TWO CENTURIES OF MOMENTUM
A somewhat confused structure but worth a casual read.
How Can This Be?
The Land Rover Defender is boxy, beastly and beloved. Early next year, it’ll be history. For seven decades, the Defender off-road vehicle has barely changed from a design so simple it was originally sketched in beach sand. Slabs of aluminum. A windshield with virtually no tilt. A roof rack made to hold steamer trunks or lion…
Market Bounces
I thought in light of the events in Paris that it would be instructive to see how markets behave after such event. I have grabbed four what I would consider headline terror events and marked them on the relevant index. The situation with the September 11 attacks is that they took place during the collapse…
Psychologists’ betting market hints at most reliable research findings
When psychologists are asked which findings in their field will pass a replication attempt, their predictions prove little better than flipping a coin. But if they play a betting market on the same question, the aggregate results give a fairly good prediction of which studies will hold up if repeated, a prediction experiment suggests1. The…
Do Rational People Exist?
Does it make sense to talk about “rational people”? That is, is there a sub-population of individuals who consistently exhibit less cognitive bias and better judgment under uncertainty than average people? Do these people have the dispositions we’d intuitively associate with more thoughtful habits of mind? (Are they more flexible and deliberative, less dogmatic and…
Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Attractive?
Click the player to find out why some are members of the tin foil hat brigade.
Buy Hope And Pray
Whilst out at lunch the other day I spied a couple reading this article . The article itself is nothing spectacular, it merely notes the fact that one analyst who covers BHP had placed an underweight rating on the stock back in May. Now I freely confess that despite having been a broker I have no idea what…
Dunning-Kruger in Groups
We may be seeing the Dunning-Kruger effect in groups. The Dunning-Kruger effect reflects a persistent bias in how we assess our own specific competence in an area. The effect is often summarized (usually for the purpose of snark on an internet exchange) as, “dumb people are too dumb to realize how dumb they…
