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"...economists often predict the future correctly but the irrational..." This is the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community worldview basically, and I find your

"...economists often predict the future correctly but the irrational..." This is the Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong community worldview basically, and I find your RPG setting reading works well for understanding them as well. From now on I'll think of them as writers who are predicting the future of an alternate universe where humans think fundamentally differently than in our reality. It's a hell of a lot of fun, if you model homo economicus instead of homo sapiens it actually is possible to reason about large societies and at least attempt to predict far future outcomes to some degree. Plenty of ways to hand wave away the reasons that you can't "predict" historical events or the present with these models, that's boring anyway, the future has cooler toys. If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way. The aversion to history makes a lot of sense, my own interest in history and sociology is what showed me the holes in this worldview and now I can't play this fun game with the same immersion they do.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way. I think it's pretty silly to accept homo economicus as an actual definition of rational behavior, since nobody really wants to live like such a creature.
- freshhawk 10y ago
  Really? I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them that. Also, I'm not sure how the quoted part relates, that was my facetious description of how Homo Sapiens act, in contrast with Homo Economicus.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them that. Quite the opposite, actually. Homo Economicus has two things homo sapiens does not, and cannot: * A fixed-a-priori "utility function". Things it wants before it has experienced life at all, with those "things" being linearly convertible into money. * Model certainty about the transactions it enters: risk is accounted for using probability, but the model structure is, again, known a priori. When you weaken these two restrictions in econometric and psychological experiments, you recover useful descriptions of actual human behavior. But those restrictions were ridiculous and unrealistic in the first place, unless you pull an economist's typical move and assume that a person operates like an investment bank with a fixed charter (ie: the fixed goal of accumulating capital) and a fixed set of actions (ie: available equity investments).
    - freshhawk 10y ago
      Yup, although that seems to be a very specific version of the general Homo Economicus term. Do you think I find the idea of Homo Economicus convincing or valid? I was arguing the opposite.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>If you accept that a chaotic soup of memes can, at any time, combine to form an idea that becomes a popular ideology that prompts a bunch of clever apes to act anywhere from irrational to completely insane for arbitrary amounts of time ... well that's impossible to model in any meaningful way. I think it's pretty silly to accept homo economicus as an actual definition of rational behavior, since nobody really wants to live like such a creature.

freshhawk 10y ago
Really? I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them that. Also, I'm not sure how the quoted part relates, that was my facetious description of how Homo Sapiens act, in contrast with Homo Economicus.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >I think we must have different understandings of the term, it just means that people decide what they want and then act in the way they think will get them that. Quite the opposite, actually. Homo Economicus has two things homo sapiens does not, and cannot: * A fixed-a-priori "utility function". Things it wants before it has experienced life at all, with those "things" being linearly convertible into money. * Model certainty about the transactions it enters: risk is accounted for using probability, but the model structure is, again, known a priori. When you weaken these two restrictions in econometric and psychological experiments, you recover useful descriptions of actual human behavior. But those restrictions were ridiculous and unrealistic in the first place, unless you pull an economist's typical move and assume that a person operates like an investment bank with a fixed charter (ie: the fixed goal of accumulating capital) and a fixed set of actions (ie: available equity investments).
  - freshhawk 10y ago
    Yup, although that seems to be a very specific version of the general Homo Economicus term. Do you think I find the idea of Homo Economicus convincing or valid? I was arguing the opposite.