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Books

Reading A Conflict of Visions

I have just finished reading A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell.

While I didn't love the writing style, I think the central premise is brilliant: underlying the politics and ideologies of different people is a specific vision of human nature.

  • The Unconstrained Vision: Some believe that humans can truly understand the complexities of how communities work. They argue that "advanced" individuals can mold society for the greater good.

  • The Constrained Vision: Others feel that societies are far too complex to be fully understood and that people are primarily driven by their own interests. In this view, trying to reshape society according to our own ideals often ends in disaster. Furthermore, because human beings have conflicting desires, no "ideal" solution can ever be found—only trade-offs and compromises.

While the first group evaluates outcomes and calls for intervention when results aren't "perfect," the second group simply aspires to maintain a social process that produces a "good enough" result.

Reading Bernoulli's fallacy

I have started reading Bernoull's fallacy by Aubrey Clayton.

It has some very nice ideas about bayesian and frequentists statistics, but so far I think that the philosophy behind bayesian statistics is much better explained in Scientific reasoning Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by Colin Howson. Moreover, I think it really overstates the benefit that ditching frequentist statistics would do to science. In my opinion the scientific enterprise is something much more complex than just statistic reasoning. For instance, in genetics we use statistics, but the role of this kind of inference is somewhat secondary.