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Isomorphisms
http://isomorphismes.tumblr.com
Interests: econometrics, algebraic topology, parkour
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I think you're right to draw attention to this mechanism. I bet more examples are hiding in plain sight.
Memories, & mechanisms
In the LRB, James Meek suggests that support for pan-Russianism is helped by generational change: Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone i...
Here is a thought experiment. Suppose one elite named HerrDoktor Professor Chris Dillow switched from looking through the people who serve him to some more respectful, not condescending, alternative. What would be the net macro effect of this change? What if N empowered people switched, simply for their own moral reasons. At what N can these micro respects be said to overthrow the endogenous ideological tyranny described in this article? (phase change? or gradual?)
Respect
Popbitch says that when Jay Z enters a room in his flat, workers are expected to walk to the nearest corner and face the wall until he leaves. Norman Lebrecht reports that customs officials at JFK airport destroyed a flautist's collection of flutes. Corey Robin notes that the University of Chica...
Interesting thoughts Chris. I am interpreting what you wrote as you are playing up the parts of your view that contrast the most with Noah's, rather than portray ambiguity.
Respect
Popbitch says that when Jay Z enters a room in his flat, workers are expected to walk to the nearest corner and face the wall until he leaves. Norman Lebrecht reports that customs officials at JFK airport destroyed a flautist's collection of flutes. Corey Robin notes that the University of Chica...
Would like to hear more from you on the external validity of economic experiments.
I recall in my economic experiments CLASS in uni we read papers that were supposed to account for this. They would measure the effects with some expensive method, then measure with a cheap method, and show the robustness between the two. Then we can maybe extrapolate from the cheap method (e.g. extra credit points) to the expensive method (e.g. cash) in general.
On not seeing luck
It's often said that people misperceive skill and luck, for example by saying that a team is on form when it has merely had a run of good fortune. A new experiment at the Autonomous University of Barcelona shows that this error is even worse than we thought. Jordi Brandts and colleagues got a gr...
@Redshift You are being wilfully ignorant. No progress or nothing interesting since Adam Smith? Game theory.
"Economics" & rationality
One of the great irritations of our age is the tendency for non-economists to tell us what's wrong with economics. We've seen two egregious examples of this recently, with a common theme. Suzanne says: [Economics] assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, al...
@Keith If your boss offers you a raise and pats you on the back for a job well done, you will accept it.
= an economic certainty.
"Economics" & rationality
One of the great irritations of our age is the tendency for non-economists to tell us what's wrong with economics. We've seen two egregious examples of this recently, with a common theme. Suzanne says: [Economics] assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, al...
@Luis Enrique - Amazing.
@Chris - You are right. Another example of this ignorant type of critique is that "People are different". Like, duh, what makes you think economists don't account for differences in taste?
"Economics" & rationality
One of the great irritations of our age is the tendency for non-economists to tell us what's wrong with economics. We've seen two egregious examples of this recently, with a common theme. Suzanne says: [Economics] assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, al...
I also remember as a student the following peeve: we do our optimization on the reals even though it's well known that integer optimization result in different argmax.
I recall that my professor literally waved his hands and said it doesn't matter. Whereas I find the Akerlof/Yellen paper on small individual departures from rationality saying it does matter.
That actually seems like a privileging of prejudice over results ("My answer should sound at least vaguely neoclassical, satisfy these assumptions and rhyme with Selfish Maximising Agents" being more important than agreement with theory or data)
'Science' without Falsification
Bryan Caplan is tired of being sneered at by "high-status academic economists": The Curious Ethos of the Academic/Appointee, by Bryan Caplan: High-status academic economists often look down on economists who engage in blogging and punditry. Their view: If you can't "definitively prove" your cla...
This is just a guess, but the weakness of the profession may have to do with too much theory and not enough data. For example an undergraduate Physics major will do labs and measure the electron band structure of germanium http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html but in Intermediate Micro students just learn the theory and never test it. (But there are bigger things to get on to! Like applying the theory to international trade or energy policy.) I'm not saying that's a mortal sin but it does seem less than completely hard-headed.
'Science' without Falsification
Bryan Caplan is tired of being sneered at by "high-status academic economists": The Curious Ethos of the Academic/Appointee, by Bryan Caplan: High-status academic economists often look down on economists who engage in blogging and punditry. Their view: If you can't "definitively prove" your cla...
Arthur Laffer's off-the-cuff observation that income tax revenue obtains a maximum SOMEWHERE with respect to rates is indisputable. That the maximum is below current rates does not follow from his reasoning about tax evasion.
But there's a larger point to be made. The purpose of government is not to maximise revenue. It's supposed to perform certain duties in aid of social efficiency, like punishing fraud and murder. Optimising for tax "efficiency" (defined along this particular, narrow dimension) has about as much point as optimising the motor efficiency of the steps you take walking to the office.
Sure, it may be "optimal" in some sense, but what's the point? The more important question is what services the government(s) should be providing.
Laughing at the Laffer Curve
Via the IGM Forum: Question B: A cut in federal income tax rates in the US right now would raise taxable income enough so that the annual total tax revenue would be higher within five years than without the tax cut. Marianne Bertrand, Darrel Duffie, and Claudia Goldin are the disappointing ...
The question shouldn't be: "Do or don't code", but how much.
Teaching secondary students bound to study English Lit in college, a month of text processing skills, could help them find that reference they need.
There is some efficient intersection for everyone between the time / opportunity costs of learning to operate a computer better and the PV[benefits] of that degree of knowledge.
Please Don't Learn to Code
The whole "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten so out of control that the mayor of New York City actually vowed to learn to code in 2012. A noble gesture to garner the NYC tech community vote, for sure, but if the mayor of New York City actually needs to sling JavaScript co...
This example is so good, it belongs in intro stat courses. Sure, the boxplots may be boring, but...they do show thedata.
Boxplots to the rescue
Phil over at the Gelman blog wondered how to improve this bewildering (but pretty) data display. Data-rich it certainly is. The table collects together the returns of 12 categories of funds over a 15-year period. The fund returns are specified, as are the ranking of each fund within the doze...
I agree with everything you're saying except for this part:
In a perfect world, every search would result in a page with a single item: exactly the thing you were looking for.
If I search for "Ethiopian restaurants in my city", ideally I'd see all three restaurants, with photos of the interior, a relevant subsample of the menu items/prices, and some information about the service/quality/reviews.
If I search for "buy car", I would like to see an array of options, like a matrix which guides me through the relevant tradeoffs (car specs, lease terms) and the $ cost of moving around in that tradeoff space.
Even a "perfect" search engine isn't going to know (although it could presume/make assumptions about) what car I'm going to want, when I don't even know yet. Rather than trying to creepily prognosticate about what my answer's going to be, an ideal search engine would just lead me to the next logical question, along with the relevant info to answer it.
The End of Pagination
What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally. There are plenty of other real world examples in this 2007 article, but I wouldn't bother. If you've seen one pagination scheme, you've seen them all. The...
It never ceases to amaze me how much respect is given to intelligence. IQ is basically worthless, yet writers with very public voices never cease to praise how important it is. Just because Zuckerberg, Gates, and Griffin have high IQ's doesn't matter. Let's talk about other quantiles which someone has non-trivial odds of reaching. Let's talk about the income quantiles someone with a 140 IQ can range among.
Most importantly, let's distinguish cunning from book-learning. Unless we're talking about tippy-top scholars like you two, the rewards to book-learning (acquired today, not 50 years ago) are small.
As regards raising the incomes of the working class without creating a disincentive to work -- how about paying for more of their healthcare?
The Growing Class Divide—Posner
Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart has gotten a lot of attention because of the data it presents concerning the growing social and economic gap between working-class and middle-class people (politicians call all nonwealthy Americans “middle class,” but that is because politicians in a dem...
Karl Rove is a spinmeister. Should be unsurprising and not taken as representative of "Republicans".
Daniel Gross: The Strange Controversy Over Chrysler’s Ad
Just when you think the Republicans cannot lose any more touch with reality… Dan gross: >The Strange Controversy Over Chrysler’s Ad: There were plenty of objectionable ads during the Super Bowl…. So it's surprising that the biggest controversy has been generated by Clint Eastwood's spot for Chrys...
Did you ever resolve this issue?
Looking for the owner of Net::Amazon::MechanicalTurk
Hello All, Got a small project here at Shutterstock to use Amazon Mechanical Turk. Unfortunately the Perl SDK seem to be very much under maintained. The ownership seems to be assigned directly to Amazon, so I can't really find a contact. I left a message on Sourceforge, where the SDK seems to ...
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