11–20 of 36 posts
These guys should take some clues from quantum mechanics, where observing or trying to control the system observed screws it up. “Physics found we can take advantage of Facebook to spread opinions and control people’s minds” - “oh shit, we polarized the people, and now we’re on the verge of WWIII”
It’s cool to have some mathematical rules of thumb to describe crowds and so on if it is backed up by experimental data. I did an economics undergrad. One thing that really frustrated me about the whole subject was how they kept calling it a social “science” and yet there was no experiment or predictions. Everything was a retroactive explanation for something, e.g. the financial crash or the affect of a minimum wage.…
Here we go, another HN comment that's awfully quick to dismiss the history of economic methodology and economics as science because they took one undergraduate class in Neoclassical Microeconomics 101. Please, this is exactly like a first year psychology student trying to psychoanalyse you: Absolute bullshit. Economics has a lot more to offer than supply-demand curves, and it has been evolving greatly in many differe…
HN comment? There are lots of books by respected authors written on the subject.
Just because the field exists and gets grants and gets to dictate policies and so on doesn't mean its scientific. Anything scientific in economics is just the math part, which are orthogonal to economic behavior and markets.
>* Economics has a lot more to offer than supply-demand curves, and it has been evolving greatly in many different directions and sub-fields like behavioural economics (especially living its golden age right now).*
The main things it has to offer is salaries for economists and favorable policy suggestions to politicians.
The allocation of scarce ressources did neither begin with capitalism nor economics. Many formal descriptions of foundational economic principles can (edit: be traced back to) ancient Mythology [1]. How societies applied these principles has differed greatly. Trade has been an important factor of human behavior since the dawns of civilization. In a framework of linear progress one might be tempted to search for deterministic laws in human behavior, but it might make more sense to just interpret phenomena case-by-case with a rather loose set of theoretical beliefs.
[1] Tomas Sedlacek - Economics of Good and Evil
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
The work described in the article can be interesting as far as it goes, but it seems to me that a lack of humility coupled with insufficiently accurate models can be a dangerous combination.
Firstly we don't understand physics fully. We have only more breadcrumbs but no answer to the ultimate "why", and are basically unable to answer a pesky kid who keeps repeating that. Now, we are applying this to explain another equally intractable problem, that of understanding human behavior. It is a strange case of reductionism. I wonder why people engage in such futile activities. May be this line in the article is the answer.
> Results like these have obvious value for corporate marketers.
A bunch of maths equations and charts presented in the form of a paper that promises to crack the human behavior with further research is too good for the corporates to let go. Ergo funding. Well done. I won't be surprised if all this started out as a joke that the corporates lapped up.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with trying to quantify an observation or a phenomenon, and in fact is always welcome, but bringing in incongruent things into the mix reduces the gravity.
It’s cool to have some mathematical rules of thumb to describe crowds and so on if it is backed up by experimental data. I did an economics undergrad. One thing that really frustrated me about the whole subject was how they kept calling it a social “science” and yet there was no experiment or predictions. Everything was a retroactive explanation for something, e.g. the financial crash or the affect of a minimum wage.…
Here we go, another HN comment that's awfully quick to dismiss the history of economic methodology and economics as science because they took one undergraduate class in Neoclassical Microeconomics 101. Please, this is exactly like a first year psychology student trying to psychoanalyse you: Absolute bullshit. Economics has a lot more to offer than supply-demand curves, and it has been evolving greatly in many differe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here we go, another HN comment that's awfully quick to dismiss the history of economic methodology and economics as science because they took one undergraduate class in Neoclassical Microeconomics 101. Please, this is exactly like a first year psychology student trying to psychoanalyse you: Absolute bullshit. Economics has a lot more to offer than supply-demand curves, and it has been evolving greatly in many differe…
> Here we go, another HN comment that's awfully quick to dismiss the history of economic methodology and economics as science because they took one undergraduate class in Neoclassical Microeconomics 101. HN comment? There are lots of books by respected authors written on the subject. Just because the field exists and gets grants and gets to dictate policies and so on doesn't mean its scientific. Anything scientific i…
Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate, but so is F.A. Hayek: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." The work described in the article can be interesting as far as it goes, but it seems to me that a lack of humility coupled with insufficiently accurate models can be a dangerous combination.
These guys should take some clues from quantum mechanics, where observing or trying to control the system observed screws it up. “Physics found we can take advantage of Facebook to spread opinions and control people’s minds” - “oh shit, we polarized the people, and now we’re on the verge of WWIII”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique <-- Treating relationships between variables as structural and changing one to influence the other will affect the supposed underlying structural relationship.