Lars P. Syll

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Assume you’re a Bayesian turkey and hold a nonzero probability belief in the hypothesis H that “people are nice vegetarians that do not eat turkeys and that every day I see the sun rise confirms my belief.” For every day you survive, you update your belief according to Bayes’ Rule P(H|e) = [P(e|H)P(H)]/P(e), where evidence e stands for “not being eaten” and P(e|H) = 1. Given that there do exist other hypotheses than H, P(e) is less than 1 and so P(H|e) is greater than P(H)....

Economics education — teaching cohorts after cohorts of students useless theories Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. This is deeply worrying. A science that doesn’t self-reflect and asks important methodological and science-theoretical questions about the own activity, is a science in dire straits. How did we end up in this sad state? Philip Mirowski...

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The problem of extrapolation There are two basic challenges that confront any account of extrapolation that seeks to resolve the shortcomings of simple induction. One challenge, which I call extrapolator’s circle, arises from the fact that extrapolation is worthwhile only when there are important limitations on what one can learn about the target by studying it directly. The challenge, then, is to explain how the suitability of the model as a basis for...

The arrow of time in a non-ergodic world For the vast majority of scientists, thermodynamics had to be limited strictly to equilibrium. That was the opinion of J. Willard Gibbs, as well as of Gilbert N. Lewis. For them, irreversibility associated with unidirectional time was anathema … I myself experienced this type of hostility in 1946 … After I had presented my own lecture on irreversible thermodynamics, the greatest expert in the field of thermodynamics...

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How central banks create money Have you ever asked yourself how central banks create money? BBC Radio gives the answer. Advertisements

The limits of probabilistic reasoning Probabilistic reasoning in science — especially Bayesianism — reduces questions of rationality to questions of internal consistency (coherence) of beliefs, but, even granted this questionable reductionism, it’s not self-evident that rational agents really have to be probabilistically consistent. There is no strong warrant for believing so. Rather, there is strong evidence for us encountering huge problems if we let...