4 ms·

I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics. Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters

I dunno, sounds like a lot of words to describe a rebranding of classical economics. Before economics became all dynamic stochastic general equilibrium matters and strategic games of imperfect information, it was about 'how does the machine work.' Not sure why we need a New Field to study that.

devons 7y ago
There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye: https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/1156301614975770635 https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063... It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
jkingsbery 7y ago
That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that > The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit) I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.
- antepodius 7y ago
  I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.

devons 7y ago

There's a Twitter thread critiquing Progress Studies from a similar angle. This reply in particular caught my eye: https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/1156301614975770635 https://twitter.com/WordsByBennett/status/115630161497577063... It compares the proposed approach to WW2 Abraham Wald airplane bullet pattern analysis [1] and Survivor Bias. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...

jkingsbery 7y ago

That's what I was thinking while reading: the author is just describing economics while ignoring the fact that > The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account (FA Hayek, The Fatal Conceit) I agree that we don't need a new field, but it seems also that the idea of designing progress is a fool's errand.

antepodius 7y ago
I like to think of it as a matter of scale. At a very low scale, a human mind designing a process can be efficient (a specific part of an assembly line, a function, etc.) As you scale, you quickly reach a point where one mind is worse than many, even if those minds are communicating mostly through such apparently low-bandwidth measures as observing the flow of money.