prior probability

What is “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy“? You can either read about Stigler’s law for free on Wikipedia (see here) or pay a company called “Wiley” up to $42.00 to obtain a PDF copy of Stigler’s original 10-page paper — that’s $4.20 per page or $1.00 for every year since Stigler’s paper was first published in 1980. (What make’s Wiley’s extortion racket even more infuriating is that I don’t have free access to Stigler’s 42-year-old paper even though I am affiliated with a major research university.)

Don’t you love it how North American CEOs like to lecture us about privacy, gay rights, or “social justice” while at the same time they are doing business in China. (Apple, Disney, the NBA, and Nike immediately come to mind.) Now, check out this academic job posting for a two-year “Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative Fellowship at Emory University.” Among other things, that job post tells us that vulnerability theory is about “decentering the individual and focusing attention on the law’s construction and maintenance of the social structures and relationships in which we all live our day-to-day lives.” (You cannot make this shit up!) How ironic, however, that an academic institution devoted to “vulnerability theory” and to “decentering the individual” itself replicates the existing feudal hierarchies of academia, or to quote an anonymous critic of the job post, notice how issues of social justice in academia are “never addressed self-referentially by high-income individuals with relative job security in legal academia, with respect to the relation of their own relative positions in society with those they employ in ‘lesser’ roles, e.g. VAPs, Fellows, Adjuncts, Lecturers, [legal writing] instructors, Clinical Instructors, Professors of Practice, and so on.” Touche’.

This week’s edition of “Wednesday Writing Tips” comes to us via The Paris Review, which published an intimate and in-depth interview of Ernest Hemingway in 1958–available here (in the PDF format) or here (online version). In the words of one author (Julia Mehalko for Retro Gazing): All writers need to read this Hemingway Paris Review interview. I concur!

You may already know about world-famous Tiananmen Square protests that occurred in June of 1989, but did you know about the Tiananmen Incident that occurred on this day (April 5) in 1976? Via Wikipedia (footnote omitted):

“The Tiananmen Incident [Chinese: 四五天安门事件] was a mass gathering and protest that took place on 4–5 April 1976, at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. The incident occurred on the traditional day of mourning, the Qingming Festival, after the Nanjing Incident [when] some people strongly disapproved of the removal of the displays of mourning, and began gathering in the Square to protest against the central authorities …. The event was labeled as counterrevolutionary immediately after its occurrence by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and served as a gateway to the dismissal and house arrest of then-Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was accused of planning the event, while he insisted that he was only nearby for a haircut. The Central Committee’s decision on the event was reversed after the Cultural Revolution ended, [and] it would later be officially hailed as a display of patriotism.”

Via Kottke: “This drone fly-through of Tesla’s new factory in Berlin is amazing … the drone flies through the robotic machinery in between cycles of stamping out parts and also through the cars as they are being assembled.”

This song is from 2017, and I still love it!

Via Econ Journal Watch (EJW), check out this series of 22 essays in which authors from around the world write about their country’s political economy and history of classical liberalism. (Also, here is the latest issue of the EJW — Volume 19.) To learn about classical liberalism more generally, see the introductory video below:

More details here; hat tip: @pickover.