Who Were the Sea Peoples?

See Nate Silver, here : "The Cleveland Cavaliers led for much of Game 1 of the finals against the Golden State Warriors and had a better than 70 percent shot at winning it when LeBron James put the Cavs up by four with 5:08 left to play." Having just finished reviewing a book on Shackle, who largely holds the same view as Mises on case probability *, I find it interesting to ask just what Silver means here. Clearly, Silver is drawing upon a database of results that contains information on how often teams up four in a game with 5:08 to play won that game. Perhaps he has 200 records that match that criterion, and the team up four won 140 of those games. "But so what?" ask Mises and Shackle. The Cavaliers aren't going to play the Warriors 200 times, starting from this identical situation, so they can win 70% of the time. This game won't result in a Schrödinger's cat situation, with the Cavaliers 70% victorious and 30% defeated; no, one team or the o...

"In schemes on thought of the Simon type the 'decision-maker' is faced with a choice among existents in a system which is already complete and closed in the sense that its structure, the set of relations composing it, cannot be added to by the decision-maker himself, but must be accepted by him and made the best of. His task is to understand this structure and then, by the exercise of judgment only, to deal with it by selecting among the possibilities, already existent, which it offers. By contrast with this, in such a scheme of thought as my own the decision-maker's field of choice is created by himself so that he is faced not with a set of relationships all simultaneously, and so in a sense timelessly, but with a system which evolves from moment to moment in his own mind." -- quoted in G. L. S. Shackle , p. 159

"For example, consider a case where a person is presented with the following three options "(a) Receive $500,000 with certainty. (b) A 95 percent probability of receiving $1 million dollars and a 5 per cent probability of receiving just $100. (c) A 50 per cent probability of receiving $900,000 and a 50 per cent probability of receiving $100,000 "For both shackles model and Prospect Theory , option (a) becomes the referenced point and the rival strategies have to be reframed as follows for Prospect Theory: "(b) A 95 per cent probability of gaining $500,000 and a 5 per cent chance of losing $499,900 (c) A 50 per cent probability of gaining $400,000 and a 50 per cent probability of losing $400,000 "In terms of prospect theory, loss aversion guarantees that (a) will be preferred over (c); option (b) may also be rejected in favour of (a) due to the downside risk being assigned a much bigger weight than 5 per cent, whereas in terms of traditional subjecti...

Earl and Littleboy describe an empirical test of Shackle's (non-probabilistic) theory of choice under uncertainty done by Hey in the 1980s. The subjects were presented with three uncertain situations, asked to produce an exhaustive list of what might occur in each case, and then to rate each in terms of possibility, probability, and potential surprise. The authors sum up the result of the experiment as follows: "Though Hey's findings were problematic for both Shackleian and probabilistic analyses of expectations, he felt on balance they were more damaging to Shackle's approach" (p. 134). However, going by the description in the book, this does not seem like a very fair test of Shackle's theory. Shackle says that in typically situations, people do not try to make an exhaustive list of possibilities and then assign a probability weight to each: instead, they considered only certain attention-grabbing possibilities. To test this, Hey apparently told the subj...

Earl and Littleboy, the authors of G. L. S. Shackle are rather critical of Shackle's unwillingness to compromise his ideas so that they would gain more mainstream acceptance. For instance, they write: "Shackle rebelled, and he lost. His tactics and timing were not quite right; he overreached. The reward even from partial victory could well have been a Noble Prize" (p. 81). They seem to be putting forward, rather than a correspondence theory of truth, or a coherence theory of truth, what we might call the "professional advancement theory of truth": your ideas are true to the extent they gain you accolades and prizes! But if Shackle was correct in his most radical proposals, wasn't he right to stick to his guns, even if it cost him recognition? And if those ideas were wrong, isn't that the reason he should have changed them, and not the fact he might have won a Nobel Prize had he done so? Consider the case of Copernicus. My lecturer in the history...

When looking at a formal theory of choice under uncertainty, there are (at least) three questions one might ask about it: 1) Is it mathematically sound? 2) Should people be applying it in some or all situations? If some, which ones? 3) Do people actually reason that way? The authors of G. L. S. Shackle sometimes seem to be mixing these three questions together, to the detriment of their analysis. For instance, they contend, "Whether probability is relevant [to single cases, rather than to a sequence of repeated trials,] is testable even by simple thought experiments" (p. 71). Well, first of all, what the authors next describe are not thought experiments à la Einstein, but experiments they have thought about someone performing. (The difference being they are asking "Think about this: how will people really respond in this situation?" rather than claiming the thought experiment itself proves anything.) And what they claim (I think correctly) is that, in the ...

It is interesting how Shackle and Mises are partners in this matter. The authors of G. L. S. Shackle discuss Shackle's rejection of the notion that a singular event can meaningfully be said to have probability X. Shackle puts forward an example where England and Australia are to have a cricket match. But instead of the usual coin toss deciding who bats first, England has managed to get the matter on the toss of a die, where a one will mean Australia bats first, and any other number, England will do so. He asks, "Can we now give any meaningful answer whatever to the question 'Who will bat first?' except 'We do not know'?" (p. 63) The authors reject Shackle's agnosticism here, claiming: "Of course, the right answer is 'England will, most probably'" (p. 64). But this simply begs the question that Shackle was raising: In the case of a single event, what exactly do we mean when we assert its probability is X? Of course everyone agr...

"Even in gambles in which the downside outcome involves money being lost, gamblers get something that is not available by holding on to their money, namely, the opportunity to 'indulge their hopes' by imagining what it would be like to receive a gain of some kind. In other words, the traditional theory of risktaking mistakenly focuses purely on the value the decision-maker would assign to each potential outcome if it actually eventuated. It thereby ignores the impact that expectations about the possible outcome of a gamble have on how one feels between the moment of choice and the revelation of the outcome. This is an early statement of an idea that he later developed at length as 'enjoyment by anticipation'..." -- G. L. S. Shackle , p. 104 This passage does, unfortunately, illustrate the authors' penchant for clunky writing. What do they mean, " Even in gambles in which the downside outcome involves money being lost..." It's not a gamble...

"Money is dope, a tranquilizer against the effects of not knowing what to do. Money is what saves you from having to make up your mind what to buy. "Liquidity is, in some sense and degree, a substitute for knowledge." -- quoted in Earl and Littleboy, p. 35

And properly so: "It is plain that what we apprehend as 'reality' is only 'shadows cast from without into the shadows of the cave'. But it is only with these shadows that science can be concerned." -- G. L. S. Shackle, quoted in Earl and Littleboy, p. 23

"For very many years I've not believed in welfare economics as a scientific construction. My idea of welfare economics is that you choose an administrator, a man with a conscience himself, and broad sympathy, with a generous mind and then you say, quote 'Leave it to him!' I don't believe you can do any better… "Those economist who are going to give advice, or who are going to be advisors either to government or to business, should have their training based in economic history, and they only need as much theory as you find up to the second-year textbook." (Quoted in Earl and Littleboy, p. 21)

(All quotes from G. L. S. Shackle .) Interestingly, Shackle, also, was a presentist : "Present thoughts and acts, so far as our consciousness can tell us, are all that is" (quoted on p. 11). His critique of mainstream economics is worth examining in some detail. Shackle wrote: "In sum... predicted man is less than human, predicting man is more than human. Man in his full humanity can neither be predicted nor predict" (quoted on p. 11). And: "The standard economic theory of choice does not in fact permit genuine choice. The answer is uniquely predetermined, and choice is illusory" (p. 11). The authors quote Kurt Klappholz, who notes that Shackle views "have attracted considerable attention from philosophers. Yet do not think it is unfair to say that Shackle's impact on economics has been limited..." (p. 12). They go on to quote Shackle: "History and philosophy, political theory, psychology of some sorts and economics all al...

I am now working on a review of G. L. S. Shackle by Earl and Littleboy... so guess who you, my faithful readers, will be learning about? The authors interestingly begin with Donald Rumsfeld's famous quote about "unknown unknowns," and defend it as a Shacklian (?) point, something I noted previously . They argue that, as Shackle contended, "we create the future; it is not sitting there merely beyond our epistemic grasp" (p. 1). The next point of interest is what Shacklian political economy is like: "A society of Shackle's design would rely more on the imagination and judgment of decision-makers and less on technical expertise" (p. 2). They then quote a passage from Shackle on why probability cannot be applied to many real-life situations Napoleon could not repeat the battle of Waterloo a hundred times in the hope that, in a certain proportion of cases, the Prussians would arrive too late. His decision to fight on the field of Waterloo wa...