Qoute goldmine.

I've always considered the man behind the Falkenblog (Eric Falkenstein) to be an incredibly perspicacious man, so it's unfortunate he'll be retiring from the blogosphere. However, he went out with a bang, or, more precisely, over 600 quotes. There are a lot of gems there. You can get it here.

A few I flipped through and copied:

I can usually judge a fellow by what he laughs at   ~ Wilson Mizner

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom   ~ Herman Hesse (a favorite author of mine)

Moderation in all things   ~ Democritus

The most exciting phrase to hear in science - the one that heralds new discoveries - is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."   ~ Isaac Asimov (sci-fi favorite of mine)

What was hard to endure is sweet to recall   ~ European Proverb

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.    ~ Niels Bohr

Anybody can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and it the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.   ~ Aristotle

 Holding beliefs proportionate to evidence requires humility

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter anyway   ~ Richard Feynman

To those who think, life is a comedy, to those who feel, life is a tragedy



I'd highly recommend looking into more yourself.

Bias.

 


Alright, as promised here's more on cognitive bias. This is the list off of Wiki regarding some known cognitive biases. Reading down the list is nearly comical. If you go through it and don't admit you commit 95% of these then you must be lying. Here's a couple:

Curse of knowledge – when knowledge of a topic diminishes one's ability to think about it from a less-informed perspective.

Anchoring or focalism – the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Recency bias – a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience attributed to recent stimuli or observations – the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events.

Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened. Colloquially referred to as "Hindsight is 20/20".

Self-serving bias – the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information or memories in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.


Good stuff. I'll try talking about bounded rationality and other applications of these, but for now I just wanted to lay out some examples to give you an idea of how stupid you are.

Cognitive bias.

 


So my post about cognitive dissonance and partisan think tanks got me interested in talking about one of the most important fields to emerge from economics in recent decades. Behavioral economics.

Now, as I pointed out earlier, models are essentially what you put into them. They're the assumptions and logic of your hypothesis. Well, the basic models are built around perfectly rational human beings that are able to compute problems down to decimal places and make decisions based off of miniscule differences.

Well, that's not too reasonable, but it has proven to be useful, and definitely mathematically tractable. So what do we do? Well, behavioral economists, using tools and insights from psychology, are trying to figure out the details of how exactly people think. A large portion of the focus has been on bias, or why people deviate from these perfectly rational models. Wiki defines it as:

"A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment. Whereby, inferences of other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own “subjective social reality” from their perception of the input. An individual’s construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate one’s behavior in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality"

Once they find it, they apply it to actual models so that their assumptions are much more cohesive with reality. Good stuff. I hope to cover some specific ones, since they're easy topics to talk about and are immensely interesting. 

Overachievers.

 

 Stealing from Daniel's blog again. 

That's a shit ton of medals for....what again? They literally ran out of room on their jackets and had to go to their pants. Wonder what their backs looks like. Anyways, if a group of people has to award themselves this much whilst having done nothing then they must be 1) begging for attention, 2) overcompensating, 3) both. Good thing they have their priorities straight. 

Speaking of their priorities, here's a chilling documentary about what it's like inside the boarders of North Korea. Awful medical conditions, terrible poverty for even those who are the best off, and, apparently, the lack of nutrition is so bad that people often go blind. To make matters worse, they don't have the training needed to use the medical equipment that was donated to them by...the United States. Not getting a single fucking medal from me.

Politics, empirics, dissonance.

 

I didn't go into depth regarding why I think that the justification behind partisan think tanks may not be as innocent as "promot[ing] what they believe." Which is certainly true in some sense. Like-minded individuals may group together to promote what they believe to be true via research institutions. But here's a sentence off of Wiki that I picked up regarding cognitive dissonance:

"Dissonance is aroused when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one's belief, the dissonance can result in restoring consonance through misperception, rejection or refutation of the information, seeking support from others who share the beliefs, and attempting to persuade others."

I guess no one likes to admit they're wrong. Eerie how closely this matches up with think tanks. On a side note, we better check up with our friends over at the "Flat Earth Society". Here's their purpose as a totally credible and non-partisan think tank:

"Enter the Flat Earth Society. For over five hundred years humanity has believed the "round Earth" teachings of Efimovich and his followers. But all hope is not lost. For through all that time, a small but diligent band of individuals have preserved the knowledge of our planet's true shape. And now, after centuries in the Dark Ages, we believe that mankind as a whole is once again ready to embrace the truth that has forever been the Flat Earth Society. Using whatever means are deemed necessary and relying heavily on a callous disregard for the lives and well-being of our members, we have slowly but steadily been spreading the news."

When do these become cults again?

From the source I got the picture from the article started:

"Society decided to check in on the Flat Earth Society and be all, 'Hey, so you guys still crazy?' And the FES was all like, 'Totes.'"

 

Had to.

 

Bad economics humor:

 "As everyone knows, Russell Crowe invented game theory"

Taken straight from Daniel's blog.

Nonsense econometrica.

A social network.

I made a new blog tentatively titled "Econometric Nonsense."

Here's the first post titled "The Science of Society":

I'm creating this blog to divert the math away from my other blog, found here. Although I do love writing non-rigorous and non-technical posts, I also enjoy the occasional proof and econometric work. So that's what this blog is for. I'll give off simple and intuitive proofs, explanations, etc., of anything mathematically related, with an emphasis on econometrics. Since I'm just starting out with statistical software as well, I could give out beginner lessons so that I too can get practice. Best way to start is a few quotes, so here goes:

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

-Max Planck 

"Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!"

-Richard Feynman

Hopefully that'll make this one less technical. If you're actually interested in that, then by all means check it out.