I hesitate to say this because I don’t want to make her embarrassed or change her behavior too much… but whenever Nancy Lebovitz comments, especially when she recommends something to read, I pay attention. It is usually something that (1) I’ve never seen or heard before and (2) gives useful insight into things from common experience. From the perspective of Aumann updating (which should theoretically happen most productively with people who are well calibrated but have seen different stuff than you have) her posts are almost pure gold to me, and I keep thinking I should PM her and maybe try to figure out some way to spend N days or weeks talking about random subjects with her to get her thoughts on them. Given the constraints of time and resources (busy lives, opposite coasts, etc, etc) all I can say for certain is I’m happy that she’s here and that her apropos comments are part of my informational environment on a semi-regular basis :-)
Above, I linked to her comment feed because it is interesting how regularly I am rewarded by tracking down things she refers to, but when I tried to think of something she linked to that still particularly stands out from ~15 months of distance as having caused cascading re-arrangements in my thinking it would be her comment referencing science fiction as appealing to the fantasy of political agency.
I hesitate to say this because I don’t want to make her embarrassed or change her behavior too much… but whenever Nancy Lebovitz comments, especially when she recommends something to read, I pay attention. It is usually something that (1) I’ve never seen or heard before and (2) gives useful insight into things from common experience. From the perspective of Aumann updating (which should theoretically happen most productively with people who are well calibrated but have seen different stuff than you have) her posts are almost pure gold to me, and I keep thinking I should PM her and maybe try to figure out some way to spend N days or weeks talking about random subjects with her to get her thoughts on them. Given the constraints of time and resources (busy lives, opposite coasts, etc, etc) all I can say for certain is I’m happy that she’s here and that her apropos comments are part of my informational environment on a semi-regular basis :-)
For reference, and because it seems right to mention, she has a blog called Input Junkie and an online button and bumper sticker business.
Above, I linked to her comment feed because it is interesting how regularly I am rewarded by tracking down things she refers to, but when I tried to think of something she linked to that still particularly stands out from ~15 months of distance as having caused cascading re-arrangements in my thinking it would be her comment referencing science fiction as appealing to the fantasy of political agency.