Nota Bene
When you get an idea, blog it. I had a googol of blog worthy original material in the last 2 weeks but now I hardly remember a thing.
Merry Christmas
- source: Greg Mankiw
Paul Krugman Writes:
As I put it, perhaps too glibly, the central bank needed to “credibly promise to be irresponsible.”
This problem will hardly ever exist in any Balkan country. Almost every institution here is expected to act irresponsibly by the public. The full post is here.
Assorted Links
2. Foster Wallace lecture to appear as book
3. Behind every great man there’s a great woman
4. Full moon
Smart Is the New Black
Humanity has never been smarter and wealthier. The good ol’ times were not as good as now. We live at (the beginning of) The Age of Mass Intelligence
Third, what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.
I have had plenty of arguments about this issue. Let’s hope the next one will be soon while the data from the article is still fresh in my mind. I pity the fool who will dare question the statement.
Blue Balled
The TruthThroughAction.org video above is fun to watch but as Will Wilkinson puts it,
simultaneously reduces politics to fashion and elevates fashion to morality. To fail be a Democrat is depicted as something like an embarrassing fashion faux pas so egregious that it deserves a response of moralized disgust. To back the wrong political coalition is to become an untouchable, worthy of contempt. And to extend love, to extend pleasure, to those on the wrong team is beyond the pale.
Think about it.
Assorted Links
1. Quantum test found for mathematical undecidability
2. Rich Cut Back on Payments to Mistresses
3. Technocracy vs. Liberal Democracy
Quote of the Day
“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”
On the president-elect and his top economic advisor. The source article is here.
On another note, Larry Summers’ career swings remind me that the greatest setbacks to intellectual development come from the ever increasing push for political correctness. In the impossible task not to offend anyone in any imaginable way, some of the most progressive people choose to burn daring intellectuals in mass media bonfires for challenging noble ideas that rest on false premises. This is wrong. The consequences of persecutions against individuals who only hypothesize things that are at odds with convenient notions go beyond them losing jobs and career prospects - the chilling effect becomes a silent killer of ideas. In Larry Summers’ case, he just suggested an explanation to the current situation in tier 1 academia. He might, or might not have belived that the underrepresentation of women in certain sciences is due to innate differences between the sexes. But those two are facts and linking them does not spell the end of the world. Larry’s idea did not postulate that the most brilliant mathematician alive cannot be a woman but rather that she will most likely be in the company of five men with almost similar abilities at the top.
Paul Krugman Was Thinking…
1. Whether it would be a faux pas to ask Bush what nickname he had given me. I decided that it would.
2. What a great job my wife had done in making small talk about her childhood in Texas (her father had been a Republican precinct captain, and he had once hosted George H.W. Bush in his living room).
The resolution to the Freakonomics VS Marginal Revolution face-off is here.
The Placebo Gene
For the first time, a gene is being linked to increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, the mysterious capacity some people have to benefit from sham treatments. (link to source)
I wonder whether prayer works in the same way. If it did, there is a whole new (literal) meaning to Karl Marx’s religion is the opiate of the people. But before you jump on the God worship/alternative medicine wagon have in mind that neither prayer nor the placebo effect help solve the underlying problem. They just might alleviate the symptoms for a small subset of the population.
