This is an edited-down excerpt from a reply I made to Dave on the Elephant Call thread. In my edits I've taken out some of my sharp opinions because they aren't relevant to the point of this post, but by all means click the link, for the sharpness. And I'm going to sneak the actual point of this post down in the comments, so look there as well ( Read more... )

Say I want to understand human financial behavior. The behavior is actually complex, but if I make the following simplifying assumptions I can at least have a place to start, and can make some calculations, predictions, etc ( Read more... )

Proposal for a social psychology experiment:

We'll use four separate, sizable groups of people, say 75 people in each group. (Not that I know if that amount is any good or not, or if we want our overall pool to be similar socioeconomically. I'm not a statistician.)

Ask each member of Group One:

What arguments would you use to try and persuade an ( Read more... )

Another one! Nate Silver cites Kuhn in a footnote, Silver probably** being unaware that his own passage (Nate Silver, The Signal And The Noise, p. 260) not only runs opposite to a couple of Kuhn's major ideas, and not only isn't in the same ballpark as Kuhn, it's barely in the same sport. Again, I'm not giving you the answer, this being a quiz:

( Read more... )

Here are the worst five sentences from what's otherwise a pretty good book. The sentences are in no way essential to the book, and didn't need to be there. So I'm just giving you the sentences without the book title. My point in printing them is that most everybody gets Kuhn wrong. There's a mass mental block.

Historians of science have often ( Read more... )

The greatest challenge in understanding the role of randomness in life is that although the basic principles of randomness arise from everyday logic, many of the consequences that follow from those principles prove counterintuitive.... In the mid 1960s, [Daniel] Kahneman, then a junior psychology professor at Hebrew University, agreed to perform a ( Read more... )