I am not saying we should discard our intuitions about relative outrage, but we ought to look at them more closely rather than just riding them to a quick conclusion.

Tyler Cowen, "Just How Guilty Is Volkswagon?"

Of course, a good hierarchical Bayes reasoner is going to use huge amounts of prior information against small amounts of countervailing evidence. Do you start believing in ghosts every time someone puts on a white sheet and jumps out at you?

I passed the Project Management Professional certification exam.

Another advantage of capitalism is that it limits some of the local power of sociopaths who are heads of families and landowners and such. Money is less entangled in systems of obligation than a more personal set-up.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

Ben Franklin

People condition on information that isn’t true.

Andrew Gelman, "The belief was so strong that it trumped the evidence before them."

As a rule, news is a distraction from worthy intellectual pursuits.

-- Bryan Caplan, expanded here

But again: now you are equating irrationality with deliberate suicide. You're not really drawing a very strong connection here.

Any games you're looking forward to? I'm curious about Pathfinder card game (new stuff coming, never played original), City of Gears, and Die! I was using the BoardGameGeek Origins preview to scout new releases.

ETA: Gen Con preview live

Tentative location: Hall F, the green tables just behind the CCG/TCG HQ.