prior probability

The great Vin Scully died last month at the age of 94. I first fell in love with the voice of this legendary baseball commentator when I was growing up in Los Angeles. While my parents were in church, I would sneak away with my transitor radio to listen to his broadcast of Sunday afternoon Dodger baseball games. Although the video below is from before my time, it is considered Vin’s finest hour:

And further shout outs to Dan Klein and Jason Briggeman, the editors of a new collection of fourteen essays on various aspects of the classical liberal tradition, including essays by or about David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, among many others. (The entire collection of essays, which includes my 2021 work “Adam Smith in Love“, are available for free here, via the CL Press, and for purchase here, via Amazon.)

With respect to the arts (music, literature, film, etc.), my general rule of thumb is that the more famous an artist is, the more overrated he or she probably is, but that said, I have been proven totally wrong in the case of Taylor Swift. See, for example, her live performance of “All Too Well” on Saturday Night Live (posted below), which just blew me away. (I somehow missed her appearance on SNL last year; otherwise, I would have blogged about it sooner!) Yes, it’s the 10-minute version, but it is so good, you don’t want it to end.

I stumbled upon this intriguing infographic a few weeks ago and have been meaning to share it, so here it is! More details here, via @WallySierk.

Which one is your favorite?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins once described the sunk cost fallacy as the “Concorde fallacy” (see below). In plain English, this fallacy can be summed up as follows: “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you have already spent a lot of time and money making it.” By way of example, check out this report by Michael Sheetz about NASA’s costly Artemis lunar mission. Among other things, NASA’s Inspector General Paul Martin is quoted as saying: “We found that the first four Artemis missions will each cost $4.1 billion per launch, a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.” Perhaps we should now call it the Artemis fallacy.

Below is my one-page syllabus for a graduate-level course on “advanced business law topics” that I will be teaching this semester. During the first half of the semester, I am assigning two movies, “The Social Network” and “Blade Runner“; two documentaries, “Hot Coffee” and “Made You Look” (shout out to my T.A. Antonella for recommending “Made You Look” to me); and an episode (see here) from season 3 of the series “Entourage”. My students will select the topics to be covered during the second half of the semester.

The Department of Justice’s memorandum explaining the reasons for the redactions of the Trump search warrant affidavit is itself substantially redacted. File under: Transparency and accountability for thee but not me!

Today (25 August), my wife and I will commemorate the liberation of Paris from the Germans (today is “Paris Liberation Day“!), and I will celebrate another birthday, and we will mark both occasions with a bottle of our favorite champagne, Veuve Clicquot. (I will resume my series of blog posts on “the seven basic plots and legal narratives” in the next day or two.)

The Journal of Law and Public Policy of St Thomas University in Minneapolis has just published its special symposium issue on “Alternate Realities: Conspiracy Theory and the Constitutional and Democratic Order” (see here), including my paper on “The Leibniz Conspiracy.” Enjoy!