http://diversified.selocsg.com Thoughts from an insatiable autodidact. Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:21:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan has a short section on the role of rhetoric in discourse, which is something that I've been thinking about for a long time now. In Caplan's analysis, he makes the case that since people have preferences over beliefs, being right isn't ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=607 As anyone who reads this blog probably knows, logical discourse is something I spend a good deal of time thinking about. So, as is my wont, I now turn my eye to how logical discourse relates to information. In my view, logical discourse serves two major functions: in the first ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=609 Continuing my summer streak of reading excellent books, I recently finished Bryan Caplan's fantastic The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. I really like Bryan's posts over at EconLog, so I've been eager to read this book for a long time, and I was not disappointed. ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=596 It seems common to disparage twitter by saying that people are just sharing mindless minutiae that no one cares about.Maybe it is the case that twitter is, in fact, a time-wasting endeavor filled with people just pumping out tons of information that no one cares about. I am much more ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=585 On more than one occasion in the past week alone, I've been accused of fallacious reasoning for the use of a reductio ad absurdam. This is a bit of a tricky issue, because a reductio is only useful when someone hasn't taken into account all of their own premises. What ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=569 In several of my recent posts, I laid out my case for how it might not undermine all of economic thinking to find that people aren't necessarily rational. One of my key points was that you can model irrationality as rationality, but this does raise the question: What good are ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=565 One of the workhorse concepts in Richard McKenzie's excellent book Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles is the idea that consumers can be rationally ignorant. Consider an argument he puts forth in Chapter 9 (entitled Why So Many Prices End in '9') — he ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=549 Of all the good books I've read recently, the best so far is probably Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard McKenzie. The EconTalk podcast on the subject is an enduring favorite, and I've probably listened to it 3 or 4 times since ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=542 Previously, I've made the case that for the purposes of modeling, it doesn't matter if people are truly rational (where rational is defined as always making decisions in such a way to maximize their utility functions to the best of their ability). However, just because, for the purposes of modeling, ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=539 On Wednesday, I wrote about the role markets play in aggregating information. Today I thought I would go into some more detail about how I see the mechanistic properties of markets. Consider the example of the iterated betting market from my previous post - even throwing out any discussion of ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=530 Seeing as how I like to define logic and symmetry in the context of their relationships with information, it should come as no surprise that I've also been very interested in what Hayek had to say about the role of information in markets. The general contention of Hayek's 1945 paper ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=395 On Friday, I explored the fact that predictable irrationality can be viewed as rationality, but the fact that these things are essentially isomorphic really leads to the disturbing implication that it might not be possible to resolve the question of whether or not we are rational actors. What I am ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=502 In yesterday's post, I talked about how people don't actually need to be rational in order for rational choice theory to be a good way of describing and predicting their behavior. I would put forth that the reason for this is that although there is asymmetry in a superficial dimension ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=489 Much of what I've been reading I've been reading lately has dealt with the subject of rationality and rational choice theory. I'm still trying to get my head around the general arguments about the thing, but I have come up with a basic framework for what I think of the ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=471 A few weeks ago I read Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, or more precisely I listened to the audiobook version. I'll have some follow-up posts dealing with the actual contents of the book, but I thought I'd start out with my general impressions. To me, this book seems like a very ... http://diversified.selocsg.com/?p=457