Despite creative efforts to tackle it, belief in conspiracy theories, alternative facts and fake news show no sign of abating. This is clearly a huge problem, as seen when it comes to climate change, vaccines and expertise in general – with anti-scientific attitudes increasingly influencing politics. So why can’t we stop such views from spreading? […]
In a recent entry, I provided a summary of Brian Caplan’s views (in his book The Case against Education ) about the main evils of our contemporary education system. In a nutshell, the main problem is, in the first place, that most of what is taught in schools and colleges is basically not learnt, or […]
Tides are more predictable than winds or sunshine. Then, why are not they already widely used as a source of renewable energy? The simple answer is that designing and building an ocean energy array is quite complex. This complexity has an associated variability in the cost of energy that makes projects difficult to evaluate from […]
In the first entry of this series, I briefly explained Christian List’s attempt to vindicate the ontological and scientific reality of intentional action as a real emergent phenomenon. In a nutshell, intentional, deliberate and often ‘rational’ action is not a fiction (as some skeptics like Alex Rosenberg have defended ), but a totally legitimate inhabitant […]
It’s a pitty that Bryan Caplan’s extremely interesting book The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money , published in 2018, has not deserved more careful attention in the public and permanent debate over education (see here an early review in Spanish by Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias). I […]
You have probably heard before about the origin of the word salary. Indeed, it comes from the allowance that Roman soldiers received to purchase salt. The trace left on the language tells about the importance it had. There is no doubt about the key role salt had for the preservation of food. Analogously, words derived […]
Christian List, a German professor in the London School of Economics, is one of the most prolific and intelligent authors in the new generation of philosophers of social science. He has authored and co-authored a formidable number of extremely interesting papers in areas like social choice, formal epistemology, judgment aggregation, deliberative democracy or political philosophy […]
We started this series discussing the basic ingredients of the Universe: events, spacetime, causality. In the last chapter , we introduced massive objects (and thus, matter), which appear as a generalization of the so-called photon box. As it moves, any object traces a path. Physicists call it worldline . We established that a massive object […]
Strategic decision is the object of study for Game Theory, a discipline that started officially with the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern . For non-cooperative games, i.e., games in which individuals make decisions individually and with no strings attached, the book was restricted to zero-sum […]
Scientific disinformation about climate change is having a great impact especially in countries like the United States (USA). Misinformation about this topic and about scientific issues in general, not only confuses the population and discredits scientific findings but also paralyzes evidence-based policies. Farrell et al (2019) provide a series of examples and strategies that can […]