prior probability

Although the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, most of the delegates to the Continental Congress did not sign this historic document until August 2, 1776! More fun facts about the Declaration of Independence are available here, via the National Archives. (For example, Reese Witherspoon, the actress who played the role of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, is a direct descendant of John Witherspoon, one of the 56 patriots who signed the 1776 Declaration.)

FYI, the following books are available online for free:

1. Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Deborah G. Mayo. (This book is available online for free from August 1-31 at this link.)

2. Introduction to Utilitarianism: An Online Textbook (Oxford University Press, 2022) by William MacAskill, Richard Yetter Chappell, and Darius Meissner.

3. Also, check out “Project Gutenberg“, an online library containing over 60,000 free eBooks.

I returned from Colombia last week and am now getting ready to visit Jamaica. In the meantime, here are a few additional photos from Bogota, one of my top-ten favorite cities in the world:

Via the popular Marginal Revolution blog, my colleague and friend Alex Tabarrok recently brought to my attention this prize-winning essay, which is provocatively titled “Drone Airspace: A New Global Asset Class“. The essay was written by Brent Skorup (pictured below), a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a visiting faculty fellow at the Governance and Technology Center of the University of Nebraska, who proposes the creation of “airspace markets” for commercial drone services. In the words of Mr Skorup, “With airspace markets, winning bidders win the exclusive license to manage, combine, and sublease air corridors. Importantly, operators have the freedom to iterate and to use the drone traffic management systems and technologies of their choice (subject to generally applicable FAA safety rules like separation minimums and emergency procedures).” Yes, what an excellent and innovative idea! My only criticism is that this proposal does not go far enough. Specifically, why not extend airspace markets to commercial satellites in outer space? See here, for example.

Via Brian Leiter, I recently discovered this excellent essay by Robert Cummins, a former philosophy professor who now writes detective novels. To the point, Dr Cummins’ essay presents a slam-dunk refutation of “reflective equilibrium,” a feeble, if not totally bogus, method of reasoning that is nevertheless popular among professional philosophers and some academic lawyers. In brief, there are two reasons why “reflective equilibrium” is bullshit. One is moral pluralism (my term). When people have different moral intuitions, no amount of individual or collective “reflection” will change that. The other reason has to do with the non-falsifiable nature (in a Popperian sense) of our moral intuitions. As a result, there is no way of “calibrating” or testing the intellectual outputs derived from this method of reasoning.

My colleague and friend Jimena Hurtado interviewed Tyler Cowen on 12 July in Bogota, Colombia. Although this informative interview is less than 10 minutes long, among other things Professor Cowen explains why he read The Wealth of Nations at age 14!

As I have gathered additional information about the many individuals in Adam Smith’s social circle during his 1766 sojourn in Paris, I have made significant revisions to Part 1 of my “Smith in the City” paper. I will most likely be making further corrections and revisions and will then post a “final” draft of the paper by the end of next week; in the meantime, however, here is a link to the most recent version of my work.

I first heard about the picture book “Bayesian Probability for Babies” last year, but the YouTube video below takes us on a page-by-page tour of the book. I am tempted to write a review!

I hate to be “that guy” but according to this 1985 Associated Press report, Jesus may have been born in late July!