James_K

Thanks, fixed.

Rachel: I'll have to write that into the new gospel.

E-Merl: New gospel?

Rachel: Gospels should be updated regularly.

Guilded Age

Edit: mispelling of "write" corrected.

My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.

Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.

Nonetheless it is important to have a firm grasp on the progress we have already attained. It's easy to go from "we haven't made any real progress" to "real progress is impossible". And so we should acknowledge the achievements we have made to date, while always striving to build on them.

That second point is particularly important. Since present governments cannot reliably bind future governments, credibility is a big issue with any politically-sensitive project with a long time horizon.

Except that an individual vote have a negligible effect on who wins an election, so voters have no incentive to figure out which political party best represents their goals.

The normal margin of error on a political opinion poll would be 1.96 sigma - a 95% confidence interval (that's how you'd get a margin of error of just over 3 percentage points on a poll of 1000 people.

Yes, I don't think "couldn't afford paper" is a good explanation, books of this nature were for wealthy people anyway.

I think much of it is that brevity simply wasn't seen as a virtue back then. There were far fewer written works, so you had more time to go through each one.

The three you mention are all subtypes of the same efficiency - informational efficiency. Informational efficiency is used in finance and refers to how well a financial market incorporates information into prices. Basically a market is informationally efficient if you can't out-predict without using information it doesn't have. The weak / semi-strong / strong distinction merely indicates how much information it is incorporating into prices: weak means it's incorporating it's own past prices, semi-strong includes all public information, and strong includ... (read more)

Yglesias seems to be committing an error here by confusing technical jargon with common English. Efficient has a very specific meaning in economics (well, two specific meanings, depending on what kind market you're talking about). The word efficient is not meant to refer to universal goodness and it's a mistake to treat it as if it were.

Indeed. In fact there's a website: What's the Harm? that explains what damage these beliefs cause.

Thank you for the recommendation.

For the record, I'm pretty sure this story is apocryphal, though that doesn't take away from it's value as a rationality quote.

It's even better when said by Leonard Nimoy.

You definitely have a point here. The Law of Comparative Advantage is an extremely powerful driver of improved standards of living. So you definitely shouldn't try to do everything yourself.

But at the same time it pays not to over-specialise. If you rely on another person to fix your computer problems for you (for instance), that might work fine, until they aren't available for some reason. Then you have a choice between working it our for yourself or just giving up.

So I'd say at the very least overcoming "learned blankness" is helpful for implementing a back-up plan.

This was really interesting, while I got a decent primer in behavioural economics at university, neuroeconomics was still too cutting edge.

Yes, the trouble with rationality is that it may not work very well if you're a fictional character.

Still, Ford's position was entirely reasonable ex ante.

That is truly incredible, I regret only that I have but one upvote to give.