Jonathan Baron
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About Jonathan Baron
See my web page at
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
I have to make this longer, so I'm adding padding.
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
I have to make this longer, so I'm adding padding.
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Blog postSome scientists think that confirming a prediction made before data collection is more convincing than explaining the data after they arrive. I think that this belief is one source (among others) of support for the practice of pre-registration, in which authors publish a plan for an experiment they intend to do, explaining the hypothesis, methods, and data analysis in advance.
Paul Horwich ("Probability and evidence", 1982, pp. 108-117) has a complex discussion o3 months ago Read more -
Blog postReplication of previously reported studies is sometimes useful or even necessary. Drug companies often try to replicate published research before investing a great deal of money in drug development based on that research. Ordinary academic researchers often want to examine more closely some published result, so they often include a replication of that result in a larger design, or just try to see if they can get the effect before they proceed to make modifications. Failures to replicate are oft8 months ago Read more
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Blog postHundreds of experiments have now shown, in various ways, that responses to moral dilemmas often follow deontological rules rather than utilitarian theory. Deontological rules are rules that indicate whether some category of actions is required, permissible, or forbidden. Utilitarianism says that the best choice among those under consideration is that one that does the most expected good for all those affected. For example, utilitarianism implies that it is better to kill one person to save five1 year ago Read more
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Blog postThe editors of RegBlog have accepted three of my recent posts. Rather than duplicate them here (which I am now allowed to do), I am instead making links to them:
How geographic boundaries determine the social cost of carbon;
The discount rate for the social cost of carbon;
Justifying health insurance.
All of these are philosophical comments about regulatory issues that are likely to be addressed by the Trump administration, the U.S. congress, a2 years ago Read more -
Blog postThe people who voted for Donald Trump were, like those who voted for Hillary Clinton, a varied lot. Some were long-standing Republicans who had doubts about Trump but even more doubts about the idea of another Democratic president. Others were upset about some particular policy that has, in fact, hurt them. But it seems that a great many were older white Christians who had no college education. When I read what some of these voters said about their choice, I find much of it, to oversimplify jus2 years ago Read more
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Blog postDonald Trump's most fervent supporters consisted of elements of the Republican coalition as it has developed over the last several years. These elements are characterized by the form of their beliefs. They confidently hold beliefs without regard to the full set of relevant arguments and evidence.
Some of their beliefs are admittedly based on "faith", which means that they are held confidently despite the absence of reasons that would matter to others who do not share their2 years ago Read more -
Blog postDavid Leonhardt, in a recent column in the New York Times (on-line Nov. 9, 2016), argues that the most important response to the Republican takeover of the U.S. is to convince Republicans that global warming is real and serious. Failure to address this problem now has very long lasting effects.
Most of the effort to convince skeptics takes the form "95% of climate scientists agree ...". This sort of argument from authority is useful only if two conditions are met. First, p2 years ago Read more -
Blog postRecently popular political movements have been anti-immigrant, anti-free-trade, and more generally anti-globalization. What these positions share is a lack of concern for outsiders. For example, U.S. discussions of the Trans Pacific Partnership (which has many advantages and disadvantages for everyone) tend to ignore completely the apparent large benefits for Vietnam. The technical term for this lack of concern is parochialism. In part, parochialism is part of our political language. The u2 years ago Read more
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Blog postI just read a forthcoming paper (in Mind and Language) by Shaun Nichols and several others, which argues that it is rational to develop moral rules that distinguish (for example) acts and omissions. The relevant idea of "rational" is from rational concept formation.
When you learn a new concept, it is best not to generalize it too much. In some experiments, subjects were given examples of rule violations, for learning, and tested with other examples. When the learning exam2 years ago Read more -
Blog postThe following is not vetted. It is some thoughts inspired by several papers I have dealt with recently. It is also about statistics, a new topic for this blog, but one I will probably write more about.
In some studies we measure several variables, and we are primarily interested in the correlation between two of them, e.g., cognitive style and political ideology. When this correlation is found, we are also interested in what the other variables can tell us about why this happens. Fo2 years ago Read more -
Blog postMany principles of "ethics" are designed to protect autonomy. Regulations concerning human subjects in research take a broad view of what counts as "coercion", to the point of including excessive rewards that make it difficult for potential subjects to refuse. Programs to reduce excessive birth rates were criticized as violations of autonomy, even if they consisted of advertising and TV soap operas (as I discussed in my book "Judgment misguided"). Now, some of the o2 years ago Read more
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Blog postSuppose that you can vote in a referendum on a proposal. You believe that the proposal is good for the whole world, but bad for your particular group. For example, it might be a proposal to accept a trade agreement that would be beneficial on the whole but would hurt your particular business. Or it might reduce global warming but hurt the coal industry, and you live in a coal-producing region. How should you vote? The options are to vote for the proposal, vote against it, or not vote.
2 years ago Read more -
Blog postI have been applying for grants that so far I do not get, but I have summarized the idea that I want to test, so I am putting the gist of it here, extracted from the last proposal submitted (in collaboration with David Rand at Yale).
Democracy is a human invention, a "design" that serves certain functions. But citizens do not understand it very well, and, as a result, they often fail collectively to take full advantage of what it can do. Here is what many people don't unde4 years ago Read more -
Blog postAn NPR interview this morning made two interesting points about the recent report on torture by the CIA, the first of which I had thought of myself. This was that it is possible that some authors of the report, or perhaps just those who summarize it, are engaging in belief overkill. They are saying that the extreme methods of interrogation never did any good. They don't need to say this. They could just say, more cautiously, that the amount of good done was so small as not to justify4 years ago Read more
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Blog postThe following (slightly revised) was a letter to the Public Editor of the New York Times, written on 9/15/2014.
I was upset at the Times's coverage of foreign contributions to U.S. think tanks such as Brookings. I was reminded of this by the recent edition of The Economist, which points out how attacking these institutions for accepting contributions could make it seem more acceptable when authoritarian regimes elsewhere try to block contributions to NGOs that might threaten them (p4 years ago Read more -
Blog postThis column by Thomas Friedman reminded me of an issue that has been on my mind for a while, the inter-relatedness of world problems. I discussed it in the book for which this blog is named, especially the chapter on population.
The world today has a long list of inter-related problems: food, fresh water, energy production, biodiversity, rising oceans from higher temperatures (resulting in shrinking coastal lands where many people live), health, unemployment of the young, catastroph7 years ago Read more -
Blog postPolitical disputes about abortion usually involve repetitions of bad arguments, empty slogans, and upsetting images. The assumption seems to be that reason is irrelevant and the important thing is to motivate those who are already convinced. It is as if everyone has accepted the theory that moral reasoning is post-hoc rationalization and that moral disputes in are intellectually no different from sports events in which fans cheer for one side or the other.
Here is a very brief summa7 years ago Read more -
Blog postIn the current (March 22?) issue of Psychological Science, DeScioli et al. report a nice demonstration of how people take punishment into account in choosing how they will go about hurting someone else.*
In the main study, subjects could divide a dollar as (90,10), (10,90), or (85,0). The first number represents the divider's outcome, and the second represents another person's outcome, in cents. The (85,0) condition was the result of letting a timer run out, hence doing nothing. Th7 years ago Read more -
Blog postThe recent shootings in Tucson have called attention to the lack of civility in politics, and the use of intemperate rhetoric, especially by right-wing politicians and media personalities, sometimes to the point of advocating violence ("second amendment remedies" Sharron Angle). One more culprit should be mentioned: my-side bias.
My-side bias is a group of psychological processes that defend beliefs and choices against arguments on the other side. These processes include s8 years ago Read more -
Blog postBennis, Medin, and Bartels have an article on "The costs and benefits of calculation and moral rules" in Perspectives in Psychological Science (vol. 5, no. 2, 2010), which I just became aware of. Bazerman and Green have a nice reply in the same issue. I want to say a few things that I think were not in the reply.
The paper concerns demonstrations such as omission bias, in which subjects in experiments using hypothetical cases often prefer harmful omissions to less harmful8 years ago Read more -
Blog postThis article is one of many that complains about the inhibiting effect of uncertainty on business investment and other good things. Business people are supposed to be used to the idea of taking risks. The biggest risk they take is the decision to start a business at all, given the number that fail. For small risks, like variations in tax rates, it would seem that expected-utility theory is the way to go. You judge the probabilities, multiply them by the outcomes of various options, and pick8 years ago Read more
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Blog postJudge Henry E. Hudson has just said that the insurance mandate of the new health-care law is unconstitutional. The center of the opinion, as I understand it, is that the constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce extends to economic "activities" but not to omissions of economic actions, such as not purchasing health insurance. It seems that Hudson's reasoning on this is empirical, namely, that prior court decisions on the scope of the commerce power have all concerned actions8 years ago Read more
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Blog postPaul Krugman and many other Democrats are saying that President Obama and the Democrats made a mistake by putting off until now the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts. Clearly - as David Leohhardt, Nate Silver, and others have argued - the Democrats are not in a strong bargaining position now that the Republicans have threatened utter chaos (hold up all the other legislation, kill all extensions of all tax cuts, etc.) unless the Democrats extend the unproductive and unfair tax cuts8 years ago Read more
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Blog postMedicare will now pay for Provenge, which costs $93,000 and prolongs life for about four months, although this is the median not the mean. This comes to about $279,000 per year, and probably more for a quality-adjusted life year. At the hearing where this was decided, may objected to the possibility that Medicare would consider costs, calling it "rationing". What precedent does this set, and what else could Medicare cover if it were to value life so highly?8 years ago Read more
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Blog posthttp://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality_consensus.html is a consensus statement of a few people invited to a meeting.
Near the bottom of
http://www.edge.org/discourse/morality.html
is my attempt to say everything I believe about moral judgment in 500 words.8 years ago Read more
Books By Jonathan Baron
Thinking and Deciding
Oct 22, 2006
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Behavioral Research Data Analysis with R (Use R!)
Dec 02, 2011
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Teaching Decision Making To Adolescents
Nov 12, 2012
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Against Bioethics (Basic Bioethics)
Feb 17, 2006
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Psychological Perspectives on Justice: Theory and Applications (Cambridge Series on Judgment and Decision Making)
Sep 24, 1993
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Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making (Cambridge Series on Judgment and Decision Making)
Nov 27, 2000
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Rationality and Intelligence
Jul 07, 2005
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