Comments on: No Country for Old Probability Theorists

By: frki

frki — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:09:38 +0000

I came to this post because i was to amazed by the same quotation ” The coin don’t have no say.It’s just you.”.
One thing is the he is passing responsibility to someone else,and second that he is living life by the fate,fate of coin probability. It’s like the bread with peanut butter if dropped always falls on the peanut butter side,because we expected it to,and probability is the same 50%, but we are the one who chose on which part of bread we will put peanut butter. We can live life with 50 % or CHOOSE and live out life with 100%,all we have to have is the courage of acceptance

By: Rob Bensinger

Rob Bensinger — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:31:23 +0000

But to see Chigurh as a robot is to exonerate him of all moral responsibility: Carla chose not to play Chigurh’s game, not to accept the terms of his gamble, on the grounds that Chigurh _is_ a human being. Chigurh is not a robot, and is fully capable of simply opting not to kill a person, even if he happens to be unwilling to do so.

If one accepts the terms of Chigurh’s game as being necessary ones, and if one’s primary goal is immediate survival (ignoring factors like the best long-term societal results), then of course one should pick “heads” or “tails.” But Carla knew that Chigurh could compromise his “principles” if he really wanted to, and either believed that he would do so, or felt it important enough to demonstrate this fact that she was willing to forfeit her 50% chance of survival to shake Chigurh up.

Although she obviously may have had irrational motivators for doing this (e.g., not caring whether she lived or died because she was in mourning, or wanting to have a personal impact on Chigurh more than wanting to maximize survival chances, or wanting to “die with dignity” if at all and not compromise her own principles), her decision wasn’t necessarily an irrational one if she simply had a different primary goal than maximizing her immediate survival chances. If her main goal was to dismantle Chigurh’s pretense of not being responsible for his killings, she did exactly the right thing.

The coin does “have a say” in the sense that it’s a factor, but as the original post pointed out, it’s not a _necessary_ factor. Chigurh is not a robot, and is not forced to accept the coin’s verdict; to view him as one is to miss the more important, broader message about human nature.

By: Dmitry Chernikov

Dmitry Chernikov — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:31:55 +0000

If the chance of calling it wrong and getting killed were 1 in a million, would it be reasonable for Carla to refuse to call? And if not, then doesn’t the (1 million-sided) coin partly determine the decision? Hence it’s not true that “The coin don’t have no say,” because the killer respects its decision. Instead of thinking of him as a villain who adds insult to injury by trusting his demonic providence, we can think of him as a malfunctioning robot whose behavior obeys a random number generator.

Oh, and this theme is also well-presented in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, though there the protagonist is executing vengeance; he is not a psychopath.

By: Peter Klein

Peter Klein — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:53:03 +0000

Thanks Steve, I didn’t know that one. Kirzner often illustrates his theory using Maugham’s short story “The Verger,” which you can read online.

By: spostrel

spostrel — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:39:38 +0000

I have just reread the best short story I’ve ever found about entrepreneurship–Max Apple’s “Peace,” collected in a newly issued volume of his stories called The Jew of Home Depot. “Peace” is a clever, funny tale about what we would call Kirznerian alertness, Knightian judgment, market ethics, and so on, but normal people would call character development and plot. Some of the other stories in the collection have business themes as well, and many of Apple’s characters are small businessmen of one sort or another.

By: Peter Klein

Peter Klein — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:45:52 +0000

See also Stephen Carson’s commentary on films relevant to Austrian economics and libertarian political theory:

http://www.mises.org/content/film.asp

By: aje

aje — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:38:08 +0000

Here’s my take on ‘There will be blood’:
http://thefilter.blogs.com/thefilter/2008/03/there-will-be-p.html

By: Peter Klein

Peter Klein — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:11:33 +0000

Ali, that’s a great quote, thanks. My dad was a history professor and I remember that long after he retired, he couldn’t read a book, even for pleasure, without a pencil in hand, ready to underline and take notes in the margin.

By: Ali Shams

Ali Shams — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:04:09 +0000

You’re post is great, but it reminds me of a quote by sir Ken Robinson who said:

“If you ever go to the ball room of a hotel where there’s been an academic conference you see men and women who roll uncontrollably to the music… off the beat…. waiting for the end so they can go home and write a paper about it.”

Seriously, the post was good.

By: brayden

brayden — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:21:22 +0000

I thought the movie and the book on which it was based deal well with the issues of agency, risk, and determinism. The coin flip scene, in particular, grapples with this idea that our consequences suffer from a strange combination of historical determinism (i.e., Carla Jean had very little to say about what happened to her life when her husband chose to take the drug money) and chance (i.e., Chigurh was willing to concede her fate to a coin flip). Seems to represent well the problems/opportunities that most of us face, including entrepreneurs.

It’s pretty obvious that Cormac McCarthy (the novelist who wrote the book on which the script was based) has been hanging around with scientists. He’s had an office in the Santa Fe Institute for several years, and regularly reads the papers that come out of the institute.