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 [...]
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 contends that one reason for [...]
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 it originally aired last year.
The [...]
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 incentives, the effect still arises [...]
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 The Use of Knowledge In [...]
On Monday, I made the case that enumerating the symmetry properties of a system allows you to compress redundant information. The other useful consequence of understanding the inherent symmetries of a system is that it immediately allows you to understand which dimensions will be relevant to a given problem.
Consider the fact that any decision [...]
Before I continue to post my analyses of the various ideas that I am constantly mulling over, I thought that I would take a brief detour and explain a bit of how my thought process works. Fundamental to how I view the world is the idea of symmetry. What I mean by symmetry is whether [...]
In part one of this two-part series, I introduced my thoughts on how logic can be used to extract (but not introduce) information from the premises using 4×4 su doku with no unique solution. In this follow-up post, my intention was to discuss the more subtle forms of information extraction that can be done with [...]
As a follow up to yesterday’s post on intellectual rigor and a precursor to later posts on logical discourse, I think it’s important for me to write a post or two explaining my mental model of what logic does and does not do. Also, I just saw
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.