Agencies Are Not Agents

People will often debate questions like "why did the U.S. invade Iraq?" One group claims it was due to a fear of nuclear weapons. Another group claims that the action was oil related. Yet another claims that George Bush had a vendetta against Saddam. But proposed answers like these often seem to assume something that isn't likely to be true: that there was a single reason why this action occurred. It is in fact not even clear that there was one predominant or overarching reason. The actions o...
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Experts Are Expert But Not Necessarily In What You Think

What are top pure mathematicians experts in? How about top doctors? The easy answers would be "pure math" and "medicine", but these are a bit too vague to be satisfying (What is pure math? What is medicine?). They also don't capture all of what these experts excel at. To know what an expert of a particular type is truly expert at, we need to understand the system that creates that type of expert. What are these experts rewarded for doing or knowing? What actions make them more or less likely ...
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