the relationship between information and confidence
Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books: “The true scarcity in Keynes’s world—and ours—was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but o...
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
the observer effect
I want to be skeptical, but Soros’ reflexivity argument is elegant. And this is delightful dishing of the “oh-no-he-didn’t” variety: Ala...
sweet jumps
NYTimes.com: Mathematically speaking, “Napoleon Dynamite” is a very significant problem for the Netflix Prize.
flight to safety
Amazing. on Marketplace, Lisa Broome speculates that General Motors may be motivated to become a bank-holding company so that it can submit to regulation and th...
performance
I marvel at how well Barack Obama performs. For quite a few years now, the bar for American performance has been lowered in so many ways. “Heckuva job, Br...
epistemology matters
John Cassidy on Soros on our current systemic failure: Outside the idealized world of Lucas’s theory, knowledge is imperfect, people stick to wrongheaded ...
kool aid for mother’s milk
Paul Krugman: How did we get to this point? It’s the culmination of many past betrayals. First of all, we have the Republican Study Committee blowing things up ...
moral hazard
Glenn Greenwald is not feeling it: What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reaped...
securitization
I guess the plan is to use the U.S. armed forces to deter creditors from collecting.
truth & method
Nassim Nicholas Taleb channels Socrates to disparage (now obviously flawed) financial models and the abuse of statistics in general: Go to a bookstore, and look...