Lars P. Syll

Political correctness? No thanks! .[embedded content]

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Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they...

We live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty — not quantifiable stochastic risk — which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but ‘rational expectations.’ Our expectations are most often based on the confidence or ‘weight’ we put on different events and alternatives, and the ‘degrees of belief’ on which we weigh probabilities often have preciously little to do with the kind of stochastic probabilistic calculations made by the rational agents as...

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Causal identification requires nonstatistical information in addition to information encoded as data or their probability distributions … This need raises questions of to what extent can inference be codified or automated (which is to say, formalized) in ways that do more good than harm. In this setting, formal models – whether labeled ‘‘causal’’ or ‘‘statistical’’ – serve a crucial but limited role in providing hypothetical scenarios that establish what would be the case if...

Where do you go to my lovely? .[embedded content]

Tax the rich? Yes!

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. Warren Buffett [embedded content] For the first time … researchers have gathered systematic data that allows for a comparison of wealth distributions in all countries of the world, from the bottom of the distribution to the top. The overall conclusion is that wealth hyper-concentration affects all world regions (and it has worsened during the Covid pandemic). At global...

Le pied dans l’plat … and a Happy New Year! [embedded content]