[E]valuation is nontrivial

You know how when you're in a debate with a smart person, and the debate wants to fragment -- you need some kind of tree structure to keep track of all the threads that the two of you have brought up, because some of them are irrelevant to the main point but still intriguing, and some of them neither of you are sure whether they'll be crucial or just trivial, and sometime what was irrelevant turns into its own fun conversation/debate?

Except usually you can't do all of this, because the debate is taking place in a linear format like blog (or, worse, Facebook) comment threads?

I had a moment feeling a little like that today when reading Massimo Pigliucci's report from the American Philosophical Association meeting in Philadelphia where he relates sitting through a panel stocked with followers of Ayn Rand. In general, this is an exercise not worth the investment of time, since no one except Objectivists takes Objectivist philosophy seriously. (Not least because Objectivist philosophers don't take any non-Objectivist philosophy seriously, and it's pretty bootless to try to have an academic discourse that way.)

If you don't have student loans, there's a high probability you're missing something

An opinion piece floated across my radar this morning; penned by one Jessica Slizewski, originally at XOJane and picked up at Time.com, it announces to the reader that I Don’t Have Student Loans and I Don’t Feel Bad for People Who Do. OK, so I'm being trolled. I don't care, I feel the need to retort.

Before I begin, I do feel compelled to state that, like Ms Slizewski, I strongly feel that the rent tuition is too damn high, and that student-loan debt overhang is having a nasty macroeconomic effect on the U.S. I also think that the structure of student-loan finance puts some perverse incentives on institutions of higher education; but that's neither here nor there.

Evan Soltas on the gender pay gap

Soltas:

"Look, I understand why Perry and Biggs have to respond to me and... I would agree with them that the 23-percent number reflects more than discrimination. But if they are going to try to explain away the pay gap, they're going to need to try a bit harder than this... When I actually ran the numbers, I found a persistent pay gap on the order of 4 percent to 10 percent, accounting for a battery of things -- frankly, everything that I could think of, and everything labor economists usually consider -- occupation, work experience, education, race, marital status, children, union membership, geographic location, and weekly hours.

For the to-read-later file

H/t Delong