In his 1983 essay, “Behind the Painted Smile” [I], Alan Moore, a prolific British writer known mostly for authoring highly acclaimed graphic novels like “V for Vendetta”, “Watchmen” and “From Hell”, gives a hint on what not to ask an artist (ad why):
One of the most common ideas about the behavior of a perfectly structured market is that it would provide higher rewards for people who work harder. In the end, this is how it should work, this is the fair way to distribute income - rewarding effort, punishing idleness. Or should it?
“The Economist” on fraud in science:
Moreover, when it came to airing suspicions about colleagues, the numbers went up. The meta-analysis suggested that 14% of researchers in the underlying studies had seen their colleagues fabricate, falsify, alter or modify data. If the question was posed in more general terms, such as running experiments with deficient methods, failing to report deficiencies or misrepresenting data, the straight average suggested that 46% of researchers had seen others get up to such shenanigans. In only half of the cases, though, had the respondent to a survey tried to do anything about the misconduct he said he had witnessed.
It has been over a month since I received the official offer from the UoL/LSE to join their ranks as an external student and now I spend couple of hours studying every day. I decided to distribute my studies into a four year period. The plan is below.
Inhibi.com, a project I take part in as a founder, has shown some signs of activity. More will be posted soon.
There are three ways to explore the world: philosophy (when we speculate without actually checking), science (when we try to test models based on speculations), religion (when we build dogmas directly from speculation and pass the testing anyway).
Gods need worshipers, culture needs creators, laws need execution. Otherwise they are all dead.
Keith Hennessey, at Freakonomics:
Since much of economic policy is determined by law, rather than executive action, the biggest constraint is “How many votes can you get for that?”
Read the rest, it is quite entertaining.
In modern societies the bulk of political discussions about what set and structure of political and economic institutions would serve the society best revolves around the question of how much market regulation there should be.