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The Lie at the Heart of Economics

The Lie at the Heart of Economics

Imagine that you are standing in line at a polling station to cast your vote. However, this year, it seems the poll workers are doing something different. Each person who walks away from the registration table has a different number of ballots. Most people have one or two, but some have three or four. One man in a suit walks away with a large stack of at least 20! A woman is turned away without a single ballot.

How Much Is Your Life Worth?

How Much Is Your Life Worth?

Have you ever wondered how much your life is worth? Economists have. The good news is that, if you are an American, your life is very valuable, with the EPA setting the value of your life at around $7,400,000, though other estimates (such as the estimate used in the visualization below) place it higher, at closer to $9,600,000. However, if you live somewhere else, your life is likely worth less, often much less.

How would Artificial Intelligence Categorize Plato’s Dialogues?

How would Artificial Intelligence Categorize Plato’s Dialogues?

Reading and understanding philosophical texts is often seen as a task that requires rationality, higher order thinking, and abstract reasoning. This seems like something that humans are uniquely able to do, and if we encountered a new species, and they could do philosophy, it would be hard to deny their rationality. If a monkey, a parrot, or a smart phone can offer commentary on Plato, it is hard to deny their rationality.

Does Twitter Prefer Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

Does Twitter Prefer Analytic or Continental Philosophy?

The debate between analytic and continental philosophy has raged for decades, but did you ever wonder who was winning? Will Russell or Hegel get you more retweets? What words and concepts to the denizens of twitter associate with each tradition? In this post we look at Twitter’s perceptions of Analytic and Continental philosophy to see if we can glean any sense of which philosophical tradition the Twitterverse is more amenable to.