Memo to self: ask J.R. what she thinks about this.

This is one of the few convincing deconstructions I have ever seen.  (Andrew would not of course call it "deconstruction".)

Now that is what I call a _compelling_ homework assignment. (So much so, in fact, that I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of giving it. But at the same time so much of the rest of what they'd be getting in their economics classes is _also_ priming/framing/forcing, in a rather more underhanded way, that this might only be fair.)

Worked at Los Alamos and, more relevantly, wrote a 2001 thesis on _Articulation Theory and Disciplinary Change: Unpacking the Bayesian-Frequentist Paradigm Conflict in Statistical Science_!

"linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation that applies only to them. In this paper, we defend this approach in detail by showing how the same inferential procedure applies to utterances at both ends of the literal-loose-metaphorical continuum, and how both literal and metaphorical utterances may create poetic effects."

Well, yes, isn't this obvious*? We begin by reasoning with others; only later do we come to reason with ourselves. (*: where by "obvious" I mean "intensely debatable, yet compelling to people like me.")

"Everyone who ever dealt with a Troll knows of the strong, nagging urge to argue back at him ; and they know, of course, that this urge must be repressed at all cost, for it is what Trolls feed on. Thus trolling is powered by the same basic motivation that it serves to satisfy : that crazy desire to get the last word in a conversation. Trolls exist because there is enough Trollhood in everyone of us for them to feed on." Plus: Socrates and Hui Shi as trolls.

Are these esthetic complaints, or moral ones? Or is this an example of how the distinction blurs and breaks down?

This has been another edition of patient explanations of things which are obvious to everyone who has actually bothered to think. Tune in next week...

Shorter Henry Farrell: risk means _risk_, you morons.

"I think the logic of the financial sector has long been "We're smart and there are plenty of dumb investors out there. The rules should be designed to make it easy for us to separate them from their money." That is not a pleasant attitude, but, to our great misfortune, they were wrong. They managed to lose huge amounts of money making important institutions at least illiquid and probably insolvent."

Mark continues his righteous jihad against Stanley Fish.

Wonderful essay by a Canadian historian on the deep strand of Americanism which recasts radical reform as simply trying to do what was implicit at the beginning: " And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.... Canadians are not against life or liberty or happiness, in moderation. But we don’t hear the music, by and large. We see windmills where Americans see dragons and damsels in distress. And because we do, we don’t have that engine driving us onward, those whirring pistons of the gap between the real and ideal."

This is a thing of beauty.

Check if library has it.

"argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric"

As the poet said, "all art is artifice".

Very carefully (and rightly) avoiding a substantive position; merely pointing out that the economists' arguments in public fora and textbooks are, on their own terms, bad.

"Uh oh. we’ve got a downturn that can feed itself and, at the same time, dig trenches." Cool!

Talk by the head of our English dept. ("Only at CMU...") Sounds great but much would depend on the implementation; missed the talk as I had to teach.

"to say something so false that people can't resist writing about how false it is thus making the Fukayamer famous. "

"THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!! ... For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a set of principles."

"But now we're talking about fitting a statistical model to the distribution across studies of effect sizes -- a measure of the difference between the distributions of outcomes in the "drug" and "placebo" groups -- as a function of initial severity. And t

"The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as th