Re: Newton Lives !

[Hyman Blumenstock <hystock@xxxxxxxxx>]

David:

What a bunch of arrogant BS. It's coming out of your ears from
a very dense supply crammed within. Your teachers have done a
great job on you.  And you certainly deserve top grades for
reciting mindlessly by rote exactly what you've been told.  This
is the rationale for declaring that PhD in Economics, or any of
the Social Sciences, means Piled High and Deep.

That there is a dichotomy of Social Science apart from the REAL Scienes --
that it is UNREAL -- is that it has NEVER resolved any problems within
its domain.

It should be obvious to anyone without an insufferable ego that the
REAL Sciences are REAL because they successfully resolve problems
within their domain. The only fault for which I condemn the REAL
Sciences, is that they never forced their successful intellectual
discipline upon the members of the Social (UNREAL) Sciences, who as
a result behave like middle schoolers on a destructive rampage, and
the world is being destroyed as a direct result.

Sure, the Social Sciences "work pretty well."  On its avowed function
to maintain the status quo of human misery, crime, violence up to and
including war, and a body of upper echelon, super rich, feeding off
and enjoying the misery of the rest of us. The Social Sciences, and its chief
exponent, "Economics, the Science of Scarcity" get an A for maintaining
status quo.


David Lloyd-Jones wrote:

> > The problem of economics today is to find that totally different way of
> > looking at things that will resolve the problems that are leading us into
> > social/economic collapse.  the difficulty is that there are political
> > forces at work which oppose that new way of looking, since the old way,
> > despite its obvious disadvantages, gives them a moral justification for
> > their rapacity.
>
> This makes about as much sense as saying that Newtonian gravity had to
> be replaced because people kept falling off their horses.  Falling down
> coal mines.  Dropping cricket balls on their heads.
>
> > I had been thinking about how differences between theory and observation
> > generally produce an advantage for those who can detect the gap, and
> > wondering if there were any examples of this.  George Soros' thesis is that
> > he is one of those people, and his fortune is proof that he has at least
> > some effective grasp of that gap.  Perhaps his ideas are a starting point
> > for a new perspective.
>
> Yeah, sure.  Einstein travelled by train, never owned a horse, so I
> guess this must be it.
>
> > Side note:  the major advantage that I see physics having over economics is
> > that the character and relationship of the important quantities have been
> > established, and conversions that produce new insight are possible.  I've
> > seen various uses of quantities here that make it obvious that that is not
> > yet true in economics, and I would consider that to be the first project.
>
> If that were true, why would it be a side note?  Surely you'd want to
> book your ticket to Stockholm on the basis of this important discovery
> alone.
>
> > Of course, such a project cannot be completed all at once, physics has the
> > advantage of dealing with simple consistent behaviours, and even so it took
> > hundreds of years to establish the various quantities.
>
> And then along came Planck and Heisenberg, Goedel and Shroedinger, to
> say they couldn't be established, after all.  So maybe what we have here
> is a distinction without a difference, a thought entirely devoid of
> content or contact with reality.
>
> I think it's time for people to get used to the fact that economics
> works pretty well.  We can predict ups and downs in business a hell of a
> lot more accurately than we can predict the folding of proteins, the
> splatter of quarks, or the timing of supernovas.  We know the world's
> economic product within an order of magnitude; I don't think we know the
> mass of black holes within an order of magnitude of orders of
> magnitude.  For interdisciplinary lagniappe, economists can tell you how
> nuclear power works vastly better than engineers can tell you what it
> costs.
>
> Perhaps this last gives us a clue why hard scientists, i.e. people in
> the easy sciences, are so often shooting off their lip about how
> economics needs to be brought up to their standards.  Economics has
> measures of success and failure, and does reasonably well by their
> lights. The "hard" sciences, by contrast, make up their own criteria for
> success as they go along, and still fail to get very much usefully
> correct.
>
>
> -dlj.