1000 posts since this was set up in January 2006.
send me suggestions if you think there is anything that could be improved on. We are eventually going to get round to tidying up all the links on the side. A more worked out tagging and category system would help also.
Overall though, as the great Father Fintan Stack once said, "I've had my fun and that's all that matters".
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Knol - From Google Blog
There is a debate about whether Knol is an attempt at competing with Wikipedia. In academic use, its unclear where exacly it fits - for example, much of what you would think of writing a "knol" about seems better placed in a standard journal article review or scholarly dictionary. Does this offer a replacement for those? Scholarpedia is another potential candidate for competing with standard academic review formats. At the moment, there is not much incentive for individual academics to produce these types of documents but is it, more generally, a more logical way of reviewing fields that are very fast-moving?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarpedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
"A few months ago, we announced a new web authoring tool called Knol. Well, today we've announced its public launch, and we wanted to tell you a little bit more about it and how you might use it to complement your blog. Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic. The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading. Know how to fix a leaky toilet, but don't want to write a blog about fixing up your house? In that case, Knol is for you. Except for the different format, you'll get all the things you've come to expect from Blogger in Knol.
Like Blogger, Knol has simple web authoring tools that make it easy to collaborate, co-author, and publish. It has community features as well: Your readers will be able to add comments and rate your article, and, if you want, they'll be able to suggest edits that you can then either accept or reject. And, just like in Blogger, you can also choose to include ads from AdSense in your knols to perhaps make a little money.
One other important difference between Knol and Blogger is that Knol encourages you to reveal your true identity. Knols are meant to be authoritative articles, and, therefore, they have a strong focus on authors and their credentials. We feel that this focus will help ensure that authors get credit for their work, make the content more credible.
All in all, we think Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads. Create your Knol right now for free."
Moral Minds
just finished reading "Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong" by Marc D. Hauser. If you are looking for a full book review and critique of the central thesis, then you've come to the wrong place but this book is a real trove of interesting information.
The main idea idea of the book is that moral sense is an innate capacity that develops over the lifespan. There is excellent background on Kohlberg, Piaget, Kant, Hume and Chomsky in the first chapter which he synthesises in to a theory of moral development.
Some highlights in terms of the book in terms of relevance to behavioural econ include
- A discussion of the Nisbett and Cohen work on "Cultures of Honour" that examines the extent to which moral codes emerge from the historical economic conditions in communities.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-South/dp/0813319935
- Discussion of Damasio's work on frontal lobe damage and consideration of future consequences and its relationship to moral reasoning. This is followed by a discussion of psychopathy, future reasoning and moral culpability.
- Discussion of Hamilton and Trivers and the relevance of evolutionary sociobiology to moral reasoning.
- I know at least one reader of the blog who will be interested in the work of Harbaugh who showed, among other things, that shorter children within an age group make higher offers in ultimatum games than larger children (attributed to social dominance). His work is available below
http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/
- discussion of DeWaal and colleagues work on reciprocity among chimpanzees.
- discussion of Kahneman's work on remembered utility
- A discussion of Kacelnik's views on the evolutionary rationality of hyperbolic discounting. A brief non-technical discussion is below but worth reading these papers and corresponding literature. In general, the book has some great discussions of experimental work with animals and children.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/275/5296/29a?ck=nck
- there is a lot in the book on different research paradigms and thought experiments in moral judgment research such as,
The Ultimatum Game
The Prisoners Dilemma
The Trolley Problem
Anyway, there's lots more in there and you can get a sense of the overall narrative yourself by reading the book.
The main idea idea of the book is that moral sense is an innate capacity that develops over the lifespan. There is excellent background on Kohlberg, Piaget, Kant, Hume and Chomsky in the first chapter which he synthesises in to a theory of moral development.
Some highlights in terms of the book in terms of relevance to behavioural econ include
- A discussion of the Nisbett and Cohen work on "Cultures of Honour" that examines the extent to which moral codes emerge from the historical economic conditions in communities.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Honor-Psychology-Violence-South/dp/0813319935
- Discussion of Damasio's work on frontal lobe damage and consideration of future consequences and its relationship to moral reasoning. This is followed by a discussion of psychopathy, future reasoning and moral culpability.
- Discussion of Hamilton and Trivers and the relevance of evolutionary sociobiology to moral reasoning.
- I know at least one reader of the blog who will be interested in the work of Harbaugh who showed, among other things, that shorter children within an age group make higher offers in ultimatum games than larger children (attributed to social dominance). His work is available below
http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/
- discussion of DeWaal and colleagues work on reciprocity among chimpanzees.
- discussion of Kahneman's work on remembered utility
- A discussion of Kacelnik's views on the evolutionary rationality of hyperbolic discounting. A brief non-technical discussion is below but worth reading these papers and corresponding literature. In general, the book has some great discussions of experimental work with animals and children.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/275/5296/29a?ck=nck
- there is a lot in the book on different research paradigms and thought experiments in moral judgment research such as,
The Ultimatum Game
The Prisoners Dilemma
The Trolley Problem
Anyway, there's lots more in there and you can get a sense of the overall narrative yourself by reading the book.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
IZA Working Paper on "Happiness Inequality"
Barry Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
Abstract
This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness across groups: Two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has been eroded, and the gender happiness gap has disappeared entirely. Paralleling changes in the income distribution, differences in happiness by education have widened substantially. We develop an integrated approach to measuring inequality and decomposing changes in the distribution of happiness, finding a pervasive decline in within-group inequality during the 1970s and 1980s that was experienced by even narrowly-defined demographic groups. Around one-third of this decline has subsequently been unwound. Juxtaposing these changes with large rises in income inequality suggests an important role for non-pecuniary actors in shaping the well-being distribution.
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3624.pdf
Friday, August 01, 2008
Brainless Economics?
The economist has an article in last weeks edition asking "Do economists need brains?". Basically an introduction to neuroeconomics. They cite the first success of neuroeconomics as providing support for the idea that irrational behaviour in a one-shot ultimatum game is explained by a punishment motive:
"Neuroeconomists have tried to explain this seemingly irrational behaviour [turning down low offers] by using an “active MRI”. In MRIs used in medicine the patient simply lies still during the procedure; in active MRIs, participants are expected to answer economic questions while blood flows in the brain are scrutinised to see where activity is going on while decisions are made. They found that rejecting a low offer in the ultimatum game tended to be associated with high levels of activity in the dorsal stratium, a part of the brain that neuroscience suggests is involved in reward and punishment decisions, providing some support to the behavioural theories."
They go on to suggest that economics can improve neuroscience's understanding of how the brain works by introducing neuroscientists to game theory:
"The neuroscientist’s idea of a game is rock, paper, scissors, which is zero-sum, whereas economists have focused on strategic games that produce gains through collaboration."
They then describe some of the arguments against, as well as some proponents who go back somewhat further than than the current enthusiasts, before finishing by drawing a clear distinction between (soft) behavioural econ and (hard) neroecon. Quoting Kahneman:
"It is far easier to argue for mindless economics than for brainless economics"
Links to some of the books and articles mentioned are below:
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux [Amazon]
The Case for Mindless Economics Faruk Gul & Wolfgang Pesendorfer
Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility by David Colander
"Neuroeconomists have tried to explain this seemingly irrational behaviour [turning down low offers] by using an “active MRI”. In MRIs used in medicine the patient simply lies still during the procedure; in active MRIs, participants are expected to answer economic questions while blood flows in the brain are scrutinised to see where activity is going on while decisions are made. They found that rejecting a low offer in the ultimatum game tended to be associated with high levels of activity in the dorsal stratium, a part of the brain that neuroscience suggests is involved in reward and punishment decisions, providing some support to the behavioural theories."
They go on to suggest that economics can improve neuroscience's understanding of how the brain works by introducing neuroscientists to game theory:
"The neuroscientist’s idea of a game is rock, paper, scissors, which is zero-sum, whereas economists have focused on strategic games that produce gains through collaboration."
They then describe some of the arguments against, as well as some proponents who go back somewhat further than than the current enthusiasts, before finishing by drawing a clear distinction between (soft) behavioural econ and (hard) neroecon. Quoting Kahneman:
"It is far easier to argue for mindless economics than for brainless economics"
Links to some of the books and articles mentioned are below:
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux [Amazon]
The Case for Mindless Economics Faruk Gul & Wolfgang Pesendorfer
Edgeworth's Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility by David Colander
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