I was chosen to be Bluffton’s Civic Engagement Day scholar for 2018 and so I’ll be lecturing about honor for Civic Engagement Day and at the Presidential Scholarship Competition next week. I had to assign a reading about honor to the prospective…
Blog Archives
See page about The Positivist Fallacy
I wrote a new page about The Positivist Fallacy which explains why positivism is impossible and the whole normative-positive distinction is illogical and useless at best or may even be harmful at worst. An example of how positivism has been harmful is the…
Posted in Medianism, Philosophy and ethics
Weekend Dimmeu, Foodie Edition
Economists frequently dismiss diminishing marginal utility (dimmeu) of wealth for ethical and political concerns, but it is hard to avoid the concept when you start looking at the world. For example, the poorest people cannot afford to pay people to…
The Streetlight Fallacy
The Streetlight Fallacy is a kind of informal fallacy in which people over-emphasize readily-available information even though it is clearly wrong instead of looking for the right information. It is a version of the availability heuristic, except that in the…
Posted in Medianism, Philosophy and ethics
“Statistics make smart people smarter, and dumb people dumber.”
Mark Twain famously said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I would counter that it is much harder to lie using statistics than without statistics because statistics are so precise and easier to verify than…
Posted in MELI & Econ Stats, Philosophy and ethics
Medianism 