Curt Doolittle

Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if th

    Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if they publish ideas in the blogosphere?

    ‘Cause unless you’re engaging in advocacy, particularly political advocacy, and particularly dishonest advocacy (krugman, delong, thoma) it is not worth your time.

    Worse, once you realize that (a) almost all online participants are engaging in a search for confirmation bias, and (b) that almost all humans are incapable of more than sentimental expression, or moral argument, and are permanently prohibited from ratio-scientific reasoning by hard limits to their abilities, and (c) that the deeper the knowledge you possess on any given subject, the more you contradict intuitive arguments -even within your discipline – meaning that

    So you basically can participate online as publisher, or a teacher, or as an advocate; but it’s pretty hard to participate as a persuader – debater. Because almost no one is capable of conducting a debate – either because of limited ability or limited knowledge or both.

    The value of the internet to average people, is not so much one of learning the new, but in their own error reduction within their own cognitive biases. And the rate at which we can reduce errors within our own cognitive biases.

    This does not help us to develop agreement on any form of moral universalims. What it does, however, eventually, is give us an opportunity for proposing compromises across cognitive and moral biases – our reproductive strategies – so that it is easier to obtain consensus across a smaller set of errors within the same distribution of biases.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-17 05:56:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/07/creative-writing-killing-western-literature-nobel-judge-horace-engdahl

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-14 01:52:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://reason.com/blog/2014/10/10/google-warns-that-nsa-is-breaking-intern?n_play=5439343ee4b08bd0716ed0cf

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-12 13:00:00 UTC

  • I love my Stowaway cases, have been using them since the first release. I usuall

    I love my Stowaway cases, have been using them since the first release. I usually buy three or four at a time. But I’ve just bought an iPhone 6, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to get one over here in Ukraine (over here in the borderland provinces so to speak). If I place some minimum order, and pay for the shipping can I get a few sent to me somehow? Thanks!

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-12 06:48:00 UTC

  • MODELS ARE FOR SMART PEOPLE –“I’ve been telling EconLog readers about my articl

    MODELS ARE FOR SMART PEOPLE

    –“I’ve been telling EconLog readers about my article with Steve Miller on intelligence and economic beliefs for years. Now our piece has finally been published in Intelligence. Quick version of the paper:”–

    —-

    Adding a measure of intelligence to the list of independent variables and re-estimating confirms that ability bias is present and substantial. Adding intelligence as an independent variable does not simply shrink our estimates of the effect of education. It is more important than education in both statistical and economic terms. In fact, intelligence turns out to be the single strongest predictor of economic beliefs.

    First, even though intelligence is the most important overall predictor of economic beliefs, it is not the most important predictor of beliefs in any of the four categories. Party, ideology, and male gender are stronger predictors for the anti-market questions. Education and “other race” are stronger predictors for the anti-foreign questions. Black is a stronger predictor of the make-work questions. Income growth is a stronger predictor for the pessimistic questions. Intelligence is the most important overall predictor of economic beliefs because it has a strong effect in all four categories, not because it has an overwhelming effect in any particular category.

    Second, intelligence is more important than education for every category except anti-foreign bias. For anti-market and make-work bias, intelligence is much more important than education; for pessimistic bias, intelligence has a moderate edge. Education is, however, the most important predictor of anti-foreign bias. This is consistent with the literature finding that education “tends to socialize students to have more tolerant, pro-outsider views of the world” (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2006, p. 473). In contrast, the typical educational experience gives students mixed signals about anti-market, make-work, and pessimistic biases. Classes in economics and high-IQ peers restrain these biases, but classes in other social sciences and humanities, as well as student activism, arguably encourage them.

    —–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 11:44:00 UTC

  • Eli. Libertarian cognitive bias and computation. LIBERTARIANS HAVE A MODEL – NO

    http://ivo.co.za/2007/08/09/libertarian-iq/From Eli. Libertarian cognitive bias and computation.

    LIBERTARIANS HAVE A MODEL – NO ONE ELSE DOES

    (actually I argue that we have the correct model and everyone else’s enlightenment model is false.)

    —“Just as programmers have a model of computation, libertarians have what I call a model of interaction. Just as a programmer can “play computer” by simulating how specific lines of code will change program state, a libertarian can “play society” by simulating how specific actions will change societal state. The libertarian model of interaction cuts across economic, political, cultural, and social issues. For just about any given law, for example, a libertarian can tell you exactly how such a law will affect society (minimum wage laws create unemployment by setting a lower-bound on entry-level wages, drug prohibition artificially inflates drug prices which leads to violent turf wars, etc.). As another example, for any given social goal, a libertarian will be able to tell you the problems generated by having government try to achieve that goal and will tell you how such a goal can be achieved in a libertarian society.I believe this is qualitatively different from other predictive models because of the breadth of the model and the focus on transitions (both of which are also true of programming). On newsgroups I often see questions … [that] … libertarians almost always quickly answer by saying, “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen…” And, surprisingly, the libertarians tend to give the same answer in most cases.

    I think most people find this odd about libertarians. They understand how an economist might be able to predict the effect of a certain law on the economy or how a social scientist might be able to predict how drug legalization might affect the ghettos, but they don’t understand how somebody could predict all of these things, especially someone who has no formal training. Libertarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to understand how someone could fail to have such a model of interaction… The nonlibertarians have no comprehensive model of interaction, and as a result, they can’t communicate in a meaningful way with those who do. Their attention is always focused on misleading superficial problems rather than on the underlying causes of such problems.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 09:15:00 UTC

  • The Misesian Straw Man. Worth reading for reactionary and aristocratic as well a

    The Misesian Straw Man.

    Worth reading for reactionary and aristocratic as well as libertines.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 07:13:00 UTC

  • Some rules of Critique: Overload: Control the conversation by volume and critici

    Some rules of Critique:

    Overload: Control the conversation by volume and criticism rather than contribution.

    Gossip: Heap undue praise on in-group members. It distracts from the real contributors, and floods the information system.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 16:20:00 UTC

  • Great Term Of The Day: “Positive Here-say” – Juan Sebastian Ortiz

    Great Term Of The Day: “Positive Here-say” – Juan Sebastian Ortiz

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 13:45:00 UTC

  • Moral, Ratio-Empirical Libertarians. Must tolerate the truth. Immoral, Rationali

    Moral, Ratio-Empirical Libertarians. Must tolerate the truth.

    Immoral, Rationalist Libertines. Must engage in deception.

    Immoral dysgenic progressives. Must justify their immoral dysgenia.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 12:34:00 UTC