Lars P. Syll

In the year 2525 .[embedded content]

But once … we were here .[embedded content] One of the greatest movie scenes ever. In loving memory of my brother, Peter ‘Uncas’ Pålsson.

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I The Book of Why för Judea Pearl fram flera tunga skäl till varför den numera så populära kausala grafteoretiska ansatsen är att föredra framför mer traditionella regressionsbaserade förklaringsmodeller. Ett av skälen är att kausala grafer är icke-parametriska och därför inte behöver anta exempelvis additivitet och/eller frånvaro av interaktionseffekter — pilar och noder ersätter regressionsanalysens nödvändiga specificeringar av funktionella relationer mellan de i...

Ignorability and other questionable assumptions in causal inference Most attempts at causal inference in observational studies are based on assumptions that treatment assignment is ignorable. Such assumptions are usually made casually, largely because they justify the use of available statistical methods and not because they are truly believed. Marshall Joffe et al. An interesting (but from a technical point of view rather demanding) article on a highly...

Applied econometrics — a messy business The applied econometrician is like a farmer who notices that the yield is somewhat higher under the trees where birds roost, and he uses this for evidence that bird droppings increase the yield. However, when he presents his findings … another farmer … objects that he used the same data but came up with the conclusion that moderate amounts of shade increase the yields … A bright chap … then observes that these two...

Celebrating our twentieth anniversary, yours truly and wife spend a couple of days at our favorite hotel — Koldingfjord — in Denmark.

What’s the point of all science? The point of all science, indeed all learning and reflection, is to change and develop our understandings and reduce illusion. This is not just an external and contingent sociological condition of learning but its constitutive force, which not only drives it but shapes its form. Without this universal necessary condition, none of the particular methodological and ethical norms of science and learning in general has any...

Jürgen Habermas and Hans Albert on the weaknesses of mainstream economics The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris...

Nationalekonomin har under de senaste femtio åren kommit att i allt högre grad innebära ett granskande av världen genom “matematikens järngaller”. Precis som Bertrand Russell har många ekonomer hoppats på att med tiden konstruera “en matematik för mänskligt beteende som är lika exakt som matematiken för maskiner.” För ekonomerna har detta ofta kommit att innebära att om ett fenomen inte låter sig passas in i gallret så avvisas det som falskt. Och tyvärr har trivialitet och...