Gompertz Law of human mortality

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minusc...

 How Physicians Were Once Like Today's Economists

The moral game of blame attribution is only one subtype of misattribution arbitrage. For example, epidemiologists estimate that it was not until 1905 that you were better off going to a physician. (Ignaz Semelweiss noticed that doctors doubled the mortality rate of mothers at delivery.) The role of the physician predated its rational function for thousands of years, so why were there physicians? Economists, forecasters, and professional portfolio managers typically do no better than chance, y...

 The Affect of a Nurturing Environment on Babies

If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have. How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to establish a productive relationship with the local power structures—you, in other ...

 Logical Fallacies

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions. Among these fallacies are: Ad hominem - Latin for 'to the man', attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., the Reve...