Word: posner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...course, this is an over-simplification. Many of the most popular weblogs are popular precisely because they’re run by someone famous from the “real world,” like Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner or actor Zach Braff (director and star of the movie Garden State). But the point isn’t that identity buys you nothing online. Rather, it’s that identity is difficult to establish there, and so in large part the web is a meritocracy: it acts like an enormous lens, magnifying good ideas and things people like...
...some point, we are unwilling to pay any more money for a slightly better safety belt. That doesn’t mean we place zero value on our lives. But ultimately, Posner writes, “the difficulty…that people have in grasping miniscule probabilities would cause them to ignore the risk completely and thus demand zero compensation for bearing...
...example, Posner argues quite sensibly for bolstering efforts to reduce global warming. And he calls on ordinary citizens to beef up their math skills so that they can make educated choices in the face of catastrophic risks...
...Posner is one of two prominent economists to wander into the tricky realm of the natural sciences in recent months. (The other, our esteemed University president, is thanked for his advice in the preface of Catastrophe.) Just as Lawrence H. Summers’ sojourn into behavioral genetics elicited several less-than-rave reviews, Posner gets mixed marks from physicists for his musings on subatomic matter...
...Posner writes, “social control of science cannot be left to the scientists.” In challenging his readers to wade into the arcane debate over strangelet disasters, Posner brings particle physics to the masses. By framing cost-benefit calculations in lucid prose, Posner helps the non-economists among us make decisions in the face of unlikely but potentially earth-shattering risks...