Today’s WSJ has a good article on what is known as “financial engineering” at MIT. This program at MIT illustrates perfectly the fallacy of thinking higher math is a sure path to making money in the stock market — in this case by pricing financial options. A couple of years ago, Long Term Capital Management […]

The only meme theory that interests me is the problem of cultural transmission: how to preserve those values and ideas that make liberal democracy possible? I sometimes wonder whether the old German idea of a “research university” might not have had its day, so far as the humanities and social sciences are concerned? Science and […]

An interesting follow up on David B’s recent series of posts on Sensation and qualia, which caused a lot of controversy on this site a few weeks back, is this update on Francis Crick’s work on neural basis of consciousness in the NYT. I tend to agree with everything Crick says, including his prediction that […]

An excellent overview of the possibilities of reform in Islam by Max Rodenbeck, a writer for The Economist is in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. NRB’s editor, Robert Silvers, has shown signs of being slow of foot in recent years (decades?) but with this piece it looks like he’s found […]

Well, it looks like nothing is going to be wagered on the outcome, but I am now at the last hurdle in my attempt to convince a skeptical jury of my peers of the merits of my wack thesis on Adam and Eve — to wit, that not only is it a true story, allegorically […]

In my previous post on Adam and Eve, I set about trying to establish the historicity of this foundational myth of Western culture and civilization, arguing that it was “a true story, that tells the invention of agriculture, which brought slavery into the world” — and that as such it was suitable for inclusion in […]

In my previous post on this subject, I asserted the non-applicability of higher mathematics to economic analysis, arguing that true functions (in the mathematical sense) are missing from all economic relationships. Abiola asked for a demonstration or proof. Very well. What follows is a slight re-working of a comment I posted to Brad Delong’s web […]

Maybe I’m wrong in my previous post as to who were the best economists. But I’m pretty sure I know who is the worst economist of the 20th century, in terms of what he did to the profession. That would have to be Paul Samuelson himself, winner of the first Ignoble Prize in economics. Samuelson’s […]

Most people would say that physics is a lot harder subject than economics, just as chess is a more difficult game than checkers. Higher I.Q. types tend to prefer the former. Yet I read somewhere (I have no idea if it’s true) that there are only two or three world-class checkers players in the world, […]

As some of you may have noticed, I really stepped in it in the comments section over at The Panda’s Thumb during their first week in operation. It was an innocent mistake on my part, I assure you, though everything worked out ok for me in the end, because it forced them to take a […]

Limbicnutrition recently had an interesting post on the derivation of the English word “Allegory”: Allegory. From Greek allos meaning “other” and agora meaning gathering place (especially the marketplace). In times past, it was common to do one’s chatting at the marketplace. Some of the topics discussed were clandestine in nature and when people spoke about […]

This one’s for you, Razib. To recap so far: I am trying to bring up to date the question Rousseau once referred to as the origins of inequality — or, in modern terminology, the establishment of dominance hierarchies at the dawn of history. In parts I and II, we saw that whereas in hunting-and-gathering societies […]

Over at Global Guerrillas, John Robb notes: “Many people assume, wrongly, that [Islamicist] terrorists are poor and uneducated.” After a brief discussion, he then concludes by agreeing with another blogger, “that the driving force in recruitment is religious intensity.” Which caused me to make the following proposal: “If religious intensity is the driving factor, maybe […]

In the comments section of my previous post on the (re)appearance of dominance heirarchies in civilized societies, I posed the following thought experiment: If two hunting-and-gathering societies impinge upon one another’s territories and begin to fight over resources, what is the worst that one group can do to the other? Compare that situation to one […]

Dominance hierarchies — based on the relationship of domination and submission — are characteristic of all non-human hominid societies (an extreme example being the tiny-testicled, alpha-male gorilla lording it over his band of mates) and are found in many other species of animal — as in the proverbial pecking order among chickens, dogs, horses, etc. […]

I don’t know who this guy is, but he mounts an interesting challenge to the libertarian point of view, with some pertinant historical observations. If American living standards continue to erode, it’s the sort of thinking that’s bound to gain traction in the period ahead. Only, thanks to the IT revolution, there are better tools […]

This should probably be a comment, but since I can’t figure out how to make comments, I’ll make it an entry. As a native born wasp living in the South, I have a few observations about the acceptance of south Asians, of which we have a few . . . First off, though I move […]