prior probability

We are in the process of building a simple range voting or bayesian voting model of appellate judging as well as a separate model of legal evasion behavior (e.g. why do so many drivers on the road routinely exceed the speed limit), so this is what we’ve been reading during the 4th of July holiday:

1. Alex Raskolnikov, Probabilistic compliance, to be published in The Yale Journal of Regulation. This paper presents a simple model of legal uncertainty and explores some important questions, such as what effect does legal uncertainty (i.e. the use of vague standards instead of bright-line rules) have on the compliance behavior of business firms and on the market for legal advice? Weakness of the paper: the model assumes perfect detection.

2. Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule, The votes of other judges, The Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 105 (2016), pp. 159-190. This theoretical paper explores some intriguing questions about judicial disagreement and judicial voting, such as why do judges disagree about the proper outcome of many close cases and should a judge take into account such disagreement when it occurs? Weakness of the paper: the authors’ two-step approach is too simplistic and doesn’t distinguish between conciliation and non-conciliation views of disagreement among epistemic peers.

3. Jeremy Waldron, Five to four: why do bare majorities rule on courts?, published in The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 123, no. 6 (2014), pp. 1692-1730. This fascinating paper poses a fundamental yet under-theorized question in the judicial context: why do judges on multi-member appellate courts use majority voting–assigning equal weight to each judge’s vote–to settle their differences? Weakness of the paper: the normative part of the author’s analysis is incomplete. Specifically, why does ethics supposedly require that each person’s vote be weighted equally, regardless of the voter’s intensity?

4. Philip Pettit, When to defer to majority testimony, and when not, Analysis, Vol. 66, no. 3 (2006), pp. 179-187. This paper is part of a much broader literature; it explores some intricate theoretical questions about Condorcet’s jury theorem.

5. Robert Schlaifer, Probability and statistics for business decisions, McGraw-Hill (1959). We keep finding references to Schlaifer’s book in the work of two of our intellectual heroes, the bayesian decision theorist Howard Raiffa (pictured below, left side) and the bayesian mathematician Jimmie Savage (pictured below, right side), so we decided to order a copy of this book and begin reading …

    

1 July 1867: Canada Day 🇨🇦 

2 July 1823: Bahia Independence Day 🇧🇷

3 July 1952: Congress approves the Puerto Rico Constitution 🇵🇷

4 July 1776: USA Independence Day 🇺🇸

5 July 2013: Prior Probability’s first blog post 🎲

Although we’re a day late, 29 June 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the launching of the original Apple iPhone.* To honor this occasion, here are some useful links:

1. Tyler Cowen’s essay in praise of the iPhone: Put down the iPhone and appreciate its genius.

2. Adam Greenfield’s critique: A sociology of the smartphone.

3. Steve Jobs’s original iPhone presentation from January 2007.

* Full disclosure: I drafted this blog post on my Apple iPhone 5s. That I was able to access the Internet, link to various sources, and track down and post a picture — in a matter of minutes and on such a small and portable device — is remarkable.

Via digg. It would intriguing to see if there is any correlation between commute times and accident rates.

“How Republicans are born… Daughter, 8, has been savings [sic] up to buy her first Guitar. Found it for $35. She had 35 exact. Then…sales tax.”

This tweet (quoted above) by Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, has generated a lot of discussion on the Internet today. On the one hand, taxes are a necessary evil to pay for public goods such as national defense and public roads. On the other hand, maybe we don’t need so many roads and military weapons. But what most commentators are missing is that Mr Norquist is just plain wrong about Republicans being “anti-taxes.” In truth, when they have been in power, Republicans in Congress have done nothing to curb federal spending (except talk). (An intellectually-honest libertarian would argue that taxes are a form of theft, backed up by coercion.)

“The first thing you learn in advertising is that nobody wants to read your shit.” According to Steven Pressfield’s latest book Nobody wants to read your sh*t, that fundamental lesson applies to all forms of writing, not just ads. Pressman’s excellent book, however, is full of simple rules designed to help writers tell stories that people will want to read. His book is full of practical pointers for writing ad copy, movie scripts, and works of fiction as well as non-fiction. Here’s one helpful excerpt (p. 81): Continue reading →