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 sufficient to convince them that [...]
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 place, it allows you to [...]
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. Even if you don’t care [...]
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 inclined to believe, however, that [...]
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 you do is to stress [...]
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 models in the first place? [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.