Monthly Archives: March 2014

John Maynard Keynes

The death at the age of 26 of Frank Ramsey, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, sometime scholar of Winchester and of Trinity, son of the President of Magdalene, is a heavy loss—though his primary interests were in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic—to the pure theory of Economics. From a very early age, about 16 I think, his precocious mind was intensely interested in economic problems. Economists living in Cambridge have been accustomed from his undergraduate days to try their theories on the keen edge of his critical and logical faculties. If he had followed the easier path of mere inclination, I am not sure that he would not have exchanged the tormenting exercises of the foundations of thought and of psychology, where the mind tries to catch its own tail, for the delightful paths of our own most agreeable branch of the moral sciences, in which theory and fact, intuitive imagination and practical judgment, are blended in a manner comfortable to the human intellect.

When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of one accustomed to something far more difficult.

John Maynard Keynes, ‘F. P. Ramsey’, The Economic Journal, vol. 40, no. 157, p. 153

Paul Graham

[U]nless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

Paul Graham, ‘Stuff’, July 2007

Jonathan Baron & Ewa Szymanska

Altruistic behavior often leads to desirable social outcomes. We can thus assume that more altruism is better than less, other things being equal. But altruism tends to be already widely encouraged, so efforts to promote it even further may produce little noticeable change. Instead, it might be easier to do more good by improving efficiency of the altruistic behaviors already in place.

Jonathan Baron & Ewa Szymanska, Heuristics and Biases in Charity, in Daniel Oppenheimer & Christopher Olivola (eds.), The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity, New York, 2011, p. 215

Robin Hanson

If you want outsiders to believe you, then you don’t get to choose their rationality standard. The question is what should rational outsiders believe, given the evidence available to them, and their limited attention. Ask yourself carefully: if most contrarians are wrong, why should they believe your cause is different?

Robin Hanson, ‘Contrarian Excuses’, Overcoming Bias, November 15, 2009