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Steven Landsburg
Personal blog · thebigquestions.comeconomicsmath
Steven Landsburg writes The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Ph, a personal blog at thebigquestions.com about economics and math. Since 2009, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “GPT-4 Fails Economics”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- GPT-4 Fails Economics7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-04-08
- The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-18
- What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-28
What Hacker News says?
Here’s a good thought experiment: https://www.thebigquestions.com/2024/07/21/the-next-democrat...
Comment linking /2024/07/21/the-next-democratic-president/
on “Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate”Submitted Who Expected That? Extreme close-ups create a Klein Bottle. as a story · 110 points
HN discussionDo go on? Sure! Read this: https://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/01/27/a-quick-economics...
Comment linking /2010/01/27/a-quick-economics-lesson/
on “For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate”Submitted The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck as a story · 107 points
HN discussionA good eulogy here from economist Steve Landsburg: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2014/11/13/the-rising-sea/ "... the greatest of all modern mathematicians and arguably the greatest mathematician of all time ..."
Comment linking /2014/11/13/the-rising-sea/
on “Alexander Grothendieck has died”Submitted What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...? as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThe expected number of sons is 1, and the expected number of daughters is 1 (by the framing of the problem, in every possible scenario, there is exactly one daughter), but the expected value of the ratio is not 1:1. E[X]/E[Y] = E[X/Y] is not a valid identity. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/12/22/a-big-answer-2/
Comment linking /2010/12/22/a-big-answer-2/
on “The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?”Submitted The "Surprise Exam" paradox as a story · 67 points
HN discussionFrom: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2020/04/15/goofus-gallant-and... >You have three pieces of meat, two kosher, one not. You lose track of which is which. Can you eat them? Answer, according to (my memory of Sternberg’s account of) the Talmud: Each individual piece of meat has a 2/3 chance of being kosher. So if you choose one of them and ask “Is this kosher?”, a “yes” answer gives you a 2/3 chance to be right and…
Comment linking /2020/04/15/goofus-gallant-and-the-law/
on “Kosher search engine powered by 4 car batteries on a passively cooled server”Submitted GPT-4 Fails Economics as a story · 3 points
HN discussion>Homo economicus assumes that the utility of the person is reflected in price optimization. But obviously only price optimization between two identical bundles. It only says we'll pick the lower price between bundles A and B if we have the same valuation of them. You may be confused because often intro econ textbooks assume that the marginal value for something never goes negative. But that assumption is broken here…
Comment linking /2010/10/12/how-rational-are-you/
on “Why do ten Chicken McNuggets cost the same as twenty?”Submitted A sequence with the first 7 terms equal to pi/2, but not the 8th. as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"So — what is a point? Grothendieck’s insight was roughly that a point is a landscape with only one place to stand — or, a little more precisely, a point is a space where all functions are constant." http://www.thebigquestions.com/2014/11/17/the-generalist/
Comment linking /2014/11/17/the-generalist/
on “Paint drip people, a successor to T-shaped people”Submitted The Python Misinterpreter as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttp://www.thebigquestions.com/2014/04/21/high-frequency-ren... This seems pretty convincing to me. The argument is that, based on the amount that firms are willing to spend on fiberoptic cables to perform hft, they put an extremely high value on hft. On the other hand, reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the social benefit of making the trade slightly faster are much less than the private cost. T…
Comment linking /2014/04/21/high-frequency-rentseeking/
on “Wall Street Profits by Putting Investors in the Slow Lane”Submitted GPT-4 Fails Economics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_capital_income_taxatio... is a good place to start. Right up top is a nice summary: "Starting from the conceptualization of capital income as future consumption, the taxation of capital income corresponds to a differentiated consumption tax on present and future consumption. Consequently, a capital income tax results in the distortion of individuals' saving and consumption behav…
Comment linking /2010/01/27/a-quick-economics-lesson/
on “Taxation of Carried Interest”Submitted Did Apple patent all pads and smartphones? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf anyone's curious about the actual math Grothendieck was doing but is (like me) a layman when it comes to mathematics, there's a useful summary of one of his major areas of work in parts II and III of this blog post [0]. The essence, I believe, is >Bottom line: To study the Weil conjectures, you have to think very hard about the subtle properties of curves, surfaces and higher-dimensional objects. When you do this…
Comment linking /2014/11/17/the-generalist/
on “Alexander Grothendieck, a genius of mathematics (2015)”Submitted Probability, Law and Innocence as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMathematics has been crowdsourced effectively. See: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/04/08/blogging-tic-tac-t...
Comment linking /2010/04/08/blogging-tic-tac-toe-and-the-future-of-math/
on “Issues in the Proof that P ≠ NP”- __ · 2009-12-29
Submitted Happy 99th Birthday, Ronald Coase as a story · 2 points
HN discussion I actually did find the "nightmare dilemmas" on the site more interesting. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/22/another-nightmare/ -------------------------------- -------------------------------- Today’s Dilemma In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it’s imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are: A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple. B. Kill…
Comment linking /2012/03/22/another-nightmare/
on “What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?”Submitted GPT-4 Fails Economics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis one says it was a bad randomizer, which I vaguely recall as being behind another vulnerability from ~10 years ago where a researcher found that many RSA keys shared a prime factor with another key, which allows the pair to be easily factored — so you could just iterate over all the pairs and quickly check which one share a factor, which breaks them. I’ll see if I can find details. Edit: found it: here’s the blo…
Comment linking /2012/03/13/uh-oh/
on “Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild”Submitted GPT-4 Fails Economics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe coder has failed to grasp the assumptions, the logic, or the conclusions of the argument he thinks he's addressing. Details here: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/10/04/the-python-misinte... .
Comment linking /2010/10/04/the-python-misinterpreter/
on “"More Sex is Safer Sex" Paradox (Python)”Submitted ChatGPT scores zero on Economics exam as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe local food movement is quite silly. http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/ 99% of human history pretty much sucked. http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.h...
Comment linking /2010/08/23/loco-vores/
on “Why vertical farms are a crock.”Submitted Are You Smarter Than Google? – Part One as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
