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> I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade fo
by thwayunion 4y ago
> I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough.
Is that how you meant it?
I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
- t-3 4y agoHow often does an economist ever receive feedback on their theories? AFAICT, only a handful of people make economic decisions at the scale of economic theory.
- thwayunion 4y agoBy "policy levers" I meant the sort that are available to a CFO or director of a mid-sized org, for example.
- nasmorn 4y agoI am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.
- thwayunion 4y agoFair enough. I suppose using the dismal science as the organizing anecdote in this particular conversation is a point I shouldn't cede :) Maybe something like accounting, corporate finance, or tax law makes for a more interesting conversation. But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting? The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.