This Review is not about reviewing The Elephant in the Brain

... it is about signaling! :) If you are part of the select readership of Nintil, you probably know about Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias fame. Perhaps you have also heard about Kevin Simler, who blogs at MeltingAsphalt. They just released a book together, The Elephant in the Brain. It is worth laying out some backstory to understand where this book comes from before getting into the review itself: For years, Robin Hanson has been writing pieces arguing that "X is not about X, it is about Y" (Wher…

Un importance avance en psicología moral

[This post is a translation of the one I just published] Hablemos de Beyond Sacrificial Harm: A Two-Dimensional Model of Utilitarian Psychology, por Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2017), el que posiblemente sea el mejor paper de psicología moral del año. En el campo de la psicología, existe un área en particular que se ha hecho bastante famosa por su uso de peculiares dilemas morales, especialmente el llamado problema del tranvía.…

A breakthrough in moral psychology

I'm talking about Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2017). Aka _Beyond Sacrificial Harm: A Two-Dimensional Model of Utilitarian Psychology, _the best moral psychology paper of the year! In the field of psychology, there is a particular area that has become quite visible to outsiders for its colourful use of moral dilemmas, in particular the trolley problem. This area, moral psychology, studies the how people reason about moral issues…

The Soviet Union Series: The Book

Remember all those blogposts about the Soviet Union I've been writing? They are now a book! The Adam Smith Institute has just published _Back in the USSR: What life was like in the Soviet Union ._It is an edited version of the Soviet Series, including nicer plots, many rewritten sections, and a coherent structure. The content itself is the same, if anything it has been cut down, and many of the super-lengthy quotes I'm infamous for have been abridged. Anyway, if you liked the original posts, you will also p…

Links (13)

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Economics What were the problems in Yugoslavian socialism? On worker cooperatives, also this thread Might short-term shareholders be better monitors? Las cooperativas como forma de empresa Global evidence on economic preferences The power of bias in economics research Methodological nihilist John P.A. Ioannidis strikes fear into his enemies' hearts once again Are so called normative statements prac…

Yet another half-baked theory of the political spectrum

Most political theorising and philosophical discourse happens in the anglosphere. And the anglosphere is mostly, by numbers, the United States. It is no surprise that attempts at explaining political blocs are in one way or another USAcentric. Even in the academic literature, one can find such things as "economic conservatism", meaning "being in favour of less intervention of the government in the economy, lower taxation, etc". Those things are not conservative (in the sense of preservin…