prior probability

On this day (20 June) in 1789, deputies of the “Third Estate” of the Estates-General (see here and here) met at the Royal Tennis Court in the Palace of Versailles, where they made “a solemn oath never to separate … until [a new] constitution of the realm is established and fixed upon solid foundations”, i.e. until they had drafted a written constitution limiting the absolute powers of the king. (For more details about this historic moment, see here and here.) This pivotal episode in the French Revolution was later immortalized by the great Jacques-Louis David in his unfinished fresco The Tennis Court Oath (pictured below), an epic symbolic work that merits its own separate blog post. In the meantime, see here.

Celebrate freedom! Today (19 June) is officially “Juneteenth National Independence Day” in the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth. Bonus track below:

Update: alas, when my daughter and I visited the mall today (Americana at Brand), all the stores but one (Nike) were open for business.

For some unknown algorithmic reason, a strange essay published in The Atlantic in 2022 kept popping up in my Twitter feed this weekend. This obscure essay, which is titled “Why do rich people love quiet?“, immediately brought back memories of my torts professor and mentor Guido Calabresi, who changed my intellectual life forever. Among other things, Guido — to this day, he prefers to be called by his Christian name — introduced me to the works of Ronald Coase and taught me a disturbing Coasean/Calabresian insight: most conflicts, including disputes about noise, are almost always “reciprocal” problems, i.e. both the “victim” and “wrongdoer” are often jointly responsible for whatever harm has befallen one of the parties. To this end, I can still remember one of the cases Guido assigned, Sturges v. Bridgman or what I now call “the case of the noisy confectioner”, and his unorthodox discussion of the reciprocal conflict between the silence-loving doctor and noise-making confectioner in that classic case. More generally, Guido asked us, what legal or moral rights should men of contemplation (like the doctor in Sturges v. Bridgman) have vis-a-vis “doers” or men of action (like the noisy confectioner)?

After attending the Manifest festival at Berkeley on June 7-9, where I met and befriended the founders of the Manifold prediction-market platform, I posted my first betting-market on their user-friendly website a few days ago; see here or tweet below:

My goal is to post a new question every other Monday; in the meantime, I will have more to say about Manifold and will respond to this powerful critique of prediction markets sometime next week.

Performed by Ruslana Semeniuk (voice), Wesley Somers (baroque guitar and voice), and Avery Grethe (steel string guitar) at the Spring Chamber Music Concert, Recital Hall, UC Santa Cruz (4 June 2024).

Bonus link: a TikTok video of Anthony Bourdain’s 2002 visit to French Laundry.

Shout out to my colleague and friend Brian L. Frye, who offered to ghostwrite my next law review article!

One of my favorite Milton Friedman anecdotes is the following story in which Professor Friedman, while traveling somewhere overseas, reportedly spotted scores of road builders moving earth with basic shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why heavy tractors weren’t being used instead of mere shovels, his host told him that it was to keep the employment rate high: if the workers used tractors, fewer people would have jobs. “Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?”, Friedman inquired. But did this exchange really happen? See link below …