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I’m an economist by training. I understand where the author is coming from but most of these points are arguable (and much argued upon) but merely stating these

by qubex 8y ago

I’m an economist by training. I understand where the author is coming from but most of these points are arguable (and much argued upon) but merely stating these points of contention without explaining why these things are considered true and instead might not be isn't very useful. To a certain extent this text paradoxically reduces economics to sub-Econ101 levels by making a simple list of Apparent Truths That Are Implied To Be Actually False (whose complements therefore are implied to be True, but logically might not be). There wouldn't be a whole field of well-meaning professionals looking into these matters if it were this simple.

ardy42 8y ago
> There wouldn't be a whole field of well-meaning professionals looking into these matters if it were this simple. I think this list basically an exhortation to think twice before swaggering into a forum thread citing "basic economics" like you've got everything figured out. It's a reminder that things are more complicated.
- qubex 8y ago
  This will never stop happening for any given discipline, however, will it? That's why I affixed the preamble that I am “an economist by training” and was very careful to express an opinion (on somebody else's opinions... how typical of economic debate that is! but I digress). In my experience the most terrifying tend to be the cryptocurrency crowd: I deeply respect their technical capacity to create sophisticated distributed crypto systems, but whenever they veer onto discussions about currencies, economies, “fiat”, fractional reserve banking, and so forth I find myself wondering whether they actually know why the system they are casually disrupting is structured as it is (conspiracy theories abound).
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > This will never stop happening for any given discipline, however, will it? No, it won't. However, my experience has been that programmers, for some reason, are much more likely to engage in such behavior. They wade in to a discussion on something technically complex, yet completely out of their wheelhouse, clutching a few cherry-picked academic or pseudo-academic citations, which they then use to argue definitive conclusions on certain points they believe. Someone on this site once referred to discussions where people trade anecdotes on a contentious subject as "anecdote poker"; I would refer to this similar behavior as "citation poker".
    - tivert 8y ago
      > They wade in to a discussion on something technically complex, yet completely out of their wheelhouse, clutching a few cherry-picked academic or pseudo-academic citations, which they then use to argue definitive conclusions on certain points they believe. I've heard that phenomenon referred to as the "engineer's disease." I can't easily find any great sources about the term or concept, but these will do: https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers-Disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... > November 2003 comment on Crooked Timber (by MeFi's own Martin Wisse?): Engineer’s disease: where just because someone is a (self-proclaimed) expert in field, they think this makes them automatic experts on anything else. Usually people intelligent enough to see through “lies-to-children” [explanations], but not intelligent enough to understand there’s more to their new area of expertise than that. For [some] reason, engineers are particularly susceptible to it. https://www.metafilter.com/160644/Treating-the-world-as-software-promotes-fantasies-of-control https://www.metafilter.com/160644/Treating-the-world-as-soft... https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm: > As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. > The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. > But as anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  For that exhortation to be compelling, these "falsehoods" should come with some justification for why they're misconceptions. If you present me with just a list like this for a field as complex as economics, one of two things will probably happen: 1. If I think economics is a simple junk science I won't be inclined to change my mind, because there's no explanation here. 2. If I already think economics is a complex field I'll think this list utterly sucks the nuance out of it.
  - qubex 8y ago
    Economics is mathematically mired by a lack of conserved quantities. Those are global invariants that (particularly in physics) that allow to desume facts about the final configuration of a system based only on the initial configuration (conservation of mass, of energy, of linear or angular momentum... each of which is a handy approximation to solve various problems and that surprisingly depend on the theories one is applying). In economics even something as fundamental as wealth is not conserved (that's the whole wonderment of nonzero-sum games and interactions in general). That means that predictions are very sensitive to the dynamics one presumes to apply, and the practitioner has no amazing bookkeeping sleights-of-hand to resort to to verify that which one is predicting is defensible.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      Not conserving wealth is fundamentally correct in my opinion but you need to keep in mind forms of wealth - it is utility not just raw goods. It also fundamentally isn't universal. As long as there is more useful work to do we can create more wealth. We are thousands of times wealthier than ancient goat herders and yet do we have ten thousand goats each? No. Wealth has many forms. A full course of antibiotics to treat Hansen's disease would be incredibly valueable miracle cure in medieval times and anyone capable of producing them effectively a miracle worker. A smartphone's in the 1940s is effectively alien nanotech to them.
      - qubex 8y ago
        I agree absolutely. However, utility is typically expressed as a nonlinear function of wealth, and therefore aggregate utility is even less constrained (further from being even approximately conserved) than wealth itself.

by qubex 8y ago

ardy42 8y ago

> There wouldn't be a whole field of well-meaning professionals looking into these matters if it were this simple. I think this list basically an exhortation to think twice before swaggering into a forum thread citing "basic economics" like you've got everything figured out. It's a reminder that things are more complicated.

qubex 8y ago
This will never stop happening for any given discipline, however, will it? That's why I affixed the preamble that I am “an economist by training” and was very careful to express an opinion (on somebody else's opinions... how typical of economic debate that is! but I digress). In my experience the most terrifying tend to be the cryptocurrency crowd: I deeply respect their technical capacity to create sophisticated distributed crypto systems, but whenever they veer onto discussions about currencies, economies, “fiat”, fractional reserve banking, and so forth I find myself wondering whether they actually know why the system they are casually disrupting is structured as it is (conspiracy theories abound).
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > This will never stop happening for any given discipline, however, will it? No, it won't. However, my experience has been that programmers, for some reason, are much more likely to engage in such behavior. They wade in to a discussion on something technically complex, yet completely out of their wheelhouse, clutching a few cherry-picked academic or pseudo-academic citations, which they then use to argue definitive conclusions on certain points they believe. Someone on this site once referred to discussions where people trade anecdotes on a contentious subject as "anecdote poker"; I would refer to this similar behavior as "citation poker".
  - tivert 8y ago
    > They wade in to a discussion on something technically complex, yet completely out of their wheelhouse, clutching a few cherry-picked academic or pseudo-academic citations, which they then use to argue definitive conclusions on certain points they believe. I've heard that phenomenon referred to as the "engineer's disease." I can't easily find any great sources about the term or concept, but these will do: https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers-Disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... > November 2003 comment on Crooked Timber (by MeFi's own Martin Wisse?): Engineer’s disease: where just because someone is a (self-proclaimed) expert in field, they think this makes them automatic experts on anything else. Usually people intelligent enough to see through “lies-to-children” [explanations], but not intelligent enough to understand there’s more to their new area of expertise than that. For [some] reason, engineers are particularly susceptible to it. https://www.metafilter.com/160644/Treating-the-world-as-software-promotes-fantasies-of-control https://www.metafilter.com/160644/Treating-the-world-as-soft... https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm: > As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. > The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. > But as anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.
throwawaymath 8y ago
For that exhortation to be compelling, these "falsehoods" should come with some justification for why they're misconceptions. If you present me with just a list like this for a field as complex as economics, one of two things will probably happen: 1. If I think economics is a simple junk science I won't be inclined to change my mind, because there's no explanation here. 2. If I already think economics is a complex field I'll think this list utterly sucks the nuance out of it.
- qubex 8y ago
  Economics is mathematically mired by a lack of conserved quantities. Those are global invariants that (particularly in physics) that allow to desume facts about the final configuration of a system based only on the initial configuration (conservation of mass, of energy, of linear or angular momentum... each of which is a handy approximation to solve various problems and that surprisingly depend on the theories one is applying). In economics even something as fundamental as wealth is not conserved (that's the whole wonderment of nonzero-sum games and interactions in general). That means that predictions are very sensitive to the dynamics one presumes to apply, and the practitioner has no amazing bookkeeping sleights-of-hand to resort to to verify that which one is predicting is defensible.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Not conserving wealth is fundamentally correct in my opinion but you need to keep in mind forms of wealth - it is utility not just raw goods. It also fundamentally isn't universal. As long as there is more useful work to do we can create more wealth. We are thousands of times wealthier than ancient goat herders and yet do we have ten thousand goats each? No. Wealth has many forms. A full course of antibiotics to treat Hansen's disease would be incredibly valueable miracle cure in medieval times and anyone capable of producing them effectively a miracle worker. A smartphone's in the 1940s is effectively alien nanotech to them.
    - qubex 8y ago
      I agree absolutely. However, utility is typically expressed as a nonlinear function of wealth, and therefore aggregate utility is even less constrained (further from being even approximately conserved) than wealth itself.