Lars P. Syll

Les garçons de la plage  [embedded content]

Why the father of modern statistics — R A Fisher — denied smoking causes cancer In 1959, Fisher denounced his colleagues for manufacturing anti-smoking “propaganda” … He did not dispute that smoking and lung cancer tended to rise and fall together—that is, that they were correlated. But Hill and Doll and the entire British medical establishment had committed “an error … of an old kind, in arguing from correlation to causation,” he wrote in a letter to...

Min landskapsupplevelse är starkast och rikast här, därför att den har djupa rötter i ständigt växande minnesavlagringar, rötter som når ner till barndomsupplevelsernas källvatten. Det enda verkligt nya man får uppleva som vuxen är kärleken. Allt annat som är värt ordet upplevelser är egentligen projektioner av de starka barndomsupplevelsens, de stora, utvidgande upptäckterna av världen och det egna jaget. Sven Barthel/Roland Svensson

Raj Chetty — big data ‘solutions’ to poverty Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also...

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Why philosophy and methodology matter for economics A critique yours truly sometimes encounters is that as long as I cannot come up with some own alternative to the failing mainstream theory, I shouldn’t expect people to pay attention. This is, however, to totally and utterly misunderstand the role of philosophy and methodology of economics! As John Locke wrote in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time...

Walter Duranty — Holodomor denier and lier One of the first Western Holodomor deniers was Walter Duranty, the winner of the 1932 Pulitzer prize in journalism … While the famine was raging, he wrote in the pages of The New York Times that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda”, and that “there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”...

St. Crispin’s Day Speech  [embedded content]