Lars P. Syll

Keynes’s Copernican revolution in economics .[embedded content]

A small ray of hope I overheard a conversation between two high school students this morning. The first person was asking about which classes the second was going to take next. One of those mentioned was microeconomics. “Oh, that’s easy” said the first, “You just have to remember that it’s all rubbish — they want you to believe that people are rational, and that there’s all this perfection in the world.” “Really?” responded the second, “That’s really dumb....

The Lady Tasting Tea En av mina absoluta favoriter i statistikhyllan är David Salsburgs insiktsfulla statistikhistoria The Lady Tasting Tea. Boken är full av djupa och värdefulla reflektioner kring statistikens roll i modern vetenskap. Salsburg är, precis som tidigare Keynes, tveksam till hur många samhällsvetare — inte minst ekonomer — okritiskt ofta bara antar att man kan applicera statistikteorins sannolikhetsfördelningar på sitt eget...

La complainte du partisan .[embedded content]

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.[embedded content] Leonard Cohen — not Bob Dylan — should have been the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Clearness and vividness in writing often turn on mere specificity. To say that Major André was hanged is clear and definite; to say that he as killed is less definite, because you do not know in what way he was killed; to say that he died is still more indefinite because you do not even know whether his death was due to violence or to natural causes. If we were to use this statement as a varying symbol by which to rank writers for clearness, we might, I think, get something...

Reverse causal reasoning and inference to the best explanation One of the few statisticians that yours truly has on his blogroll is Andrew Gelman. Although not sharing his Bayesian leanings, I find  his thought-provoking and non-dogmatic statistical thinking highly recommendable. The plaidoyer infra for “reverse causal questioning” is typical Gelmanian: When statistical and econometrc methodologists write about causal inference, they generally focus on...

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A pedophile writer is on trial — and so is the French academic elite MeToo has finally reached France. That’s good news. [embedded content] Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles et Fanny Deleuze … Jack Lang … André Glucksmann, et bien d’autres encore; tous font partie des 69 intellectuels français qui, aux côtés de l’écrivain Gabriel Matzneff … ont signé une tribune publiée le 26 janvier 1977. D’abord dans Le Monde puis dans...