Vol. II · No. 259
Established 2025

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Wednesday, September 16, 2026
174 writers in the library
Economics · 2 shelves
EconomicsPsychology

Optimally Irrational.

Lionel Page on behavioral economics, game theory, and human psychology.

Recent essays

30 of 37

Are universities on the brink of an Uber-like revolution?

A scenario for how AI could challenge universities’ dominance in higher education

Power to the laypeople!

How AI will reduce experts’ intellectual market power

How AI will revolutionise peer-reviewed research

Frontier models will change the way scientific papers are checked, selected and written

Why has sociology become so politicised?

On the underlying reasons behind the ideological drift of the field

Should robots be considered as slaves?

On whether AI agents should be granted moral status

AI self-awareness is not the real risk

The danger is not consciousness, but self-drive.

So, what is morality?

Clear answers to some of moral philosophy’s deepest questions

The tide and the waves of social change

How social conceptions about justice change over time

The shocking truth about fairness

The deep origin of fairness norms is bargaining power

What is a just society?

Part 2: equality or maximum happiness?

What is a "just" society?

Part 1: simple answers to big questions

How we decide what is fair in everyday life

Equality or overall satisfaction?

What is fairness?

The invisible rules that pervade our social interactions

The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers

From cooperation to conflict: the evolutionary grammar of social interactions

The game theory of cooperation

Explained simply

Cooperation is the scaffolding principle of life

From cells to humans, cooperation is a key principle of evolution

Dekanting moral philosophy

Unconditional moral duties do not follow from pure rationality

What if the US seizes Greenland?

Looking into what would be a massive political and geopolitical blunder

Is morality relative?

And if so to what extent

A defence of morality as respect for a social contract

The absence of objective moral truths does not mean that "anything is permitted"

Morality works without absolute moral truths

Replacing theories of the Good and the Right with a theory of the Seemly

There are no moral laws out there

A criticism of moral realism

No, religion isn't required for morality

Our moral sense precedes religious doctrines

Morality without skyhooks

Shedding light on what morality is and how it works

Does the arc of history bend towards democracy?

Why the world became more democratic, and whether it will continue

What are we really doing on social media?

The motives and strategies that shape our online presence

Artificial General Intelligence will likely require a general goal, but which one?

AGI, LLMs and the challenge of alignment

Power balance and ideology

Why the cultural hegemony of the left erodes its epistemic standing

The delusion of political violence

Our fantasies about violence are an evolutionary mismatch

The truth about sport

Why we really care about it