On this day (11 July) in 1804, an early-morning duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton took place. To commemorate this fateful moment in North American history, I am posting below some historic odds and ends: a YouTube video showcasing the actual pistols used in the duel; a TikTok video featuring Hamilton Park in Weehawken, N.J., where this famous duel took place; and the song “Ten Duel Commandments”. P.S.: The last duel to take place in Argentina occurred in 1968! (See here and here; second link in Spanish.)
Yesterday (9 July) was Argentina Independence Day, which my daughter Adys Ann and I celebrated by visiting the Museo Evita in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Later today (10 July), we will attend an informal talk or charla on my favorite Argentian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, as well as make a pilgramage to Borges’s former flat on Calle Maipú #994, among other things. In the meantime, here is Evita’s Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Perón
FYI: The Bluebook is a collection of incredibly complex and convoluted citation rules used by most U.S. law journals. (Think of Dante’s Inferno, but for footnotes!) I have proposed an alternative set of simpler rules, which I call “Anti-blue“, here.
I just finished reading Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason (book cover pictured below), which was written by my fellow lawyer-historian Buckner F. Melton, Jr. (As an aside, it’s true this work wasn’t on my summer reading list, but I couldn’t help myself after finding a used copy of this tome for $1(!) at this lovely bookshop in my hometown last week.)
For me, one of the most remarkable aspects of the “Burr Conspiracy” is that historians still disagree about about the extent of Aaron Burr’s involvement in this enigmatic plot and what his true aims were. Perhaps Burr’s nefarious conspiracy would be a great test case for our proposed World Truth League! More details about this new information market are available in this short (16pp.) white paper/prospectus; in the meantime, everyone is welcome to join the world truth league waitlist here: https://worldtruthleague.com
I am posting my third link to Twitter in as many days because I could not find this catchy song, “Incentives Matter” (hat tip: Tyler Cowen), on YouTube:
Exploring formats to make education more entertaining: I generated this song for the “Incentives Matter” principle in economics as described by @tylercowen.https://t.co/iuPMZvtyzx
“Incentives, they change the way we act, Shift the motivation, that’s a fact, From the…
Are you tired of being lied to by op-ed pundits and TV talking heads? Would you like to see their opinions put to the test? Then join the World Truth League! You can join a team and make forecasts or hindcasts, which will then be aggregated over multiple rounds until a consensus emerges. More details are available in our short (16pp.) white paper/prospectus; in the meantime, join the world truth league waitlist here: https://worldtruthleague.com
Are you tired of being lied to by op-ed pundits and TV talking heads? Would you like to see their opinions put to the test? Then join the World Truth League! Waitlist here: https://t.co/3k5Trmn24Epic.twitter.com/tWT5InBmLf
— F. E. Guerra-Pujol 🇨🇺🇲🇽🇮🇱🇯🇲🇯🇵 (@ProfessorPujol) July 6, 2024
A bunch of these silly GPT-5 memes popped into my Twitter feed last month, so I thought I would pass one along. Also, happy 11th anniversary to my blog!
🇺🇸Happy 4th of July🇺🇸 Following up on my previous post, Steve Kuhn, myself, and several others have been brainstorming a new type of second-generation information market: the World Truth League. (Here is a link to our 16-page white paper, which contains a tentative sketch of our idea, including a one-page prospectus/executive summary.) So, how would our proposed truth league keep score? In brief, we propose a simple Bayesian scoring system in which teams would have an opportunity to update their beliefs. In brief, our scoring system consists of three discrete steps, which are further described below the fold, and can be summed up in three words: wash, rinse, and repeat.
Is it possible to test the truth-values of popular or entrenched conspiracy theories without resorting to censorship? To this end, Steve Kuhn and yours truly have just posted our new “World Truth League White Paper” to SSRN. In brief, we propose a new multi-round Bayesian scoring system for testing and adjudicating disputed claims like the lab-leak hypothesis or 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories. I will have a few more things to say about our proposed truth league soon; in the meantime, below is an excerpt (emphasis added; footnotes below the fold) from the introduction to our paper:
Were the 2020 U.S. presidential elections stolen?[1] Did a lab leak occur in Wuhan, China in 2019?[2] Was 9/11 an inside job?[3] More generally, how can we create a process where controversial topics are debated in a good faith manner? This white paper and prospectus outlines a novel iterative multi-round scoring method for testing the truth values of controversial claims.
By way of background, the authors have been attempting to design a truth market for several years now.[4] We now wish to present a tentative sketch of our solution: Hayek 3.0. If Hayek 1.0 is F. A. Hayek’s classic work on “The Uses of Knowledge in Society”,[5] i.e. the fundamental insight that prices reflect information that is dispersed and decentralized throughout the world, and if Hayek 2.0 are first-generation information markets like Kalshi,[6] Manifold,[7] and Polymarket,[8] then Hayek 3.0 is our blueprint for a new, second-generation information market, which we are calling the World Truth League.
prior probability 