I'm an academic in an economics department. This paper is trash. The published version of Peter Wakker et al's critique [1] is remarkably polite. You have to r

I'm an academic in an economics department. This paper is trash. The published version of Peter Wakker et al's critique [1] is remarkably polite. You have to read their supplementary information [2] for the full, hilarious horror. Here are some juicy quotes to tempt you: "The EU [expected utility] value does not actually have to be realized or consumed in any sense.... However, Peters erroneously thinks that the EU value must actually be realized in some sense.... EU involves imagining, a priori, some outcomes that later may not have actually been received. This procedure involves imagining consequences that will never happen. But we do this every day, and such is the nature of every probabilistic decision. We do not need to believe in “parallel universes” or the existence of “multiverse clones"...." "A more fundamental problem in dynamic decisions is that we do not just maximize our entire wealth at the end of our life, but intermediate consumption patterns virtually always play a role. For nonquantitative outcomes, growth rates cannot even be defined. Dynamic questions as discussed here are central, for instance, in economic growth theory and in life-cycle consumption theory." "Peters suggests that economists should primarily study intertemporal processes, the topic of ergodic theory. For example, he suggests that risk attitudes and risky variance are not important and that interpersonal variations are not important, and then, in one blow, that neither is any economic theory." "Peters’ claims that, because of the ubiquity of time, we should always study intertemporal growth. Similarly, a risk theorist can claim that we always face uncertainties and, therefore, we should always study risk theories.... In the annotated bibliography Wakker (2020), the keyword “own small expertise = meaning of life” gives references to other authors falling victim to this ubiquity fallacy. ... and then there's the experiment. Oh boy, I'd forgotten that part! "Meder et al. applied expected utility and prospect theory in a way that we call static: they applied EU and PT to each choice in each round separately, as if it was the only choice made and as if intermediate outcomes were actually received. This static analysis is incorrect. The intermediate outcomes are not outcomes received and consumed by subjects." Translation: Sorry, kid, you failed your midterm. tl:dr; This is nonsense, an embarrassment to the authors, and an embarrassment to physics. Yet it pops up on Hacker News from time to time as a Deep Mathematical Takedown of Economists by Physicists!!!!... No.[3] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01106-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01106-x [2] https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41567-020-01106-x/MediaObjects/41567_2020_1106_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=ergodicity&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...