76% Of All Statistics Are Made Up

Whilst heading to the gym this morning I heard on the radio that police had seized 280 kilogram of methamphetamine with a street value of $205 million. Apart from thinking I was in the wrong business I thought bullshit. The reason I said bullshit was simply the result of a quick bit of mental arithmetic,…

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Hedge Funds Fudge Their Data…Say It Isn’t So

From The Economist – Some revisions may be down to cock-up but a closer look hints at conspiracy. Counter-intuitively, most fixes aim to make performance look worse than originally stated. That is probably because two-thirds of funds charge performance fees only if they are at or above their highest valuations. Eager to bring forward the time…

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Rational Rationality.

People are not irrational-at least not as much as we are led to believe. This is because the brain is economic. That is, brains have a limited amount of energy to achieve necessary goals like survival and reproduction. As a result, brains have evolved ways to make decisions in an efficient way. Professor Richard McKenzie at UC…

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