Posts

Michael Levin's Platonic Space Argument

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  Michael Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University, and is quite a prolific thinker. I have been following his work for a while because he is very interdisciplinary; something I think modern academia is seriously lacking. His biological research overlaps with artificial life, bioengineering, computer science, behavioral science, and cognitive science; introducing a truly novel perspective on these overlapping subdomains. This is relevant to me because I think economics (my discipline) ought to incorporate some of the concepts and methods his lab takes seriously, such as: collectives, swarming behavior, emergence, scaling laws, evolutionary development, and process oriented thinking. I think he is modeling complex systems the correct way. A mere mortal like myself couldn't possibly make the intellectual strides he's made. I see him as a thinker I'd like to emulate. However, no one has the answers to everything, and I can't help but critically analyze every ar...
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A Few Thoughts on the Current Nonsense

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This is something I really don't want to write about. I have no interest in commenting on culture war pundits. Unfortunately, I can't keep my mouth shut. I'm simply disgusted by what's happened after the Charlie Kirk assassination. More so by the government's effective weaponization and response to the murder, but very much by the myth making surrounding who Kirk was. While he was alive, I tried to pay as little attention to him and the alt-right echo-chamber he proliferated in. I saw him as the epitome of degeneracy with respect to political discourse in the United States. This is what I'd like to focus on in this post; just a few thoughts on what this guy actually was and how disappointing this is.  Who He Was Let's set the record straight on what he was. Charlie Kirk was a conservative influencer. He was a very dogmatic evangelical fundamentalist who was essentially an apologist for Trump. These two sentences should make it evidently clear that he was not...
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Causal Inquiry Dialogue

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While writing the "Theory of Rationality" post, I revisited the pragma-dialectical rules for critical discussion and Waltons extended dialogue types; then suddenly got an idea. Walton's extensions could possibly be extended further into sub-types. Why not extend this framework into a dialogue exclusively concerned with the nuances and features of causal inquiry? This interests me in particular because I'm quite familiar and interested in empirical methods used to identify causal effects in data. While in Economics graduate school, I distinctly recall most applied microeconometric research reducing to debates about whether X is a confounder, proper instrument, or if there is selection bias. This sure sounds like a sub-type of Walton's Inquiry Dialogue. Furthermore, Walton already has argumentation schemes for causal reasoning. Perhaps we could simply extend the existing work? Below I will first review the schemes then propose a dialogue sub-type. 1) Argument from C...
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