EconTech

First, Robin:
Inhuman Rationality?
 
We seem comfortable celebrating those who practice complex statistical analysis, even if only one in a thousand can do so. And the one in a billion genius celebrated for greatly improving our understanding or practice of statistics, or other rationality, seems to us an epitome of the best in humanity. Who [...]

Not that the Republican machine hasn’t been screaming tax break for decades with ZERO sign of ever implementing an actual decrease on taxes. Either they don’t get it, or they don’t care. A drop in taxes is ONLY implemented in a spending decrease. Reducing taxes while implementing such a break is not a ‘tax break,’ [...]

I say I am non-partisan. More accurate would be a statement of anti-Republicanism (not necessarily pro-<other_party>). But I just wanted to be clear, the winner of your Iowa caucus does not believe in evolution. Just start a new party already.

Evolutionary Psychology over at Overcoming Bias:
Like “IRC chat” or “TCP/IP protocol”, the phrase “reproductive organ” is redundant. All organs are reproductive organs. Where do a bird’s wings come from? An Evolution-of-Birds Fairy who thinks that flying is really neat? The bird’s wings are there because they contributed to the bird’s ancestors’ [...]

For a friend who consistently misses the difference between natural selection and adaptation (and yes, I will continue to call you out when you say an organism evolves):
Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers:
No human being with the deliberate goal of maximizing their alleles’ inclusive genetic fitness, would ever eat a cookie unless they were starving. But individual [...]

Alright, here’s a problem for all you bioinformatistas and inapproximabistas out there, which was inspired by this post of Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias (see also the comments there).
Let a DNA sequence be an element of {A,C,G,T}*, and suppose we’re allowed the following primitive operations: (1) insert a base pair anywhere we want, (2) delete [...]