Global Strategy - blog

Ended up viewing this during my weekend hassle.

Ok, this might be a long shot, but I'll let it go anyway. After a long weekend of homo oeconomicus -bashing at Philosophy of Management conference, I could not but read Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization with the same glasses on. Naturally, he discusses madness (which is far from economics), quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier:

Associated with some themes of this blog, I just came across this video...

Despite that I mostly agree with evolutionary biologists, especially when it comes to the societal implications of their evolutionary views (such as eradicating religion from the affairs of state); one thing has bothered me for a while now. That is the ontological framework-the world-of these popularly bent natural scientists.

On Monday, a workshop took place at the LSE CPNSS as a part of project called ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science'. The day was loaded with four speakers, all hovering around the topic matter. All the presenters provided interesting insights to the general matter; due to the limitations of this account, I am going to concentrate on one of them.

As everyone knows, it is the ultimate honour of a Briton to have one's portrait in a banknote. The Guardian raised an issue today, as there seems to be a problem with the ten pound note, which has Charles Darwin and a hummingbird printed on it.

The public lecture super-week at LSE was launched by Gerd Gigerenzer, a German psychologist whose main work concentrates on bounded rationality and heuristic decision-making. His main thesis was the re-evaluation of the unconscious processes taking place in human heads that are commonly seen as, at best, obscuring so called rational ones. The people that think so, let us call them ‘limitationists’, seem to be mainly the same individuals that received the bulk of criticism during the lecture held last Monday. The bottom line is that there can be something happening beyond the realms of language.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb agreed to give ‘a boring philosophy lecture' at LSE approximately six months ago, discussing mainly epistemology. Retrospectively not surprisingly, the focus of his attention was shifted to our contemporary financial turmoil (which also resulted in a flood of spectators and a spillover room). Hence the name of his lecture, ‘Decisions, Probability and Beliefs: beware Mickey Mouse probability'. The details of his argument are available and discussed elsewhere .