From the monthly archives:

February 2007

This Is My Dataset. There Are Many Datasets Like It, but This One Is Mine. . .

February 27, 2007

That’s the title of my new post at Overcoming Bias….

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Effective Policy and the Measurement of Human Well-Being

February 27, 2007

Economists Andrew Oswald and Andrew Branchflower begin a very interesting new NBER paper [$$$] on the relationship between levels of self-reported happiness and blood levels with this dubious claim:
For effective social and economic policies to be designed, it is necessary for policymakers to be able to measure human well-being.

They better hope they’re wrong, because if they’re right, then effective [...]

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Adapting to Stuff and People, and Stuff

February 23, 2007

My first contribution to the Overcoming Bias blog is up, discussing themes perhaps distressingly familiar to Fly Bottle readers.

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Bounded vs. Unbounded

February 2, 2007

Lately I’ve been noticing a general phenomenon that strikes me as shady… comparing something unbounded against something bounded. The top quintile, decile, percentile, or whatever on, say, the income distribution is going to have no limit on the number. Which is why it is possible to have such a huge gap between the median and [...]

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Stephen Stich: Quote of the Day

February 2, 2007

“The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are [...]

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Sullivan’s Meaninglessness about Meaningfulness

February 1, 2007

Andrew Sullivan publishes an intelligent letter from a reader on how Sullivan and Sam Harris are talking past each other — Harris talking about truth, Sullivan talking about meaning — and suggesting that they refocus and take this issues head on.
I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility and will to act [...]

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