Lars P. Syll

Horace Engdahls nya försvarstal En fiktiv dialog med en skotsk 1700-talsfilosof på spårvagnen genom Göteborg – det låter som en usel idé. Rentav pinsam. Men har man Horace Engdahls bildning, stil och värdighet kan man uppenbarligen förvandla ett sådant upplägg till en bladvändare. Värdigheten, förresten. Den är fortfarande sårad efter metoo-skandalen vid Svenska Akademien, där Engdahl försvarade sin vän Jean-Claude Arnaults rätt att leva ”vivörliv”. Efter...

The current state of game theory Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being made. On a political and social level, ​it is doubtful if the methodological...

[embedded content] Listening to the choral music on Armonico Consort’s Naked Byrd Two anthology is an unending delight. One of my favourite albums.

Causal inference — Fisher vs. Neyman (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Statistical assumptions as empirical commitments Real probability samples have two great benefits: (i) they allow unbiased extrapolation from the sample; (ii) with data internal to the sample, it is possible to estimate how much results are likely to change if another sample is taken. These benefits, of course, have a price: drawing probability samples is hard work. An investigator who assumes that a convenience sample is like a random sample seeks to...

Eurofanatiker försöker köra över folket igen Efter att ha misslyckats med att få in Sverige i euron på demokratisk väg försöker nu marknadsliberaler andra metoder. ”Jag ser inget behov av en ny folkomröstning om euron” säger Liberalernas ordförande Johan Pehrson.  I en debatt i TV4 Nyhetsmorgon (14/9) tog även Timbros nya chef PM Nilsson av sig masken. Han hade pratat med valutahandlare som sa att kronan skulle kollapsa när som helst, så nu måste vi skynda...

.[embedded content] Kjell-Åke Andersson turned Göran Tunström’s s epic masterpiece The Christmas Oratory into a stunningly beautiful and emotionally overwhelming movie. Stefan Nilsson wrote the breathtaking music. And it still breaks my heart every time I watch it … One day you shall hang this jewel around my neck. Then I am yours. Now I am nothing that is myself. I am nothing but the waiting.

‘Whose side are you on? I’m on the workers’ side.’ [embedded content]

Statistical reification — a deadly sin It would not be an exaggeration to say that many of us see academic statistics as “the sick man of science,” an alarming diagnosis in light of the central role it plays in science in general. The situation is maintained through specious and often byzantine rationales for destructive traditions, which is as expected from another human condition: Blindness to conceptual mistakes when correcting those would threaten the...

Bernie Krause — Citadels [embedded content]