Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Boberooni has implied that I got a man crush on Scott Adams. I will admit that I have learned a lot from Adams about persuasion. But I'm not in love, no no ! Adams, is, for instance, a terrible philosopher. Consider this gem : "As a companion to what I said on the Rubin Report, here is more scientific evidence that we are not rational beings. We are beings who rationalize after the fact." The problem with this position ought to be obvious... but it isn't, I guess, if you are a terrible philosopher. If "we," taken as a blanket statement, are not rational beings, then who cares what the "scientific evidence" says: it is just more rationalization after the fact done by a bunch of irrational beings who happen to (irrationally) have gained the title of scientist. Or are scientists magical aliens who are somehow immune to the laws that rule the rest of our "dumb human brains" for which "data and logic just don't exist"...

Kahneman and Tversky famously posited that there is a " conjunction fallacy ": people often assign a higher probability to a "plausible" case with more specific conditions than a general one. That clearly is erroneous. David Gordon tries to deny  Kahneman and Tversky have exposed any error in people's reasoning. He writes: "I do not think this result demonstrates that the people in the survey have reasoned wrongly. Suppose, when asked about the probability of Linda's occupation, people think it very unlikely that she has chosen to be a bank teller. They think, by contrast, that she very likely identifies with feminism. When asked about Linda's being both a feminist and bank teller, they may not recall their earlier estimate of her being a teller. Rather, they may simply lower their estimate that she is a feminist, to reflect the new information that she is also a teller." The reason Gordon tries to debunk Kahneman and Tversky is clear: a...

Bryan Caplan assumes  ( HT Kuehn ) that if people, ceteris paribus, prefer a known, workable situation to an unknown, quite possibly unworkable one, that is an irrational bias! Many contentions of "irrationality" are like this: people do not behave like some abstract model of how they should behave. Reality doesn't fit the model, so let's chide reality for its "irrationality." It's as though astronomers had tried to taunt the planets into moving in perfect circles instead of developing a new, elliptical model.

In college basketball, when a star player gets his fourth foul, coaches usually sit him for a long time, to save him for the end of the game. I've often wondered if this makes any sense. Here is my case for doubting that it does: 1) You don't know how long it will be before foul five, so you run a high risk of benching a player for too long. For instance, perhaps he would have gone ten minutes before getting foul five, but the coach holds him out until only five minutes are left in the game: five minutes were "wasted" playing without the fellow. 2) The usual response to this would be, I think, "But we need to make sure he is on the floor at the end of the game" Why? Baskets in the first minute of a game count for exactly the same number of points as those in the last minute. Let's say the star who was held out brings his team from ten down to win by one in the last five minutes. The coach will claim vindication: "See, he saved the game for us...