The Logic of Life

What Hacker News says

1. bbaylesSep 2016
   I read Dubner and Levitt's Freakonomics in 2005. It's lame to say that a pop-science book changed my life, but since then I've thought about economics every day.

   I would recommend some pop-econ to become familiar with a stylized version of how economists think. I'd recommend Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist Strikes Back and The Logic of Life and Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist. (Dubner's and Levitt's books are entertaining, but I wouldn't try to learn much about economics from them)

   The world of professional economists has been fascinating to watch over the last 10 years, as academic economist blogs are very active and very high quality. Watching debates and commentary about the global financial crises unfold on the blogs in real time was really something. Economist bloggers have a real influence on policy now, and whole schools of thought have coalesced out of blogs (e.g. market monetarism).

   There are some excellent economics podcasts out there now. EconTalk (with Russ Roberts) has been going since 2006. I'd recommend listening to some of his interviews with academic economists. Macro Musings (with David Beckworth) just started this year, and the policy discussions have been quite informative.

   The Marginal Revolution University website has an fantastic series of videos on economics topics. The "Development Economics" course I would recommend strongly - I wish I'd been taught the Solow Model in school.

   Economics is a very interesting discipline to study from the outside. Learning a bit about it puts policy debates in a new light - I've become much more liberal on some topics and much less confident on a lot of topics. I find that reporting about economics issues is generally pretty terrible, so beware that if you get into economics you'll want to stop reading a lot of news analysis.

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2. jhedwardsAug 2015
   1) Biology and Knowledge by Jean Piaget

   2) Ontogeny and Phylogeny by S.J. Gould

   3) The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

   These books have very little fluff and will challenge you to think in new ways about evolution, biology, and the development of human knowledge.

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3. davidwMar 2012
   > I think I need to read a bit about economics in general.

   Be careful: a lot of purveyors of "economics knowledge" on the web are trying to sell you an ideology along with it.

   This is fairly neutral: http://www.introecon.com/

   A good author is Tim Harford, who has some "popularized" economics books that are, once again, reasonably neutral.

   In particular "The Undercover Economist" and "The Logic of Life".

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4. jseligerSep 2010
   "Being curious or "hormonally charged" seems normal, but people seriously looking to have sex in college seem to be in the minority. Otherwise, there would be an orgy every weekend, right?"

   If you replace "people" with "men," the answer is probably yes. Men on average tend to seek out far more sexual partners than women do; I remember one study that had attractive, opposite-sex college students approach other students and offer to sleep with them. 75% of males approached said yes; 0 females did. I think the study is discussed in Dan Ariely's _Predictably Irrational_. As Roy Baumeister points out in his book _What Are Men Good For_, famous men often sleep with many, many random young women, and appreciate it when young women offer them sex; famous women seldom do the same.

   As for women, they are the sex that has to invest more in offspring; in virtually every species studied, the choosier sex is the one that has to invest more; see, for example, Robert Trivers' famous work, or Geoffrey Miller in _The Mating Mind_:

   "As David Buss has emphasized, human sex differences are most apparent in short-term mating. Men are motivated to have short-term sexual flings with multiple partners than women are. Women are much choosier than men in the short term. Short-term mating is exciting and sexy, but it is not necessarily where sexual selection has the greatest effect" (95).

   "Human males are generally not as choosy about short-term affairs as females. There is very little opportunity cost to short-term mating for men. It does not exclude other sexual options. But men get much choosier about medium- and long-term relationships, because their opportunity costs increase dramatically. If they are in a sexual relationship with one woman, it is very difficult to sustain a sexual relationship with another woman. They cannot give both their full attention. They must make choices—sexual choices" (95).

   Note: this doesn't mean women aren't very sexual. They are. See, for example, Randy Thornhill's _The Evolution of Human Female Sexuality_. But they don't tend to seek out as many random encounters or as many concurrent, unknown partners as men do. Most sexually mature women are "seriously looking to have sex" because they like it as much or more as men do. But they aren't, on average, looking to have it as indiscriminately as men do.

   The equilibrium isn't for "an orgy every weekend." There isn't a stable equilibrium if the number of males and females and fluctuating; for more on this and how small numbers of people influence mating/dating markets, see Tim Harford's _The Logic of Life_.

   Note too that variations among individuals are greater than variations between groups, so those of you who are about to tell stories about your guy friend who is asexual and your female friend who hooks up with a new guy every weekend are not being inconsistent with the above, which has been established empirically through a variety of means discussed in the books referenced.

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5. jseligerMay 2010
   The issue of pluralistic ignorance doesn't address the relatively large changes that relatively small changes in gender imbalance can have on norms. For more on this, see Tim Harford's The Logic of Life and in particular his chapter on "The Marriage Supermarket."

   In any event, I wrote an essay about modern sexual culture in response to "The New Dating Game" in the Weekly Standard: http://jseliger.com/2010/05/05/the-weekly-standard-on-the-ne... . Birth control and contraceptive availability has lowered the cost of sex for women; there are more women than men on college campuses; men as a group have a higher preference for hooking up than women; people tend to feel like others have been pre-selected on college campuses, as Kathleen Bogle argues in her book Hooking Up, which is a sociological study on the issue. Taken together, these technological and social trends lead toward hooking up.

   Pluralistic ignorance might play a small part but is hardly the dominant factor. And the study relies on the notoriously unreliable self-reporting feature: people might report they want a relationship, until it's late, and they've been drinking, and they spy an attractive stranger, and so on. Dan Ariely talks about the difference between our "cold" selves and "hot" selves in the chapter "The Influence of Arousal" from Predictably Irrational, which is another recommended book.

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6. jseligerMay 2009
   I wrote this as a comment on the blog at the link, but I thought I would note here as well:

   <i>9. Customization is stressful</i>.

   I would add that choice can actually make us less likely to make a decision rather than more likely to; I face this in all kinds of fields, including office equipment. In the last two weeks, I've spent vast amounts of time looking at phone and copier systems for <a href="http://blog.seliger.com>Seliger + Associates</a> and found the experience mostly enervating—and that's with a relatively small sample set!

   Trying to not just evaluate a large number of products, but to customize them as well, isn't something I'm willing to do for anything save things that are important to me, like books. And the literature on this issue in fairly vast—see, for example, Daniel Gilbert's <i>Stumbling on Happiness</i>, Dan Ariely's <i>Predictably Irrational</i>, and Tim Harford's <i>The Logic of Life</i>.

   Together, those might help explain some of the social issues with mass customization.

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