Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Neurotic Manifesto and Prof. Gelman on people not using the help page

I reply to a recent Prof. Gelman post on not chewing people out for not using the help page of something.

You might be interested in my working approach to moral accounting "The Neurotic Manifesto" on my blog.

Because on the one hand I agree it doesn't make sense to chew out people for not reading the help page. Extending that logic, I intuit it doesn't make sense to chew people out for chewing people out for not reading the help page. On the other hand, policing does move the animal spirits. Of course, policing against policing also moves the animal spirits. I still think coordinating (including policing) to improve our collective welfare is a good idea, or at least the best of all possible doomed projects to engage in. But I think we should be sensitive to how inchoate it is at the level of first principles, at least as we can discern them.

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