Utopia, you are standing in it!

Dan Hannan explains in his Washington Examiner article The better Sweden does on the coronavirus, the angrier they get.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

My columns on Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus always provoke an angry response. But it is striking that, the better Sweden does, the angrier its critics become.

Like anti-Trumpers who couldn’t hide their annoyance at the success of the U.S. economy, or British Remainers who longed for a recession so as to be able to say “I told you so” about Brexit, lockdown enthusiasts determinedly screen out the good news.

They trot out three main arguments. First, they say, “You can’t compare us to Sweden. It has a low population density.” Second, they argue that “Sweden hasn’t succeeded; it has had more deaths per capita than neighboring countries.” Third, the claim that “Sweden has taken an economic hit as well — the…

Ahead of Tuesday’sVirtual IHRParliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Eilish Gregory at the University of Reading. She will be responding to your questions about her research on Catholic Forfeitures during the English Revolution on Zoom between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on 20 October 2020. Details on how to join the discussion are available here or by contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

This blog is based on Eilish’s full-length seminar paper, ‘Catholic Forfeitures during the English Revolution: Parliament and the Role of Sequestration Agents’, which is available here.

In November 1656, the Catholic delinquent William Blundell wrote to his nephew Thomas Selby, mentioning his recent dealings with the agent and lawyer Gilbert Crouch who was managing his sequestration affairs in London. Blundell’s estates in Little Crosby, Lancashire, were sequestered during the English Revolution because Blundell had fought for King Charles I against Parliament.

Thanks to Swiss Policy Research for providing perspective on the coronavirus contagion in a few charts.  Their article is Covid: The Big Picture in 7 Charts, updated to October 10, 2020.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

1) Global covid “cases” and deaths vs. all-cause deaths

Chart number one shows global covid deaths by September in blue (about 1 million) versus global all-cause deaths in purple (about 40 million). The chart also shows the cumulative number of global covid “cases” (i.e. positive PCR tests) – the so-called “casedemic” on top of the pandemic.

In contrast, the UN expects that the political reaction to the pandemic may put the livelihood of up to 1.6 billion people at immediate risk and may, by the end of 2020, push an additional 130 million people “to the brink of starvation” and an additional 150 million children into poverty.

Global covid deaths and…

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…