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Simple Forecasts Best

A fascinating tale, from the book Dance With Chance: During the 1970s … It bugged the professor greatly that [business] practitioners were making these predictions without recourse to the latest, most...

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Why Academics Aren’t Bayesian

Bryan Caplan asks Why Aren’t Academic Economists Bayesians?: Almost all economic models assume that human beings are Bayesians, … [but] academic economists are not Bayesians.  And they’re proud of it!...

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Contrarian Excuses

On average, contrarian views are less accurate than standard views.  Honest contrarians should admit this, that neutral outsiders should assign most contrarian views a lower probability than standard...

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Why Neglect Big Topics

From an ’04 review of Robert Triver’s ’02 book Natural Selection and Social Theory: [Trivers’] directions on writing a classic paper …: 1. Pick an important topic. 2. Try to do a little sustained...

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Real Rationality

Bayesian probability is a great model of rationality that gets lots of important things right, but there are two ways in which its simple version, the one that comes most easily to mind, is extremely...

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New Hard Steps Results

If planets like ours are common but intelligent life like ours is rare, then it should be rare that life on a planet evolves to our level of development before life is no longer possible on that...

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How Hopeless A PhD?

Imagine that you have some estimate in your mind of the odds of becoming a professor, given that you start a Ph.D. program. Now imagine you see an article titled “The disposable academic: Why doing a...

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What Is “Belief”?

Richard Chappell has a couple of recent posts on the rationality of disagreement. As this fave topic of mine appears rarely in the blogsphere, let me not miss this opportunity to discuss it. In...

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My Surprises

I am surprised that: I exist at all; the vast majority of possible things do not exist. I am alive; the vast majority of real things are dead. I have a brain; the vast majority of living things have...

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Ignoring Small Chances

On September 9, 1713, so the story goes, Nicholas Bernoulli proposed the following problem in the theory of games of chance, after 1768 known as the St Petersburg paradox …: Peter tosses a coin and...

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