance the asymmetry pertains to precisely the information needed to game the system. Put simply, financial executives will always know more about how to game the financial system than anybody else, because manipulating the financial system is their job.

Noah Millman, "Some Measures of Inequality Are More Equal Than Others"

Economics 100

Money, after all, is just a way to avoid having to barter for stuff and avoid the coincidence of wants. If I want a chicken and potatoes for dinner, I don’t want to find someone who raises chickens and grows potatoes who is also interested in getting a degree in economics. If the person who is interested in a degree in economics is a furniture maker, I can give her an economics lecture in exchange for a chair and then try to find a chicken farmer who needs a chair. Very time-consuming, what economists call high transaction costs. Better to take some general measure of purchasing power, money, from the furniture maker and buy a chicken.

So money is a veil. It hides the underlying reality that what I can consume depends on what I can produce. And what I can produce depends on the people I can exchange with and cooperate with economically. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. If I have a lot of people to exchange with, then I can be more specialized and via technology, get a lot richer than if I trade with a small circle of locals. If I trade widely, I’ll have more money, but the amount of money I have is an effect not a cause. The existence of money is a cause–that creates wealth because it allows me to trade without [having] to find the chicken farmer who wants an economics lecture. But that’s it.

Russ Roberts, "What's Wrong with Keynes" (via)

Minimax Moralia

Of course, the overwhelming problem with most of the things I complain about isn’t that they’re going to inconvenience folks like me (although they often do). The problem is that they’re prone to abusive exploitation against people who aren’t comfortable well-educated middle-class white adults. The TSA, for example, has been picking on people with disabilities for far longer than they have libertarian-ish people with cell phones. But ask paternalists to put themselves in the mindset of a rape survivor, say, or a three-year-old kid, or a Muslim woman whose headscarf gets her “randomly” selected for extra screening every time she flies, and you run smack into a wall of cognitive dissonance and they call you a terr’ist.

Matt, "A Litany of Annoyances"