Peter Turchin has some interesting theories of cycles of empires in history. I’ve puzzled over his suggestion that “elite overproduction” is consistently part of the fall of empires, and that we are seeing it today. This concept doesn’t make much sense to … | Continue reading
My favorite board game is: Imperial. Not only is it fun, but it has a great theme and moral. From a review: Imperial is a board game about being a shadow investor-slash-member of the Illuminati. It’s a game that is explicitly about financing imperialism. Each player is an “invest … | Continue reading
Financial traders are rewarded for trading on info that implies a non-zero difference between their expectation of the future price, and the current price. (Well, the “current” price here is the price their order would get if sent in now, and for positive revenue this difference … | Continue reading
Financial market prices embody info that helps others to make decisions. For example, firms decide activity levels based in part on their stock prices. Thus traders who add info to such markets do a public service, even if they do this for a private profit. | Continue reading
Cole: I see dead people. Malcolm: In your dreams? [Cole shakes his head no] Malcolm: While you’re awake? [Cole nods] Malcolm: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins? Cole: Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They … Continue reading → | Continue reading
In a universe that is (so far) almost entirely dead, we find ourselves to be on a rare planet full not only of life, but now of human-level intelligent self-aware creatures. This makes our planet a roughly a once-per-million-galaxy rarity, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
While this blog is called “Overcoming Bias”, I don’t recall explicitly addressing biases in a while. So let me revisit a bias which, though it is pretty clearly visible, most people don’t even bother to hide: where they stand depends … Continue reading → | Continue reading
To learn more about the sacred, I tried a few more Twitter polls. And one interesting meta datum I learned here is that few are curious about the sacred; when I asked for suggestions for more questions to ask, I … Continue reading → | Continue reading
There is not a natural alliance of contrarians. Instead, each contrarian group claims that it has been unfairly lumped in with the others. Sure, they say, most contrarians are wrong, but if you look carefully at our case, ours isn’t … Continue reading → | Continue reading
In my last post I suggested that we prefer institutions of this form: Masses recognize elites, who oversee experts, who pick details. However, our ways to do that first step, masses recognizing elites, seem rather primitive so far. Our oldest … Continue reading → | Continue reading
While I’ve spent much of my life doing institution/mechanism design, I’ve only lately come to see that, at least on prestigious topics, most people want relevant institutions to take the following ideal form: Masses recognize elites, who oversee experts, who … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Here’s a long-term trend I don’t recall hearing much about: over time, talk has been losing its non-talk context. That is, over time listeners have known less about the context of speaker talk. Though animals have quite limited languages, they … Continue reading → | Continue reading
“Don’t sweat the small stuff; and its all small stuff” Compared to unimportant decisions, for moderately important decisions we tend to do more thorough practical decision analyses. This is mainly because we try harder. Yet when we get to our … Continue reading → | Continue reading
One of the reasons I’ve always shied away from moral questions is that I’ve lacked a relevant analysis system like those I rely on in many other areas. My thinking has always relied heavily on intellectual systems. Oh sure, one … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Less than 25% of the population seem to think religion is an important part of Christmas (more) 7 Common Tropes Found in Hallmark Holiday Movies: rekindled romance, bad boyfriends dropped, royalty, family secrets, small towns, aspirational jobs, magic. (more) The … Continue readi … | Continue reading
In a stereotypic rich household of long ago, servants and the served had different roles, and different styles of talk. Servant areas of responsibility were practical, concrete and narrow, and servants were subject to being overruled by the served. The … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The main social functions of school seem to be to help students show off their smarts, conformity, and conscientiousness. Schools also babysit, socialize, and indoctrinate. But the two main stated functions that school fans tout most often are (A) teaching … Continue reading → | Continue reading
When we form opinions on topics, the depth of our efforts vary. On some topics we put in no effort, and hold no opinions. On other topics, we notice what are the opinions of standard authorities, and adopt those. We … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Grabby aliens are advanced civs who change the stuff they touch in big visible ways, and who keep expanding fast until they meet each other. Our recent analysis suggests that they appear at random stars roughly once per million galaxies, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
In many important areas of life like medicine, law, counseling, education, journalism, charity, governance, etc. we rely on giving great discretion to prestigious professionals, who tell us we can trust them due their professional ethics, internal professional review, and deep … … | Continue reading
Used to be, many ads appeared in local newspapers, which competed for attention via their local news coverage. This induced such papers to fund local investigative journalism, often looking for dirt on local politicians, which induced such politicians to avoid … Continue reading … | Continue reading
Which ideas get more video attention can be pretty random. At the low attention extreme, I’m most known for my work on prediction markets, yet these are the most viewed videos of me on that: 5K views, 18min, Center for Study of Public Choice, Introduction … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Children were almost twice as likely to be willing to share their most treasured belonging after winning the game than after losing. … Only people in the first group—primed to consider the unreliability of their close friends or romantic partners—reported … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Imagine a company had a team of sales people, who were assigned to sales regions that varied in their promise and difficulty of sales. The people assigned to easy rich regions tended to have high sales, while those assigned to … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Centuries ago, most commerce and production was organized around individuals and small groups. Since then, we’ve seen enormous innovation in business forms and structures. Today, such forms are much larger and more complex, and they do most everything of importance … Continue rea … | Continue reading
We humans can’t do much on our own; for that, we must join orgs. Orgs like families, firms, schools, clubs, and nations. But the more deeply involved we get with such orgs, to benefit from them, the more we also … Continue reading → | Continue reading
While I’ve been a U.S. citizen for 63 years, I’d never before heard this truth about U.S. origins, told well by Christopher Blattman is his new book Why We Fight (pp. 38-41). The U.S. revolution was a textbook example of … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We see sacred things from afar, even when they are close, so we can see them the same. I’ve previously described the main cost of this as impaired vision. That is, we don’t see sacred things as well, and so … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels The dizzy dancing way that you feel As every fairy tale comes real I’ve looked at love that way But now it’s just another show And you leave ’em laughing when you go And … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We owe pretty much everything that we are and have to innovation. That is, to our ancestors’ efforts (intentional or not) to improve their behaviors. But the rate of innovation has not been remotely constant over time. And we can … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Previously I used a poll to estimate that career agents today who get 10% of client wages as a result raise those wages by 1.5% on average, suggesting that tax career agents (TCAs) who got ~20% of income might raise … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Agents who are paid a larger fraction of their client’s income have a stronger incentive to promote and advise those clients. Thus the tax career agent idea makes more sense for governments that tax a larger fraction of citizen income. … Continue reading → | Continue reading
My main intellectual strategy is to explore important neglected topics where I can find an original angle to pursue. As a result, I lose interest in topics as they get more attention. Which is why I’ve avoided climate change. Yes, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Most schools assign each student a “grade point average”, i.e., a number that averages over many teacher evaluations of that student. Many schools also assign each teacher an “average student evaluation”, i.e., a number that averages over many student evaluations … Continue readi … | Continue reading
Academia functions to (A) create and confer prestige to associated researchers, students, firms, cities, and nations, (B) preserve and teach what we know on many general abstract topics, and (C) add to what we know over the long run. (Here … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Imagine a world of people doing various specific projects, where over the long run the net effect of all these projects is to produce some desired outcomes. These projects may interact in complex ways. To encourage people to do more … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Yoshimune Tokugawa, a shōgun who ruled Japan as part of the Tokugawa shogunate during the 18th century … is often credited as the first person to implement a suggestion box system, called meyasubako, around 1721, placing them outside of Edo … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I love the tax career agent idea, because it seems so simple, seems to have no losers, and doesn’t seem to step on any taboos. The basic idea is this: If the government auctions off the right to get the … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The game theory is clear: it can be in your interest to make threats that it would not be in your interest to carry out. So you can gain from committing to carrying out such threats. But only if you … Continue reading → | Continue reading
We humans evolved a way to take some of the things that are important to us, and bind our groups together by seeing those things as “sacred”. That is, by seeing them in the same way, via always seeing them … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The reason I first started to study the sacred was that “sacred cows” kept getting in my way; our treating things as sacred often blocks sensible reforms. But now that I have a plausible theory of how and why we … Continue reading → | Continue reading
My close friend and colleague Bryan Caplan has a new book, “Don’t Be a Feminist”. In general, I’m reluctant to embrace or oppose vague political slogan terms like “feminist”, preferring instead to stick to terms that are better defined. But … Continue reading → | Continue reading
(ngrams) Economists know many useful things about human social behavior, and about how to improve it. And the world would probably be better off if it listened to economists more. But while the world respects economists enough to mention when … Continue reading → | Continue reading