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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Why isn’t Puerto Rico the 51st State yet?
Or why aren’t California and Texas sovereign republics?
Free riding in Trinidad & Tobago
TEDx never ceases to amaze us … Bravo!
Infinite regress in law (a theoretical critique of the Hand formula)
Adjudication is the process of making decisions in law, but decision-making is a costly activity. For simplicity, we can model the process of adjudication (and decision-making generally) as a function consisting of two costly inputs: (i) RESEARCH or information-gathering and (ii) … Continue reading
Don’t freak out …
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s third (and possibly last) “Freakonomics” book — Think like a freak — is out. It’s a breezy though entertaining mish-mash of assorted anecdotes and sundry stories … and an excellent graduation gift for any 6th graders you … Continue reading
The self-reference test …
Can your favorite academic theory pass the self-reference test? What is the self-reference test, you ask? It’s a little test we devised after unintentionally stumbling upon (yet again) this perceptive quotation, which appears on page 776 of Gunther Teubner’s essay with the … Continue reading
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Tagged Dialectics, Gunther Teubner, Paradigms, Self-Reference, Theories
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Probability 101 (independent events)
We recently stumbled upon this wonderful little quotation on page 107 of the book Chances Are … Adventures in Probability by Ellen Kaplan and her son Michael Kaplan (Viking Penguin, 2006): “Consider the sequence of independent events a1, a2 … an” : as … Continue reading
In defense of intellectual agnosticism …
We are reposting this cool meme in defense of intellectual agnosticism (i.e. the ability to update one’s priors). You can check out the entire series of “epistemic rationality memes” here. (double hat tip: Tyler Cowen & Michael Wiebe) Please don’t forget to … Continue reading
“Information hypocrisy” in law
Futurist Robin Hanson has written up another astute blog post on the subject of information hypocrisy. By way of example, Hanson points out the existence of such hypocrisy in law: We say court proceedings are to get information to decide guilt, but … Continue reading
The limits of law: an update on San Francisco’s tour bus ban
A flat-out legal prohibition (e.g. “thou shalt not …”) represents a coercive, non-market approach to a given social problem. So, why aren’t legal bans always effective? Consider, for example, the tour bus ban approved last November by San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, which … Continue reading
“The Pervasive Effect of Priors”
That is the title of this informative four-part series of blog posts in which Claire Hill discusses and illustrates various aspects of people’s prior beliefs (aka “priors”). Here is an excerpt from part one of the series: They (people’s priors) help explain why … Continue reading
prior probability 