prior probability

Starting tomorrow (16 Sep), I will begin sharing the details of two new scholarly projects that I have been working on these past few weeks. One of my projects explores Adam Smith’s own personal experiences with doctors and the health practices of his day, including such quack remedies as tar water and the practice of bloodletting. (I will also survey Smith’s hard-core free-market views on medical education. See especially letter #143 in The Correspondence of Adam Smith; Mossner & Ross 1987, pp. 173-179). My other project builds on the previous work of Anderson, Shughart, & Tollison (1985), who pointed me to an archive preserved on microfilm containing over 1,100 pieces of correspondence signed by Adam Smith in his capacity as as commissioner of Scottish customs. I will thus be doing a deep dive into Smith’s work as a customs official during the last 12 years of his life. In the meantime, I will continue the painstaking process of transcribing the contents of this archive.

WORKS CITED

Gary M. Anderson, William F. Shughart II, and Robert D. Tollison, “Adam Smith in the Customhouse”, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 93, No. 4 (1985), pp. 740-759.

Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (editors). The Correspondence of Adam Smith. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (1987).

1. The Public Database of World Predictions (hat tip: Alex Tabarrok)
2. A computational framework for evaluating an edge-integrated, multi-ramp construction model of the Great Pyramid of Giza (via Nature)
3. AI extinction resignation sparks false-flag conspiracy claims (via The Telegraph)
4. Game Theory (Open Access textbook with 165 solved exercises; via arXiv)
5. Posner v. Tullock: Diverging Paths in the Economic Analysis of the Law (via RHETM)
6. The Kid Who Could Count to Ten (Excerpt from 1968 Soviet animated film; via Twitter)

Check out this post by ‘Air Genius’ Gary Leff: “Terrorists Attacked Our Freedoms on 9/11–Then Washington Spent 25 Years Taking More of Them Away“. Today, air-travel passengers in the U.S. are less safe (see here, for example) AND less free than ever before. PS: Call me crazy, but teetotalers and war-mongers George W. Bush (Iraq) and Donald J. Trump (Iran) should be in jail right now for leading us into two protracted wars under false pretenses.

My most recent paper “Adam Smith in the City of Light” (with Alain Alcouffe) was recently published in volume 15 of the Adam Smith Review. (Here is a link to an ungated preprint of my paper.)

One (“The Social Reckoning“) is about Mark Zuckerberg’s response to a Wall Street Journal investigative report known as the Facebook files; the other (“You Can See Everything“) is about disgraced Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes. The theatrical release dates of these productions are 9 and 16 October; teasers below:

PS: “Musk” does not make my short-list as that movie is almost four hours long!

File under: the history they did not teach me in school. The Stono Rebellion (also known as “Cato’s Conspiracy”) begins on this day (9 September) in 1739 in the colony of South Carolina. It is the largest and most violent uprising in Britain’s mainland North American colonies prior to 1776, and what is even more noteworthy is that it was a slave revolt! (Also on this day in 1850, California is admitted as the 31st U.S. State.)

As you probably have heard by now, last Friday (4 September) the judge presiding over the Lindsay Clancy case in Plymouth, Mass., declared a mistrial after a lone holdout juror had blocked a unanimous verdict after seven days of tense and arduous deliberations. (See here or here, for example.) Alas, I hate to be “that guy”, but this case would not have ended in a mistrial had the jury been allowed to use a simple weighted voting system known as “score voting” or “range voting“, which would have allowed the jurors to express how strong or weak they think the prosecution’s case is. For further reference, I explain in far more detail how this common-sense and intuitive voting procedure works in three of my previous papers:

1. “Why Don’t Juries Try ‘Range Voting’?“, Criminal Law Bulletin, Vol. 51 (2015), pp. 680-692.
2. “The Case for Bayesian Judges“, Journal of Legal Metrics, Vol. 6 (2019), pp. 13-20
3. “Weyl Versus Ramsey: A Bayesian Voting Primer“, SSRN (2020)

I have also blogged about score/range voting (or what I now prefer to call Bayesian voting — “Bayesian” because this method of voting allows one to express degrees of belief) many times before:

1. Range Voting and “Making a Murderer“
2. Bayesian voting 101
3. Some virtues of Bayesian voting
4. ChatGPT: Why don’t juries use range voting?

For a technical explanation of how Bayesian systems of voting solve Arrow’s Paradox, see the video below:

If this haunting track sounds familiar, it’s because it was released by the Swedish artist Kasbo back in 2018.