Lars P. Syll

Adorno on pop culture When Adorno issued his own analyses of pop culture, though, he went off the beam. He was too irritated by the new Olympus of celebrities—and, even more, by the enthusiasm they inspired in younger intellectuals—to give a measured view. In the wake of “The Work of Art,” Adorno published two essays, “On Jazz,” and “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” that ignored the particulars of pop sounds and instead...

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Say ‘consistent’ one more time and I … Being able to model a credible world, a world that somehow could be considered ‘similar’ to the real world is not the same as investigating the real world. The minimalist demand on models in terms of ‘credibility’ and ‘consistency’ has to give away to stronger epistemic demands. Claims in a ‘consistent’ model do not per se give a warrant for exporting the claims to real-world target systems. Questions of external...

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Folk som har otur när de försöker tänka … Att olika åsikter möts är bra, och inte farligt. Det viktiga är att vi kan tala om dem på skolan – och det gör vi. Namnändringen är fortfarande en relevant fråga. Men inte för att alla förväntas hålla med om att “vita havet” har rasistiska konnotationer. Kanske är det helt enkelt dags att skapa en annan samhörighet än färgerna svart och vit, som våra två hav nu heter. Inga beslut har fattats. Men världen förändras...

Mathematical modelling has now dominated the economics academy for so long that younger people that emerge from economic studies who are dissatisfied with what they are taught, cannot think beyond the modelling. They have been immersed in it so long that it is a kind of common sense to them. The idea that modelling is bound to be almost always irrelevant just does not compute for many. Yet they recognize that modern academic economics mostly does not provide any...

The standard NK [New Keynesian] model, like most of its predecessors in the RBC literature, represents an economy inhabited by an infinitely-lived representative household. That assumption, while obviously unrealistic, may be justified by the belief that, like so many other aspects of reality, the finiteness of life and the observed heterogeneity of individuals along many dimensions … can be safely ignored for the purposes of explaining aggregate fluctuations and their...

Noam Chomsky on postmodern grotesquerie .[embedded content]

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.[embedded content] For more on how the constitution was created yours truly highly recommends reading  Carol Berkin’s A Brilliant Solution.