Category Archives: Science and the scientific method

Guest Post: Is the Problem the Models or the Modelers?

Submitted by Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since them, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our model, but in ourselves–apologies to W Shakespeare The economics profession […]

Guest Post: Review of Pablo Triana’s "Lecturing Birds on Flying"

Submitted by Richard Smith: This is the Black Swan gospel according to Triana. Taleb endorses it in a characteristically incendiary and intemperate foreword. He does come out all guns blazing, and you just have to go with that. Or chuck a glass of water over him, if he’s in range, I suppose. A quick recap […]

Taleb Presentation on the Fourth Quadrant

Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave a presentation in New York yesterday which hews closely to a recent piece of his, although his talk did include some additional interesting charts and anecdotes. The article is worthwhile, and worth your attention, but let me highlight the two things I found most interesting. First was his “fourth quadrant” construct. […]

Harvard, Princeton Economists Say No Fire Sale Prices, Premise of Public-Private Partnership Wrong

We have been saying for some time that the policy premise of the Fed and Treasury has been that the financial crisis is that it is a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis. If you are of that school, the fallen prices of various assets is due to a combination of scarcity of funding plus […]

Tim Duy Versus Hedge Fund Manager Scott on the Economy

Full disclosure: I have a great deal of respect for both Tim Duy and the hedge fund manager Scott who is also quoted in this post. As you will see, Duy wrote an interesting post addressing a question posed by Brad DeLong, in essence “Since we are in the midst of the worst financial crisis […]

Taleb’s Harsh Assessment of Bankers, Economists, and the Fed

Reader Michael called to my attention a wide-ranging interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan and professional iconoclast, in the Times of London. The article is colorful, wide-ranging, and a bit long, so I’ve excerpted some of the most provocative bits. Needless to say, I am particularly taken by his dim view […]

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Sexual Deviant?

According to a University of New Hampshire study, children who are spanked are more likely to have an appetite for kinky less-than-savory sexual practices. So is the anti-spanking movement really about sexual conformity? From PhysOrg: New research by a University of New Hampshire domestic abuse expert says spanking children affects their sex lives as adults. […]

"Antidepressant drugs don’t work"

The headline above comes from the UK’s Independent. I could have picked number of variants (BBC, “Anti-depressants ‘of little use‘,” Financial Times, “Antidepressants ‘have no impact‘”), but what is interesting is that as of this hour, this study, published by the University of Hull, is getting MSM coverage solely in the UK and Commonwealth countries. […]

Rich Nations’ Environmental Damage to Third-World Countries Costs Them More Than Foreign Debt

Since the market meltdown ’round the world is pre-empting a lot of other programming, I thought we’d turn to other important topics. A study looking over 40 years led by UC Berkeley researchers concluded that first world environmental degradation of third-world countries cost them more, in aggregate, than their foreign debt. Indeed, the researchers argue […]

Insects May Have Done in Dinos

Science Daily tells us that a new Princeton University Press book, What Bugged the Dinosaurs? Insects, Disease and Death in the Cretaceous, by George and Roberta Poinar argues that insect borne diseases played a major role in the demise of dinosaurs. Their reasoning? The reptiles died off over too long a period for a cataclysmic […]

Human Evolution Accelerating Rapidly

Articles in Reuters and the BBC, reporting on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe how the pace of human evolution has increased in the last 5000 years. However, the changes discussed have taken the form of adaptations specific to certain regions, with the result that the human species […]

Humans May Have Shortened the Life of the Universe

Never mind global warming. Human observation of the universe may have accelerated its demise. An article in New Scientist discusses the theory developed by cosmologists Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and James Dent of Vanderbilt University. They believe that the observation of dark energy made in 1998 may have caused the universe to […]

Surfer Comes Up With New Theory of Everything

No, the headline is not a variant on the now tired joke, “What does a guru order at a McDonalds? ‘Make me one with everything.’” It instead refers to a different sort of messianic endeavor, the quest in physics to come up with a unified theory that integrates all known types of matter and forces. […]