prior probability

What if John Belushi, Steve Martin, Frances McDormand, and Gene Hackman had played the roles of the advanced Nexus 6 replicants in the classic 1982 Blade Runner movie? That is precisely what filmmaker Leon Chase re-imagines in Blade Runner: The Lost Cut. The only question I have is the one that my fellow Blade-Runner aficionado Jason Kottke poses: “Does this cut go too far? Or not too far enough?” More details about this crazy cinematic montage are available here, via Adi Robertson (The Verge).

The chess grandmasters pictured below are “social distancing” by staying at home and playing their rapid chess matches online (#magnusinvite), but truth be told, they’re all having a tough time not touching their faces! Julia Naftulin explains here why we are always touching our faces.

In the introduction to her book “Thinking in Bets,” Annie Duke describes how she was completing her PhD at Penn when her personal life took a sudden and unexpected turn. Before she knew it, she became a professional poker player, winning millions of dollars in high-stakes competitions around the globe. So far removed from the Ivory Tower, she abandoned her formal studies and was never awarded her doctoral degree. Accordingly, I wish to conclude my review of Duke’s beautiful book by writing a Platonic love letter to her.

Dear Miss Duke, if you are reading this, I have an idea. In lieu of a formal academic dissertation why don’t you ask your publisher to mail a few extra copies of “Thinking in Bets” to the pompous academics at Penn. As the notes on pages 241 to 252 of your book amply attest to, you have more than earned your doctoral degree! More importantly, you are an intellectual inspiration to us all. One of the reasons I love your work so much is that I too have become over the years a hardcore proponent of probabilistic thinking, and your enchanting book not only lays out in plain English the virtues of thinking in probabilistic terms; it also provides a plethora of practical tips and recommendations for thinking probabilistically in one’s own life. Thank you, and keep betting!

Let’s return to my extended review of Annie Duke’s beautiful book “Thinking in Bets,” shall we? Thus far, we have seen how a personal betting syndicate, one committed to a certain set of values, can help improve the quality of your decisions, but what if you are unable or unwilling to join such a betting syndicate? Annie Duke concludes her beautiful book “Thinking in Bets” with several second-best decision-making strategies in Chapter 6. These mental strategies are second-best ones because they do not involve actual bets or betting behavior; yet they are nevertheless worth giving a try, for they help us promote probabilistic thinking. For brevity’s sake, I shall review only two such mental strategies here. Continue reading →

Check out the short video below poking fun at all the wasteful and counterproductive spending in the coronavirus relief bill approved by the Congress last month. For my part, this parody makes a deeper point: instead of enacting another round of bailouts, why don’t we return to our nation’s first principles and take a property-rights approach to the current pandemic? I outline precisely such an approach in my Mercatus Center op-ed, which was published yesterday.

My essay, which explains what the proper legal response should be to COVID-19, was published earlier today in The Bridge, a publication of The Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Here is an excerpt:

“If the government is going to order a business to close its doors for the greater good, then the government is also required under the Constitution to pay “just compensation” in exchange for one’s cooperation. This property rights approach to the pandemic not only respects the federal structure of our constitutional system of government, it also represents a fair compromise between our need to make significant sacrifices for the common good (by staying at home for a reasonable period of time) and our bedrock moral right to receive some of form of meaningful or just compensation in exchange for the deprivation of our liberty.”

Some media outlets (like this one) are reporting that Communist dictator Kim Jung Un is either dead or critically ill. Good riddance, motherfucker! If only the same fate were to befall the corrupt dictators of Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela!