21–30 of 46 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
* blog refers to husband--should it be a "she"?
Isn't the person being quoted a man? >Recently, my husband pointed me to the work of a well-known sociologist, Duncan Watts, earlier at Yahoo! Research, who explains why people exhibit such behavior. Here is my favorite part of his TED talk
But the more important point is: It's never pointed in the OP why rocket science is simpler than social problems, e.g. solving world hunger (didn't watch the linked TED talk, though). I think that the reason is that most social problems are "Wicked Problems" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem). The most important difference between a problems such as solving religious extremism and putting a satellite in orbit (or nuclear fusion or brain surgery) is that in the latter case you can isolate affecting factors and study them in (relative) isolation and sub-problems are well-defined and have well-defined answers, at least compared to social problems.
Interestingly, poking Google's ngram search suggests that whilst the phrase "rocket science" saw a little use around 1900 (I've no idea why: HG Wells?) and some use around the 1940s and 1960s, the phrase "not rocket science" is a far more recent coinage & only appears in the text corpus from the 90s onwards:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=not+rocket+scie...
As an economist, I salute this post. While common sense will get a person far in life, strategic decision making is a hard process to model.
That is probably the reason new models are en vogue every other decade.
You may be thinking about macroeconomics, in the which there seems to be a fad cycle of models, and a hyped up difference of assumptions. I assure you macroeconomics doesn't actually have a fad cycle.
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Is-Obvious-Once-Answer/dp/0...
The rocket always lands as predicted? He didn't pay much attention to the Space Shuttle accidents, did he? Perhaps he's referring to ballistics. Rocket science generally refers to designing the rockets, which to this day sometimes blow up, lose engines, spiral off course, and suffer various other catastrophes.
* blog refers to husband--should it be a "she"?
I never liked this phrase; my friend & I (as probably many other HN'ers) were building small solid-state fuel rockets at the age of 15. There's nothing inherently difficult in the basics of rocket science and rocket engineering. Frankly, I find cooking more difficult than making a solid rocket motor land at my neighbour's backyard.
The rocket always lands as predicted? He didn't pay much attention to the Space Shuttle accidents, did he? Perhaps he's referring to ballistics. Rocket science generally refers to designing the rockets, which to this day sometimes blow up, lose engines, spiral off course, and suffer various other catastrophes.