Lars P. Syll

Songs from a world apart .[embedded content]

The Holy Grail of Science Traditionally, philosophers have focused mostly on the logical template of inference. The paradigm-case has been deductive inference, which is topic-neutral and context-insensitive. The study of deductive rules has engendered the search for the Holy Grail: syntactic and topic-neutral accounts of all prima facie reasonable inferential rules. The search has hoped to find rules that are transparent and algorithmic, and whose following...

Does drinking cause you to become a man? Breaking news! Using advanced multiple nonlinear regression models similar to those in recent news stories on alcohol and dairy and more than 3.6M observations from 1997 through 2012, I have found that drinking more causes people to turn into men! Across people drinking 0-7 drinks per day, each drink per day causes the drinker’s probability of being a man to increase by 10.02 percentage points (z=302.2,...

Laplace’s rule of succession and Bayesian priors After their first night in paradise, and having seen the sun rise in the morning, Adam and Eve was wondering if they were to experience another sunrise or not. Given the rather restricted sample of sunrises experienced, what could they expect? According to Laplace’s rule of succession, the probability of an event E happening after it has occurred n times is p(E|n) = (n+1)/(n+2). The probabilities can be...

Beta distribution (student stuff) .[embedded content]

He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother .[embedded content] In loving memory of my brother Peter. Twenty years have passed. People say time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. But some wounds never heal — you just learn to live with the scars. But in dreams, I can hear your name. And in dreams, We will meet again. When the seas and mountains fall And we come to end of days, In the dark I hear a call Calling me there I will go there And back again.

Models and the need to validate assumptions Piketty argues that the higher income share of wealth-owners is due to an increase in the capital-output ratio resulting from a high rate of capital accumulation. The evidence suggests just the contrary. The capital-output ratio, as conventionally measured has either fallen or been constant in recent decades. The apparent increase in the capital-output ratio identified by Piketty is a valuation effect reflecting a...

.[embedded content] Michael Lee Aday (1947-2022). RIP.

DAG thinking (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Mainstream economics in denial We’d gathered at Downing College, Cambridge, to discuss the economic crisis, although the quotidian misery of that topic seemed a world away from the honeyed quads and endowment plush of this place. Equally incongruous were the speakers. The Cambridge economist Victoria Bateman looked as if saturated fat wouldn’t melt in her mouth, yet demolished her colleagues. They’d been stupidly cocky before the crash – remember the 2003...