Pascal’s Market

This is an observation about human rationality as much as it is about the epistemic conditions generated by life in what Jay Bolter has aptly termed the digital plentitude and which I usually call the Database. We are not as narrowly rational in our thinking as many would like to believe. Which is why conventional “solutions” to the problems associ... See more

In Bayesland, when two people pass each other by and find that they have different forecasts, they are obliged to do one of two things. The first option is to come to a consensus and revise their forecasts to match. If my sandwich board says that Nadal has a 30 percent chance to win Wimbledon, and yours says that he has a 50 percent chance instead,

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Burniske warns, "Markets are a powerful technology that is meant to serve society's virtues, but markets are dangerous as a virtue system in-and-of themselves. If we continue to allow markets to dictate our virtues, we will perpetuate a society that the majority now whisper is selfish, divisive, imbalanced - threatening, even." With everything in o... See more

Of course, markets are not available in every case. It will often be necessary to pick something else as a default. Even common sense can serve as a Bayesian prior, a check against taking the output of a statistical model too credulously. (These models are approximations and often rather crude ones, even if they seem to promise mathematical precisi

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Komporozos-Athanasiou’s point is not so much that every sphere of life is programmatically ordered as a speculative market, but that we find ourselves assuming—sometimes by choice, sometimes by default—the attitude of speculators in everyday life.