Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Lee McIntyre: "Cognitive scientists recommend using a "truth sandwich" to report lies: : ay the truth, then show the liar telling the lie, then fact check it. Otherwise the well known 'repetition effect' allows the news media to be used to amplify lies..."

What I describe as the Rubin questions, because these are questions that I first heard when Bob Rubin would ask them when he led the NEC for Clinton in the 1990s: What might we wish two years from now we had done today? What might we wish ten years now that we had done today? Yes, that decision turned out right, but was it the best decision we could have made then given what we could have known then? Yes, that decision turned out wrong, but was there a better decision we could have made then given what we could have known then, and how could we have made it?: Cory Doctorow: Thinking in Bets: a poker-master's Jedi mind-trick for being less wrong: "Annie Duke... Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts...

Josh Bernoff: How we really should teach writing: "Here’s a radical idea.... Teach... students to write stuff that they’ll actually need to write in life or in an office: emails, blog posts, social media posts, marketing copy, research reports, and presentations...

History, biography, and fiction are the queens of the humanities because we think via narrative: David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories: "The perfect summer blockbuster. A handsome king... superhuman strength... insufferable arroganc... wreak[s] havoc...

Deep and true thinking about how to build structural models, and what they tell us about what to control for—and what not to control for—in estimation: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie: The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (New York: Basic Books: 0465097618) https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465097618

Judea Pearl on the Meaning of the Monty Hall problem: Judea Pearl: (2018): The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (New York: Basic Books: 046509760X): "Even today, many people seeing the puzzle for the first time find the result hard to believe. Why? What intuitive nerve is jangled?...

Seth Godin: Marketing Sauerkraut: "The story goes that James Cook brought fermented german cabbage with him on a long voyage, an innovative way to combat scurvy...

Nouriel Roubini: "So please scam me as u wish as I fork u $4bn!: 'The EOS tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform'"

The usual dodge here is to make "the money" a trader deploys proportional to the gap between the current price and their estimate, and so dodge this question completely: Dan Davies: "The 'Manski Bounds'.... How surprisingly little information you can extract from prices.... All the price tells you is that half the money thinks the true value is more than that and half thinks it's less. It doesn't tell you how much more or how much less. I think this matters a lot when you're trying to analyse fast moving markets like TRY or BTPs. Most of the people selling are selling because their guess about true value has moved a long way, not because the price has moved and they switched from the bid to the offer..."

Dan Davies: "The 'Manski Bounds'.... How surprisingly little information you can extract from prices.... All the price tells you is that half the money thinks the true value is more than that and half thinks it's less. It doesn't tell you how much more or how much less. I think this matters a lot when you're trying to analyse fast moving markets like TRY or BTPs. Most of the people selling are selling because their guess about true value has moved a long way, not because the price has moved and they switched from the bid to the offer..."

Adam Smith (George Goodman) (1972): Supermoney: "Anyway, we sat at the great man’s knee, and then we went out to apply the theory...

81%? Only 81% of "Initial Coin Offerings" created by "con artists, charlatans, and swindlers"? What are the other 19%? What of their own resources are the issuers putting on the line, and what is the path to long-run value? Not 81%: 100%, Nouriel!: Nouriel Roubini: Initial Coin Scams: "Initial coin offerings have become the most common way to finance cryptocurrency ventures, of which there are now nearly 1,600 and rising...

Without short selling, the current price of a speculative asset is the expected maximum valuation that will ever be given it by the non-forward looking. When the valuations by the non-forward looking become extrapolative, Katie bar the door!: Noah Smith: Lessons on Bubbles From Bitcoin: "Until there is a way to bet against an asset, its price will be set by the most upbeat buyer...

Oscar Jorda, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, AND Alan M.Taylor􏰀: The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015: "This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century...

Noah Smith: Rational Markets Theory Keeps Running Into Irrational Humans: "To many young people, the idea of efficient financial markets—the idea that...

Matt Townsend et al.: America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn’t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...