prior probability

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.

I began this series of blog posts on 22 August by asking whether Adam Smith was a closet Bayesian. Today, I draw this series to a close by concluding that Adam Smith was a closet behavioral economist who made several significant contributions to what I like to call the “psychology of probability”. Although Smith’s insights are non-mathematical in nature, they are nevertheless important and original:

LOTTERY METAPHOR

To begin, Adam Smith can be considered the first out of a long line of future Anglo-American philosophers — Rawls 1971, Williams 1981, Taleb 2001, Hawthorne 2004, Binmore 2005, and Stone 2011, just to name a few — who have explored how chance applies to various domains of our lives! On this note, see my posts “Adam Smith’s allegory: the lottery of life” and “Adam Smith on self-deception“.

OPTIMISM BIAS

In addition to initiating an entirely new field of philosophy, the Scottish philosopher-economist made an important contribution to this new field, for he explains how optimism bias clouds and distorts our ability to rationally calculate the expected value of certain types of bets (e.g. choice of profession, lottery prizes, insurance risks). See my posts “Adam Smith: father of behavioral economics” and “Adam Smith on the paradox of insurance“.

RISK-TAKING, CRIME, AND AGE

Smith also identifies a direct connection between age and risk-seeking behavior and correctly concludes that risk-taking is most pronounced among young people, and he also extends his optimism bias model to criminal conduct. See my posts on “Adam Smith on the risks of youth” and “Adam Smith explains why crime does not pay“.

THE “WHO DECIDES?” QUESTION

Last but not least, Smith not only recognizes the role that chance can play in our lives and how our self-confidence can distort our perception of these probabilities; he also highlights (though only in passing) the importance of what I like to call the “who decides?” question. That is, in any given situation, Who is in the best position to calculate what the relevant probabilities are? Who decides? See my post “Politics and probability“.