Clik here to view.
Friedman on Psychic Harm
Four terrific posts by David Friedman, partly on psychic harm, partly on talking about psychic harm. I’d recommend these highly even if they hadn’t invoked my name. Landsburg v Bork: What Counts As...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Terror, Truth and Torture
Last week was not the first time the United States was transfixed by an act of terror. In 1964, three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi were (quoting Wikipedia) “threatened,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lies and Lying Liars
When a politician misleads the public with distorted or flat-out fictional data, or uses eight minutes of national TV time to smear the character of the careful scholar who dared to report an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Story Darkens
It turns out that last week’s tag-team smear of a young Heritage Foundation economist, executed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and his lackey Paul Krugman of the New York Times, was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lying Low
Faithful readers of this blog might remember the despicable antics of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who, in a televised hearing last June, spent eight excruciating minutes impugning the honesty of a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Applied Bayesianism
When I was a child, my parents took me to Atlantic City every summer. And we would always make a side trip to Longport (three towns away) to collect seashells, because my Dad said that Longport was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Letters and Numbers
Four years ago, roughly two dozen economists and financial theorists signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke urging him to back off the policy of quantitative easing, citing, among other things, the risk...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Generalist
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day — I feel him...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Voter’s Guide to Thinking
Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) offers a Voter’s Guide to Thinking that is so good I am going to reproduce it in its entirety: If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
William Faulkner Foresees the Internet
Because what somebody else jest tells you, you jest half believe, unless it was something you already wanted to hear. And in that case, you dont even listen to it because you had done already agreed,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Blogging, Tic Tac Toe and the Future of Math
Blogging, as you might have heard, is changing the face of the media. It may also be changing the face of mathematical research. For the first time ever, a substantial mathematical problem has been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From an Eternal Perspective
My favorite new blogger is the pseudonymous Sub Specie Æternitatis, who I discovered when he left a particularly thoughtful comment on the Fair and Balanced thread here at The Big Questions. A little...
View ArticleClik here to view.
O Brave New World!
Something momentous happened this week. Of this I feel certain. A little over a week ago, HP Research Scientist Vinay Delalikar claimed he could settle the central problem of theoretical computer...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Neutrinos and Appomattox
Scientists at CERN have found apparent evidence that neutrinos can travel faster than light. Suppose that tomorrow historians at Harvard find apparent evidence that the South won the American Civil...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Big News
Last week, the highly distinguished Princeton Professor Ed Nelson announced a proof that the Peano axioms for arithmetic are inconsistent — and hence so is arithmetic itself. If true, this would be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aftermath
Joel Seligman, the president of the University of Rochester, has, in his words, exercised his right to express his views with a dissent from my recent posts about contraceptive subsidies. Several news...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Analogists
Viagra analogies have been in the news a lot lately, both in connection with contraceptive coverage and in connection with state laws restricting abortion. I love good analogies and I hate bad...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Agreed!
Often, all economists agree that we all agree. We just can’t agree about what it is that we all agree on. Now comes the remarkable IGM Economic Experts Panel to shed some light. The experts in question...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paging Diogenes
Chapter 8 of The Big Questions is called “Diogenes’s Nightmare” and argues that: 1) In a world of honest truthseekers, there would be no disagreements about matters of fact; 2) In the world we inhabit,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where I’ve Been
Video of my recent talk to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (topic: Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?”) is now available here. Click here to comment or read others’ comments.
View Article
