29/11/2019

Nothing as Useful as a Bad Theory

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To a true anti-hereditarian, every day is fresh & new & surprising, because hardly anything happens as they expect. Gregory Cochr...
27/01/2019

The American Left's Authoritarian Turn

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I grew up in a far-left college town , and I've known so many young people who were free spirits, who were nonconformists, who were de...
28/07/2018

Be Careful What They Wish for

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No doubt that candid feedback is necessary to improve as an individual and as an organization. But I question how many people are truly in...
18/05/2015

Libertarians vs. Marxists: The Extremes Don't Touch

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Libertarians [...] tend to see life within the ubiquitous life-structuring matrix of state-backed legislation as a distortion of natural or ...
16/05/2015

What Is Not Procrastination?

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People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what...
20/02/2015

What Is Force?

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No woman should be authorised to stay at home to bring up her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choi...
14/11/2014

More Right than he Knew he Was

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Thomas Mann once remarked, against Nietzsche, that the world never suffers from a surfeit of reason. And he never went online! Leon Wies...
02/11/2014

Bilingualism and Cognition

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"It’s easier to bear in mind that the map is not the territory when you have two different maps." - Eric S. Raymond, " Cog...
19/08/2014

Literature Summarized

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Anthony Burgess said there are two kinds of writers, A-writers and B-writers. A-writers are storytellers, B-writers are users of language. [...
17/08/2014

Consider the Alternative

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Consider all those irritating people who over the last few years have taken to commenting whenever there’s a study they don’t like: “Correla...
23/04/2014

The Old Standby

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Whatever truth correlation does not equal causation might have is outweighed by the damage it does when it is used to ignore evidence. ...
19/04/2014

Under the Feet of Giants

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I just don't think I'll ever be able to bring myself to truly enjoy rock & roll.  Whether it's the music, or it's me, ...
09/04/2014

Answer That One, Christians!

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I would argue that physical gratification (though less pleasurable and intense than commonly believed) is not especially wicked. Millions ...
28/11/2013

Survivorship Bias

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Francis Bacon, often crdited with the principle that beliefs must be grouded in observation, wrote of a man who was taken to a house of wor...
26/11/2013

Keep Your Identity Robust

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A broader danger of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means. People become wedded to their beliefs, because t...
24/11/2013

The Scientific Method in Action

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Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his m...
20/06/2013

How Not to Fight Online Procrastination

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I followed a popular “personal productivity” blog for a while, but in the end spent too much time reading the forums. Joan (quoted here )...
30/05/2013

Testability and the Methodology of Positive Economics

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Friedman also made an influential contribution to economic methodology in arguing that an economic theory should be tested by its predictive...
28/05/2013

Putting the Iraq War in Perspective

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Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. Ron Unz, " O...
26/05/2013

Wisdom for the Coming Years

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[D]ata is not knowledge and big data is not wisdom. Alex Tabarrok, " The Battle over Junk DNA "
18/05/2013

Failure Can Be Informative

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[A] t least some drug trials begin with seemingly sensible expectations that a drug will work; those expectations are often wrong. Usually t...
18/03/2013

Education against Human Nature

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Human nature: People who are the same want to be different. Formal education: People who are different should be the same. Seth Roberts,...
16/03/2013

Does the Libet Experiment Prove the Steam Whistle Hypothesis?

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Thomas Huxley articulated the “steam whistle hypothesis” over a century ago (1874). It says conscious thought resembles the steam whistle o...
14/03/2013

Let the Theory Fit the Hope

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The over-emphasis on early years also has to do with the conventional wisdom's hopes for egalitarianism and blank slate social engineeri...
27/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (7)

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Doch das Genie, sogar schon das große Talent leitet sich weniger aus Faktoren der Intelligenz oder speziellen Verfeinerung her, welche die d...
25/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (6)

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Er erklärte mir, der Raum, in den Gilberte sich begebe, sei die Wäschekammer, erbot sich, ihn mir zu zeigen, und versprach, er werde Gilbert...
23/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (5)

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Aber während er sich früher geschworen hatte, er werde, wenn er jemals diejenige zu lieben aufgehört hätte, von der er noch nicht wußte, daß...
21/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (4)

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Besonders aber durch die Bemerkung über meine Neigungen, die sich nicht mehr ändern würden, und über das, was dazu dienen könnte, mein Gesch...
19/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (3)

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"Wie sagt doch ein schönes arabisches Sprichwort: 'Die Hunde bellen und die Karawane zieht vorüber.'" Nach diesem Zitat sc...
17/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (2)

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Mein Vergnügen steigerte sich noch, als ich hinter diesem noch geschlossenen Vorhang verworrene Geräusche hörte, wie man sie unter der Schal...
15/01/2013

Proust für Eilige: Die besten Stellen aus Im Schatten junger Mädchenblüte (1)

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Aber der tiefere Grund, der sich übrigens auf die Menschheit im allgemeinen anwenden läßt, war der, daß unsere Tugenden in sich selbst nicht...
13/01/2013

Model Learning: The Negative Version

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It is also important that cheaper types of reading, if hitherto followed, be dropped. Popular magazines inculcate a careless and deplorable ...
30/12/2012

Don't Take Advice from Fiction

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A lot of our biases come, I think, from expecting real life to be like fiction. For example, when we have negative opinions on important sub...
24/12/2012

Wasteful Signaling: The Time Dimension

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I think about this a lot: you’re young, you come from a smart, wealthy family, you’re somehow supposed to show that you’re successful quite ...
16/12/2012

Game Theory

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If you lack the willpower to resist your kids' rent-seeking on an issue, magnanimously give them what they would have extracted from you...
30/11/2012

Compared to What?

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Nothing is easier than the proof that something human has imperfections. I'm amazed how many people devote themselves to that task. T...
26/11/2012

History Teaches Anything

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Policy makers are as likely to use history as a way to validate their preconceptions, or endorse existing plans, as they are to scour it obj...
24/11/2012

Disdain Fictional Fiction, Demand Fictional Nonfiction

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Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to sc...
22/11/2012

A Two-Step Model of Political Opinions and Affiliations

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I think a lot of people go along with Democratic economic policies largely because they've already decided to be Democrats based on soci...
20/11/2012

Role Specialization and Jealousy

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Role specialization is a robust way to limit jealousy. If dads have different parental roles than moms, then my kids could like me best as a...
18/11/2012

Style of Learning Shapes Performance

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The courses in medical school can be approached in two different ways. The ideal approach is the pyramid method: the student masters the bas...
10/11/2012

A Tax on Bullshit

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I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter mo...
15/10/2012

Taking Honourary Authorship a Little Too Far

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One of the authors on the paper, the most distinguished of the several cardiologists, actually died before the study began. Yet that hasn’...
19/09/2012

Lob der Faulheit

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Wenn die Jugend unerfahren ist, so kommt das daher, daß sie niemals wirklich gefaulenzt hat. Der Fehler unserer Erziehungsmethoden ist, daß ...
17/09/2012

Easy vs. Hard

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When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. T...
09/09/2012

Two Visions of Power

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Contemporary controversies revolving around differences in the very conception of power often go back to centuries-old differences in the vi...
06/08/2012

Another Reason to Teach Statistics in School

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Until they understand statistical concepts, people seem inevitably drawn toward essentialism. Essentialism in the history of biology led to ...
31/07/2012

Über Mustererkennung

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Die Arbeit eines Fußballexperten besteht darin, Ereignisse, die zum Teil mit Zufall zusammenhängen, hinterher als unvermeidliche Folge von F...
07/06/2012

Big Identity

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A common failure mode in human reasoning is to become too attached to theory, to the point where we begin ignoring the reality it was intend...
03/06/2012

"Natural" Property Rights as Libertarianism's Root Mistake

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One gets the sense that libertarians are unwilling or unable to acknowledge that property rights are the product of institutions and legal n...
30/05/2012

Ulysses and the Knifemongers

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If a sophisticated agent had access to an effective private self-control device, she would take advantage of it, reducing the value of a gov...
22/05/2012

On Metaconfidence

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Those who don’t know the past are doomed to over-trust experts. Seth Roberts, " The Next Time a Top Economist Predicts Disaster… ...
20/05/2012

Obvious but Unfashionable

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If you tax ice cream, people will be less obese, which is good, but they will also be enjoying less ice cream, which is bad. Tim Harford,...
14/05/2012

Umso schlimmer für die Theorie

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Einmal besichtigen wir Siedlungen für die Arbeiterschaft, Krankenhäuser, Schulhäuser etc. Der Herr vom Bauamt, das ich um die offizielle Gef...
12/05/2012

It Depends on whether You Were Born to

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In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he...
08/05/2012

Lizenz zum Töten

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Um Böses zu tun, muß der Mensch es zuallererst als Gutes begreifen oder als bewußte gesetzmäßige Tat. So ist, zum Glück, die Natur des Mensc...
06/05/2012

Irrational Rationality

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When you think about cosmology, ancient Rome, the nature of world government, or starving folks in Africa, it might feel like those things m...
22/04/2012

To Be Productive, Be Confident

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I used to wonder, enviously, how he could write so much, especially given his drinking, his travels, his public appearances and his demandin...
14/04/2012

The Risk of Trying Hard

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[I]f you work hard and fail, there's the presumption that you're innately not very talented. If you don't work hard and fail, yo...
06/04/2012

A Reeducation

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Enduring a flue alone in an apartment has always included a certain psychedelic aspect, it seems to me. But it is a psychedelia of the body,...
15/03/2012

Well, There's a Figure of Speech for That One

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Herman Kahn observed that the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor's clothes was psychologically flawed. It was impossible to...
13/03/2012

Are IQ Tests Biased against Non-Western Populations?

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IQ, as measured by IQ scores, is a decent measure of the cognitive skills that you need in order for technical innovation or more routine sc...
22/02/2012

Graphic Anarchy

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Serious works of economics or statistics tend to be written in a serious style in some version of plain academic English. [...] Serious work...
20/02/2012

Akademisches Marketing v. Chr.

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Die Griechen hatten weder in ihren Thorien noch in der Praxis viel für Mäßigkeit übrig. Heraklit hat behauptet, daß alles sich wandelt, Par...
04/02/2012

The Asymmetric Interpretation of Advice

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I will here offer a bit of meta-advice. The single thing that has surprised me most about serving on evaluation/selection committees is the...
02/02/2012

Why Are Left-Wing Groups Such a Mess?

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Building on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder, Haidt and his colleagues synthesize anthropology, evolutionary theory, and psycho...
31/01/2012

On Being Drunk in a Foreign Country

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Howard walked across the street and into the Windmill pub. Here he ordered and began drinking a perfectly reasonable bottle of red wine. His...
25/01/2012

There Is No Good Reason to . . .

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"There is no good reason to" precedes all kinds of arguments for banning things I could well have good reason to want. Eric Crampt...
05/01/2012

Check for Inconsistencies

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In general, people seem far more eager to collect respectable arguments for or against various specific regulations, than to consider the co...
03/01/2012

Cocktail Party Bore

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[S]tatistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual" conversation. By this, I mean that there are many indi...
30/12/2011

Why Be an Early Adopter?

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Old technology is typically pretty stable; new technology is improving. It can make sense to switch early (before the new technology actuall...
18/12/2011

Opportunity Costs

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Poor people are people who make decisions. They are not a combination of circumstances that can be tweaked to make them stop acting like poo...
10/12/2011

Der Markt für Politiker

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Leider kann man keine Autorität ausüben, indem man die eigene Fehlbarkeit akzeptiert. Wir Menschen müssen einfach durch Wissen geblendet wer...
02/12/2011

Antinostalgia, Holiday Card Edition

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The thing is, a holiday card is something you're only supposed to look at for about a minute. Then you throw it away. This is practic...
16/11/2011

Entscheidungsfreiheit

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Jetzt warteten sie auf das Ende, und vielleicht zeigt sich die Natur hier von ihrer barmherzigen Seite, denn wenn die Erschöpfung so groß is...
14/11/2011

Is "Vision of Liberty" the First Factor of Political Preferences?

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Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willi...
12/11/2011

Conoisseurs Are Easy to Please

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People think of connoisseurs as having higher standards. [...] Connoisseurs make unusual demands, yes, but in some ways they are easier to ...
21/10/2011

The Organisational Sociology of Deception

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Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with th...
19/10/2011

The World Series Fallacy

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I would often have to fight the “World Series Fallacy,” which is that a strategy fails if it doesn’t help you win the top honor. A new coach...
17/10/2011

Tradeoff des Todes

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Erst sah es wie eine Ohnmacht aus, wir fuhren sogar noch eine Weile. Aber dann war kein Zweifel, dass wir stehenbleiben mußten. Und hinter u...
15/10/2011

Introversion: A Hypothesis

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My theory--that "social unease" is the euphemism for scant curiosity about someone else not kin, spouse, peer, or authority figure...
09/10/2011

Wer A sagt

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Solange wir das Prinzip anerkennen, dass religiöser Glaube respektiert werden muss, einfach weil es religiöser Glaube ist, kann man auch den...
03/10/2011

Macht, Charakter und Verhalten, supraindividuelle Version

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Viele Religionen kommen heute schmeichlerisch lächelnd mit ausgebreiteten Armen auf uns zu wie schmierige Händler auf einem Basar. Im Wettbe...
02/10/2011

Don't Express Yourself

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Pity is such an awful, useless emotion - you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself. The moment you try to express it, it only makes t...
25/09/2011

Plausibilität und Wahrscheinlichkeit

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Das folgende Experiment zeigt, dass Erzählungen zu einem Fehler bei der Abschätzung der Chancen führen können. Geben Sie jemandem einen gut ...
05/09/2011

Damn Right

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My identity is not the accidents that have happened to me. It is what I choose . Eric S. Raymond, " Why I Hate Identity Politics ...
30/08/2011

The Progress Equation

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progress = resources*knowledge*time*freedom*motivation Seth Roberts, " Alexandra Carmichael Almost Eliminates Headaches "
28/08/2011

Belief

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Modern liberalism takes the idea that people and subsets of people must be virtually identical. This is taken as essentially a religious giv...
18/08/2011

Not Racist (But What's "a Pick in the Back"?)

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Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. If you walk into somebody's o...
20/07/2011

Some Proxies Are Useless

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[T]he idea that there is one thing called "government"—and that you can measure it by looking at total spending—makes no sense. ...
18/07/2011

Was aufs Papier gelangt

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Ich hasse das Klappern der Schreibmaschine, weil es den Strom der Imagination zerhackt. Handschrift, Sprechzwang beim Tonband, das gleiche....
16/07/2011

Resources Are Limited

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Across a variety of disciplines, many researchers aim to show that subtle biases continue to exist. My reaction tends to be, yes, and the w...
14/07/2011

Exchange and Power

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Should police officers be paid per arrest? Most people think this is a bad idea, I imagine, but the larger point (what can we learn from thi...
26/06/2011

People Respond to Incentives, Mental Health Edition

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As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments ...
20/06/2011

What Is Kindness?

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In common use, whether you are kind or cruel is not about what happens to the person you are supposedly being kind or cruel to. It is about ...
14/06/2011

Why Isn't Sociology Better?

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After three days of observing academics, it is clear to me that the social sciences attract precisely the wrong kind of people. They are I-w...
12/06/2011

Framing Inequalities

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This is something Alan Taylor’s American Colonies is really good on. His point is that if you look at the European aristocrats who ran the ...
10/06/2011

Success and Selection on the Dependent Variable, Again

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There’s an obvious selection-effect problem here. Most book-writing advice is going to comes from people who are able to successfully apply ...
08/06/2011

The Songwriter's Disease

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The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feelin...
18/05/2011

Why Track?

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In junior high and high school, tracking was the only thing that made my life bearable. In my memory, normal classes were a combination of ...