Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner

I am all but certain to never teach a course on: Reasoning—Indivdual, Social, and Societal. But if I were to teach such a course, would this be the best reading list? And if not these readings, what would be better replacements?

• William Poundstone (2011): Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge https://books.google.com/books?isbn=030776379X
• Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017): The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674368304
• Daniel Kahneman (2011): Thinking, Fast and Slow https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0385676522
• T. M. Scanlon (2014): Being Realistic about Reasons https://books.google.com/books?isbn=019100314X
• Joshua D. Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke (2008): Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1400829828
• Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (2018): The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0465097618
• William Flesch (2007): Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674026314
• Josiah Ober (2008): Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1400828805
• Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2012): "Cognitive Democracy" http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/23/cognitive-democracy/
• Cosma Shalizi (2012): "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
• Herbert Simon (1969): The Sciences of the Artificial https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0262264498
• Partha Dasgupta (2007): Economics: A Very Short Introduction https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0192853457
• Milton Friedman and Rose Director Friedman (1990): _Free to Choose: A Personal Statement https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0547539754
• Tom Slee (2006): No One Makes You Shop At Walmart https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1897071884
• Paul Seabright (2010): The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1400834783
• Richard Thaler (2015): Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0393246779

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner

Why we surf the internet: Abi Sutherland: Return of the Dreadful Phrases: "Seneca is (dubiously) said to have told us that errare humanum est (to err is human) sed perseverare diabolicum, but to persist [in error] is diabolical...

oldster: Can I get a citation for that Seneca quote? I cannot find it. And I think it is vanishingly likely that he would use the word "diabolicum", which gets into Latin as a transliteration of New Testament Greek. So maybe he said something like "errare humanum est" somewhere, but I strongly suspect that second half comes much later than Seneca. I feel bad for being so pedantic. But then again, the "dreadful phrases" threads are natural display-cases for pedantry, so maybe it is less out of place here?

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner

"The principal control mechanism in factories... is based on programmable logic controllers, or PLCs.. introduced in 1968 to replace electromechanical relays. The 'coil' is still the principal abstraction unit used today, and PLCs are programmed as though they were a network of 24-volt electromechanical relays. Still": Rodney Brooks: The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions: "Overestimating and underestimating. Roy Amara was a cofounder of the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, the intellectual heart of Silicon Valley. He is best known for his adage now referred to as Amara’s Law: 'We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run'.... A great example... the U.S. Global Positioning System... nearly canceled again and again in the 1980s... first operational use for its intended purpose was in 1991 during Desert Storm; it took several more successes for the military to accept its utility....

Today GPS is in what Amara would call the long term, and the ways it is used were unimagined at first. My Series 2 Apple Watch... the technology synchronizes physics experiments across the globe... synchronizing the U.S. electrical grid... allows the high-frequency traders who really control the stock market to mostly avoid disastrous timing errors.... used by all our airplanes... used to track people out of prison on parole... determines which seed variant will be planted... tracks fleets of trucks and reports on driver performance. GPS started out with one goal, but it was a hard slog to get it working as well as was originally expected. Now it has seeped into so many aspects of our lives that we would not just be lost if it went away; we would be cold, hungry, and quite possibly dead....

"The 'big data' point... huge opportunity... to really expand the data.... The 'machine learning' point... a tremendous opportunity to use more flexible models, which do a better job of capturing... reality. The 'AI' point is that artificial intelligence is the technology of the future, and always will be...": Cosma Shalizi: The Rise of Intelligent Economies and the Work of the IMF: "We've been asked to talk about AI and machine learning.... I do understand a bit about how you economists work, and it seems to me that there are three important points to make: a point about data, a point about models, and a point about intelligence. The... an opportunity, the second... an opportunity and a clarification, and the third... a clarification and a criticism—so you can tell I'm an academic by taking the privilege of ending on a note of skepticism and critique, rather than being inspirational...