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Ezra Klein - In Defense of Experts
Klein takes on Megan McArdle and defends his previous posts about innovation and drug companies.
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In return, Megan McArdle showered him with contempt. Her post began with a spectacularly telling dismissal. The interview, she snarked, was part and parcel of "Ezra Klein's obsession with experts." I should go talk to some drug industry executives, she advised.
It's the experience of talking to ideologues on both sides of this issue -- some of them industry employees, others activists -- that has actually led me to rely so heavily on, well, actual experts. But McArdle's rebuttal isn't premised on interviews with a different class of experts. Rather, she's relying on a mixture of basic economic theory and intuition. The product, as you might imagine, isn't terribly responsive to Avorn's arguments. "I am completely unsurprised to find out that Dr. Jerry Avorn has completed no work in economics," she writes in her concluding paragraph, "and indeed, so far as I can tell, no work in anything except being a professor of medicine."
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So does Tabarrok -- or McArdle -- know as much as Avorn does about the pharmaceutical industry? Of course not. Neither of them is a health economist. Neither of them, to my knowledge, has worked at a pharmaceutical company. Neither of them has had sustained contact with the drug industry. Nor is medical innovation a subject that's dominated by economists. It's something that requires some knowledge of, you know, medicine, and the interactions between public and private research divisions, and the FDA process, and all the rest of it. Economics is a useful discipline. But it's not a decoder ring. And it's not a substitute for discipline-specific knowledge. That's why Tabarrok read Avorn's book, which he called "excellent."
McArdle elides this by spending a lot of time explaining how companies work to Dr. Avorn. Almost all of her post relies on spinning Avorn's comments as if they were about pharmaceutical companies, rather than about whether high reimbursement rates for pharmaceuticals is the most cost-effective spur to further innovation. It's quite a performance.
The Last Psychiatrist: The Best Way To Improve Your Creativity
Distance and it's connection to creativity.
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Here's my trick: imagine you are someone else answering the question.
Who that someone else is depends a lot on what you're trying to do. Sometimes I pick a person related to question (e.g. The Crocodile Hunter guy); sometimes I pick a guy unrelated but clever person (e.g. Stewie from Family Guy). It can't be a generalization of a person ("how would a biologist answer?") it has to be a real person that I know enough about to model their thinking, but different enough from me that alternative answers are possible. But I don't linger, I don't force the guy to answer if he can't; I cycle through multiple identities to get quick looks at the problem.
Ezra Klein - Will Health-Care Reform Save Medical Innovation? An Interview With Dr. Jerry Avorn.
The Wisdom of Fun: Harnessing games & play for useful work - Eventbrite
Sponsored by Vague Innovation.
Ah, Wall Street. Seeing the real you at last. » New Deal 2.0
Financial innovation was presented to us in a way that suggested that great things were happening for mankind. The presentations were usually vague. To understand them, we had only the power of our own imaginations, or perhaps, failing that, our awe in the face of this powerful expertise, confidently propelling us to a greater future....
Malarky. This is all code for defer to the wishes of those who make money from these techniques.
University of Oxford, Saïd Business School: Institute for Science, Innovation and Society
The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (formerly the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization) focuses on research, policy development and teaching programmes which provide new approaches to understanding technological and social change.
Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » Financial innovation | Blogs |
I think that the case for the positive effects of financial innovation is yes pretty strong if you roll back the clock to 1200 or 1900 or 1950. But over the past 25 years or so, the claim is much harder to make stick.
Creativity, Innovation, Collaboration - Group Genius by Keith Sawyer
In this authoritative and fascinating book, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. The empowering message is that all of us have the potential to be more creative; we just need to learn the secrets of group genius.
Authorship Collaborative - Home Page
This individualistic construction of authorship is a relatively recent invention, the result of a radical reconceptualization of the creative process that culminated less than two centuries ago in the heroic self-presentation of Romantic poets.
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity » Blog Archive » Robert Johnson made no deal with the devil; he listened to and learned from his colleagues.
Conceptions of Robert Johnson’s work highlight the context dependent nature of notions of originality. Originality is yet another characteristic of copyrightability that is not always easy to delineate in actual contexts of creation.
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explains that the prevailing view of an author as the originator of new works is a relatively recent phenomenon arising out of the Romantic Movement and its view of an artist as someone uniquely inspired. This view of authorship stands in stark contrast to an older view becoming new again in today’s remix cutlure — a view that creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing:
The Myth Of Original Creators | Techdirt
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Law professor Peter Friedman recently had a few interesting blog posts that helped highlight this. First, he noted that the very notion of an author as the originator of a new work is a relatively recent phenomenon, and part of the Romantic Movement. However, prior to that, the view was much more akin to what we're actually seeing today with online tools of creation: "creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing."
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