Useful maxim: Just because the result is uncertain doesn’t mean it’s going to be close

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I’ve been watching elections for many years and in that context I learnt a slogan (can't remember the source) that’s applicable to many other areas of life. Mathematically it's rather obvious and trite, but it's one of those things that's worth fixing in your brain because it's an easy mistake to make in an reflective … Continue reading Useful maxim: Just because the result is uncertain doesn’t mean it’s going to be close

The Catholic church is dangerously mistaken about intersex people

~ deponysum ~ 2 Comments

I. TLDR: The notion that every person can be clearly categorised as either male or female on the basis of biology appears to be increasingly popular in Catholic circles, but the biology and medical science disagree At least if Father Tad Pacholczyk of the National Catholic Bioethics Education Center is correct about current theology, the … Continue reading The Catholic church is dangerously mistaken about intersex people

The Economic Ideology: what it is and how it reproduces itself

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[This is not exactly finished work. I'm still very much in the process of tinkering with it.] I want to draw a distinction between economics, and what I call the economic ideology, for the purpose of critiquing the latter. Economics is a complex, nuanced discipline. I have my problems with mainstream economics, but it often … Continue reading The Economic Ideology: what it is and how it reproduces itself

Share market growth isn’t the same as economic growth, in fact they go the opposite way

~ deponysum ~ 5 Comments

Edit: After I'd written this post I realised that John Ross had written a similar post here. I hemmed and hawed about whether I should post this but decided to in the end. Go visit John's blog, it's very good. Edit 2: I am not Slajov Zizek. I don't know why the Slajov Zizek image … Continue reading Share market growth isn’t the same as economic growth, in fact they go the opposite way

The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index is bad

~ deponysum ~ 6 Comments

If you enjoy this post, check out my (free) book https://deponysum.com/2020/03/30/something-to-read-in-quarantine-essays-2018-to-2020/ TLDR: The problem with freedom indexes is this. They are aggregates of separate variables, some of which indicate small government, others of which indicate what would uncontroversially be regarded as ‘good government’. It is the good government indicators, not the small government indicators, which … Continue reading The Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index is bad

Thinking about political persuasion from a left-Wing point of view

~ deponysum ~ 6 Comments

1. The American left cannot win without persuading large swathes of the right & centre There’s a comforting lie that some parts of the American left like to tell themselves. We don’t need to worry about convincing conservatives- we just need to get non-voters to vote. This has never rung true to me. What evidence … Continue reading Thinking about political persuasion from a left-Wing point of view

GPT-2 Among the philosophers: Prompting a language bot with philosophical content

~ deponysum ~ 1 Comment

GPT-2 is a machine learning application designed for language modelling- that is predicting the word most likely to follow the proceeding string of words. It turns out that to be good at language modelling over diverse corpuses you’ve got to be very good at mimicking many things- including philosophy. I prompted an online version of … Continue reading GPT-2 Among the philosophers: Prompting a language bot with philosophical content