I think your contrasting between “judeo/christian” vs. “lassiez faire/darwinian/nazi” economic public policy is unhelpful for enlightenment or for best policy formation. But I do think you’re being baited into that framework by folks like Caplan -so I think it’s an emergent problem from what I called the “polarization bias dance party” between Left/Right types. Both groups seem to be satisfying mutual psychological needs by reducing policy discussion to these two polarized points, but I think it’s far from optimal in terms of actually determining best policy (to maximize my (or our) persistence odds).

Body: Available here
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Conclusion: The opinions I expresssed were censored. Allowing a link to elsewhere is in no way the equivalent of not deleting the possibly offending comments from the very conversation where they are relevant.

Of course the rest of my comment stands. My clear and detailed response to three comments (made on a previous comment of mine) was not in any way “an arbitrarily long comment” and appears to have been excised lest it offend – something that would appear to fly in the face of what the principles of Overcoming Bias claim to be.

mnuez

First of all I should note that I enjoy your posts and that this is not my first visit to Overcoming Bias and that I’ve also noted that I enjoy this blog on my own blog.

Lest you think that I’m saying this in order to flatter you I’ll continue with the following

Aside from the fact that I never received any email from you, I should also note that an explanation for censorship of ideas in the form of letting me know that you don’t allow “arbitrarily long comments” is quite silly. I’m not entirely certain as to what an “arbitrarily” long comment would be but I’d find it hard to imagine that it would be a detailed response that speaks directly to comments made in response to an earlier comment of my own.

Perhaps I’m crazy but it would appear to me that the more true reason for the wholesale deletion of my comment would be the more impolitic explanation to the effect that it might offend some people.

And if that isn’t bias NON-overcome I’m not sure what is.

I blame typepad. Until an experiment has been replicated Occam’s Razor would demand that we assume that a blog called Overcoming Bias would never delete non-spam comments.

I’ll attempt to replicate that experiment now with a re-post.

mnuez

P.S. In the unlikely event that my recent comment was purposely deleted and that the subsequent one will be deleted as well but that for some reason THIS comment will remain, I direct anyone interested in reading the deleted comment to my blog where it’s been reprinted. But again, deleting comments does not quite seem to be in accordance with the supposed intellectually honest values of this blog so I’ll have to assume that never took place. ~ m

“[Economists]have full and complete faith in the ability of the individual human being to engage in his most responsible, self-benefiting behavior when he engages in the market (despite the few measley trillions of dollars spent in psychological/marketing studies designed to fool people into spending money in ways that do not serve their best self-interests) yet they have zero trust in the same small human unit when it comes to his knowing how to vote his self-interests.”

Read Caplan’s book or related articles, as he addresses this issue thoroughly. He details how voters do not vote to maximize their financial self-interest, and instead entertain various fantasies and delusions. If I recall, he calls this the “near-neoclassical” demand curve, and claims that voting mechanism makes the expected value of a vote for your self-interest very low (the converse being that the price of irrational beliefs is low, thus we happily indulge in them).

Reading before ranting is generally a superior strategy.

If you would like to show that your disagreement with Caplan is on rational grounds, you could use the arguments that are numbered 1 through 7 above, or come up with some new ones. Referring to Caplan as an “asshole” (even if he is one, I personally do not know but presumably Robin does) is not likely to be an effective tactic and on the contrary would likely distract people from the points you are trying to make.