Utopia, you are standing in it!

Today’s Nobel Prize to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson is the capstone of an incredibly fruitful research line which began in the 1970s in a few small departments of Operations Research. Game theory, or the mathematical study of strategic interaction, dates back to work by Zermelo, Borel and von Neumann in the early 20th century. The famed book by von Neumann and Morganstern was published in 1944, and widely reviewed as one of the most important social scientific works of the century. And yet, it would be three decades before applications of game theory revolutionized antitrust, organizational policy, political theory, trade, finance, and more. Alongside the “credibility revolution” of causal econometrics, and to a lesser extent behavioral economics, applied game theory has been the most important development in economics in the past half century. The prize to Milgrom and Wilson is likely the final one that will go for early…

An Introduction to Logic

In debates, I often find that people are unwilling to accept the rules of logic, and they make foolish comments like, “well you’re entitled to your opinion.” In reality, the rules of logic are like the rules of mathematics. They are an inherent and immutable property of existence, not opinions. Just as 2+2 always equals four, the rules of logic are always true and must always be followed. To illustrate, the most basic rule upon which all other rules rely is known as the Law of Noncontradiction. It states that something cannot be A and not A simultaneously. In other words, two mutually exclusive things cannot exist simultaneously. For example, you cannot have a circular triangle, because a circle, by definition, has no straight lines and no corners, and a triangle, by definition, has three straight lines and three corners. An object cannot simultaneously have…

Perhaps the most common mistake that people make in debates is the use of logical fallacies. This occurs largely because people generally are not taught logical fallacies, and, therefore, don’t recognize them when they use or see them. Knowing logical fallacies and being able to recognize them is, however, extremely important, because, as previously explained, the presence of even a single fallacy will completely destroy an argument and force you to reject it. So this post is my attempt to help my readers learn the how to spot logical fallacies. What follows is a list of some of the most commonly committed fallacies. For each of them, I attempted to provide examples to illustrate how they work (or, rather, fail to work). I have grouped these fallacies by “type.” These are not officially recognized distinctions (such as formal and informal fallacies), rather, they are groupings that I find useful…

Here we have the German theoretical physicist, author, and science popularizer Sabine Hossenfelder giving an 11-minute talk called “You don’t have free will, but don’t worry”. (My own talk on the subject is the first five words she uses, and I think we should be concerned—though not in the sense she means.)  The video and a written transcript are on her website Backreaction.

If you’ve read this site, you’ll know that my own views are pretty much the same as hers, at least about free will. We don’t have it, and the fundamental indeterminacy of quantum mechanics doesn’t give it to us either. Hossenfelder doesn’t pull any punches:

This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain…

Christopher Columbus is a controversial historical figure who is widely viewed as terrible. Every year we question whether we should continue to have a day to celebrate his discovery. But, as this video points out, his bad deeds as highlighted by Leftists have been exaggerated to make him fit the role of a villain.

The hatred directed at Columbus could be the result of centuries of mistreatment against natives by Europeans and Americans that might continue to this day and should not be downplayed nor ignored. In the case of the Left and what Knowing Better exposes brilliantly, is that Columbus is the convenient scapegoat to blame misfortunes on rather than to have to explain the true nuanced nature of history.

PHOTO CREDIT:Christopher Columbus on Santa Maria 1492 By Emanuel Leutze – http://mr_sedivy.tripod.com/explor2.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17318667

Bargains made and broken involving the exchange of hostages and the swearing of oaths were such an important part of Anglo-Saxon warfare that scarcely an event was recorded without such an accompaniment. It is the glue that held the model of the political world together. By looking at the nature of such agreements it can be shown that the familiar tools used to cement agreements varied wildly in their effectiveness. The study of this one phenomenon alone can explain so much about Anglo-Saxon history.

There were a number of ways in which the leaders of early Medieval England could seek to cement an agreement or alliance. For Christian parties there was the baptismal sponsorship or god-parenting arrangement. Also, there was the marriage alliance, particularly effective if the leader in question had several available beautiful sisters at his disposal, as did King Athelstan at the beginning of his reign (924–39). Athelstan…

My biggest wish for the Autumn is that David Laidler will win the Nobel Prize in Economics next week for …

“…his contribution to monetary economics and the history of economic thought”

There is unfortunately little chance that that will happen, but it is about time that a historian of economic thought is awarded the Nobel Prize.

While we are awaiting for the good news (fingers crossed) you should read David’s latest paper – Reassessing the Thesis of the Monetary History. This is the abstract:

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed’s failure as a lender of last resort at its onset, and the ineptitude of its policies thereafter. This explanation is reassessed…

The scientific method remains the best way to solve many problems, but bias, overconfidence and politics can sometimes lead scientists astray

A Friends of the Earth lawyer claimed, re. the ruling now being challenged: “It is the first case that has ruled that government plans for a massive infrastructure project are unlawful on the basis of the Paris Agreement,” she said. But that gives a misleading impression of the verdict, as this report shows. Big infrastructure projects haven’t been declared illegal.
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Heathrow Airport is challenging a ruling that quashed plans to build a third runway earlier this year, based on the UK commitment to the Paris Agreement, says Climate Home News.

Heathrow appeared in front of the UK Supreme Court this week in a bid to overturn a judgment that blocked Europe’s busiest airport from expanding.

In February, campaigners claimed a historic victory in the Court of Appeal, which quashed plans for a third runway at Heathrow on climate grounds. The case was brought by litigation charity…

It has been called the “Forgotten Conflict.” The War of 1812 took place at a time when the world at large was preoccupied with the Napoleonic struggles in Europe and elsewhere. In the North American chronology, it fell between the War of Independence and the Civil War, both of which produced libraries full of books. Little wonder it is that the stories of these wars have left little room on the shelves of bookstores for the War of 1812 literature.

No set of trifling circumstances prompted the United States to declare war on Britain in June 1812, however. And, though American leaders drew up blindly unrealistic plans at first, their intent posed a direct threat to the British/Canadian settlers and the native peoples living around the Great Lakes. Battles, steadily growing in intensity, raged on both sides of the border as the names of hitherto unknown officers and warriors became…