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Of all the topics in which HN has provided me immensely deep insight, its userbase has failed equally immensely in economics. Comments from people who took just

Of all the topics in which HN has provided me immensely deep insight, its userbase has failed equally immensely in economics. Comments from people who took just one Economics 101 class in college baselessly trashing the field making it to the top of the comment list disappoints me. You know someone has no credibility on the matter when they mention homo economicus, as if it was the keystone.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Comments from people who took just one Economics 101 class in college baselessly trashing the field making it to the top of the comment list disappoints me. Yeah, as someone who actually has a degree in both computer science and economics, it's really embarrassing to see the level of discourse that pervades threads on economics. It's like seeing an economics student who's taken half an introductory CS class argue that CS is "a fundamentally broken pseudoscience", because they just found an implementation of an O(log(n)) algorithm that was slower than an implementation of an O(n^2) algorithm.
- soVeryTired 9y ago
  For you and GP: it's not enough to claim that a criticism is ill-founded. You need to show how it's ill-founded. Your defense in particular sounds a lot like an argument from authority.
MustrumRidcully 9y ago
I have a Ms in Economics and work as an economist. Most of the criticism and debate I see here is quite interesting, and the reflexions of the author of the article are similar to mines after working several years in the field. You fall in the category of people who think that debate about science should be limited to those who know science theory. The problem I saw in the field is that people talking have to much to loose, hence forbidding a reworking of the fundamental assumption and a trashing of the useless models that we keep producing. If you want to do real science, go ask the ones who are practicing economics daily about their heuristics. Nightclub owners figured out their economics interest long before two-sided market theory was out there, after all.

chimeracoder 9y ago

> Comments from people who took just one Economics 101 class in college baselessly trashing the field making it to the top of the comment list disappoints me. Yeah, as someone who actually has a degree in both computer science and economics, it's really embarrassing to see the level of discourse that pervades threads on economics. It's like seeing an economics student who's taken half an introductory CS class argue that CS is "a fundamentally broken pseudoscience", because they just found an implementation of an O(log(n)) algorithm that was slower than an implementation of an O(n^2) algorithm.

soVeryTired 9y ago
For you and GP: it's not enough to claim that a criticism is ill-founded. You need to show how it's ill-founded. Your defense in particular sounds a lot like an argument from authority.

MustrumRidcully 9y ago

I have a Ms in Economics and work as an economist. Most of the criticism and debate I see here is quite interesting, and the reflexions of the author of the article are similar to mines after working several years in the field. You fall in the category of people who think that debate about science should be limited to those who know science theory. The problem I saw in the field is that people talking have to much to loose, hence forbidding a reworking of the fundamental assumption and a trashing of the useless models that we keep producing. If you want to do real science, go ask the ones who are practicing economics daily about their heuristics. Nightclub owners figured out their economics interest long before two-sided market theory was out there, after all.