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? [...]
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, the two things are equivalent [...]
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 subject.
First off, the arguments that [...]
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 good introduction to the important [...]
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
Earlier in the week, Ryan Sager posted an article about the role of panic in pandemic prevention. Here’s an excerpt:
Swine Flu, like most of our super-deadly epidemics, is probably being overblown by the media. Our brains are pretty bad at assessing risk — we worry about flying (which is safe), while we love driving (which [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.