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But there are reductionist predictions you can make actionable I find. For instance, if you stop thinking people are rational you may allow yourself to at least

But there are reductionist predictions you can make actionable I find. For instance, if you stop thinking people are rational you may allow yourself to at least accept the rise of religion-driven crazy long bubbles followed by short/long wobbles back down. I m sure there's a model we could make to accurately predict the next bitcoin or gamestop. Humans may all have histories, they also are synchronized: they grow up together raised by the same LED screen whispering in their ears. I m sure you re right it'd be hard to explain and simulate the human economic interactions with less energy than required to just run it with real humans, but you can probably make a lot of easy short sub models now that we are all that synchronized. And look at me writing to you in good enough English from Hong Kong while I was raised in France. I really feel we can be reduced more to patterns simply because we have to adapt a lot more to a common denominator. I had to internalize a lot of american concepts just to be understood when I express myself in English and therefore must surely be more sensitive to American stimuli than my personal history from the countryside of Normandy would suggest.

mjburgess 5y ago
You have correctly identified the heart of the problem, > to explain and simulate the human economic interactions with less energy than required to just run it with real human I think we have become mystified by the type of "engineerable reductionism" that very modern science has enabled. This religion of "engineering approximations" has taken the popular imagination captive, academics included, and has led to people being extreme reductionists. As an anti-dote, I think we should consider problems which are physically impossible to compute; interactions which require infinite energy to measure; simulations which take the age of the universe to run. We find problems of this kind everywhere and they out-number the solvable ones infinity-to-few. We cannot compute the shape of a table from the positions of its atoms (10^30 states) let alone human behaviour from god-knows-what (the state of some neurones, ad prices, or blood flow). In the face of what cannot be known either in principal, or ever in practice, we should resist engineering solutions. I dont think there can ever be a reductive science of human behaviour. We are in exactly the position almost all humans in history have been to matters such as chemistry: unable to make any pronouncements whatsoever. I think in the case of "the hard problems" in irreduibly complex cases, we should wholesale reject the reductive scientific method. It can only lead to pseduoscience. We should instead be extremely careful and locally theoretical empricists, as the anchinets. And say only, "over here, this happens", and "over there, that happens". And so on. Any more is charlatanism, delusion -- and worse -- an invitation to the public to a superstitious pseudo-scientific religion.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  > In the face of what cannot be known either in principal, or ever in practice, we should resist engineering solutions. I agree with this sentiment, for example, in the case of wholly electronic ballots. But the behavioral economics of academic grants will continue to guffaw at the idea of denying monetary incentives laid on the altar of the technology godz.

mjburgess 5y ago

You have correctly identified the heart of the problem, > to explain and simulate the human economic interactions with less energy than required to just run it with real human I think we have become mystified by the type of "engineerable reductionism" that very modern science has enabled. This religion of "engineering approximations" has taken the popular imagination captive, academics included, and has led to people being extreme reductionists. As an anti-dote, I think we should consider problems which are physically impossible to compute; interactions which require infinite energy to measure; simulations which take the age of the universe to run. We find problems of this kind everywhere and they out-number the solvable ones infinity-to-few. We cannot compute the shape of a table from the positions of its atoms (10^30 states) let alone human behaviour from god-knows-what (the state of some neurones, ad prices, or blood flow). In the face of what cannot be known either in principal, or ever in practice, we should resist engineering solutions. I dont think there can ever be a reductive science of human behaviour. We are in exactly the position almost all humans in history have been to matters such as chemistry: unable to make any pronouncements whatsoever. I think in the case of "the hard problems" in irreduibly complex cases, we should wholesale reject the reductive scientific method. It can only lead to pseduoscience. We should instead be extremely careful and locally theoretical empricists, as the anchinets. And say only, "over here, this happens", and "over there, that happens". And so on. Any more is charlatanism, delusion -- and worse -- an invitation to the public to a superstitious pseudo-scientific religion.

smitty1e 5y ago
> In the face of what cannot be known either in principal, or ever in practice, we should resist engineering solutions. I agree with this sentiment, for example, in the case of wholly electronic ballots. But the behavioral economics of academic grants will continue to guffaw at the idea of denying monetary incentives laid on the altar of the technology godz.