mpax

Get out.

The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences.

How does "life is meaningless" imply "life is useless"? Also, why would nihilism entail radical individualism? The core of nihilism is that since the indifferent universe is without meaning humans have to give it meaning, quite the opposite of what you're implying.

You might do well reading up on the last couple of centuries of Greek history...

Those data on poverty are a joke! Read for example: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/4/27/200-years-to-end-...

It's basically the World Bank covering its ass for its own spectacular failure.

The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature of modern econ.

Depends on how you look at it.

Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.

What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.

It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production.

The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.

Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.

What’s the proper game-theoretic equivalent of this situation?

Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the pixel shader?

Please keep such madness out of the EU...

On a tangent, the Mixed Mental Arts podcast episode with Diamond is _very_ entertaining.

They also interviewed Peter Turchin, who proposes an alternative vision to why certain nations succeed, namely multi-level selection (aka group selection) which I find just as interesting. Diamond seems pretty controversial among anthropologists, likewise multilevel selection is topic of debate among evolutionists. I don’t know enough myself to make an informed judgement in these matters.

They can just sit there in perpetuality, there’s no swat team going to bust in the door because one leg of government lent to the other.

The national debt can wait, the private sector is more indebted than at any point in recorded history, and getting worse. In the US especially you can see the seeds of debt servitude being sown.

They’ve always been decoupled, it’s just a lot more visible these days.

Facebook has been getting increasingly slugish for me for several years now. I wonder if it’s got anything to do.

I think historians will look back on this era and point society’s decline towards two companies, they both start with “Go”.

I’d rather shoot the horse and get a cab.

One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics by David Berlinski

Often gets low ratings because people mistake it for an educational book. It’s a mix of history, biographies and verbal exposition on the development of mathematical theorems, with a good poetic slant. Reminds me I really need to look into his other books, his writing is scarily good.

Laws of power is nice but what always bothered me about it is that there doesn’t seem to be a system to the laws, it merely sums up a bunch of them without investigating underlaying foundations.

A Brief History of Time, by Hawking

70 mph is not fast if I am leaving adequate distance between me and everything else.

The problem then becomes others tailgating and driving into the space in front of you, effectively diminishing you braking room.

I very much share this sentiment, I often think of prisons as quarantine. But that’s the descriptive dimension, not the normative.

Crime victims seem to crave “revenge”. It’s a very human thing. In fact psychological studies have shown it turns out that revenge feels quite fulfilling to the perpetrator. Societies without an institutionalized punitive systems (like much of western society has historically) tend to have family feuds which can last for generations.

I don’t think that should be a norm, bit plenty seem to think so, often quite strongly.

Well... sure, but it depends on how you look at it.

In a monetary society (as opposed to credit or barter (intermediary like you suggest) — monetary circuitist terminology), money is created as a debt/credit tuple to facilitate an intertemporal private contract (tit-for-tat), of which cash is a physical token representation. The etymology of “credit” is “faith”, “honor”, “merit” etc. That of debt, at least in some germanic languages (“schuld”) literally means “guilt” and has connotations of sin and atonement.

Wait, you mean privatized prisons are a moral hazard? /s

We have research publishing requirements in academia these days, which puts quantity over quality of research. I think we should swap those with required replication studies of published results.

"This, Jen, is the internet."

https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg

I'm starting to notice a trend whenever I engage with economics on these matters. In fact this pattern shows up every time, it's like they are trained to do this.

It starts with an acknowledgement that the theory is stylized beyond any practical purpose, or that it is merely a pedagogical "tool". They then point out that any fault I see with economic theory and/or methodology must be my own failure to understand the material. Like, sure, go read Varian or Mas-Colell's tomes before you try to bring up anything wrong with elementary supply-demand analysis. It's worth noting that they never go out of their way to explain what the supposedly superior methods are. To me it's just moving the goalposts.

In fact, I just stumbled on this paper, the conclusion reads as something straight out of Monty Python's Flying Circus:

Complexity and Economics: computational constraints may not matter By F. Echeneque, D. Golovin and A. Wierman

Conclusion: "We show that the notion that economic agents have limited computational resources adds no empirical content to the theory of utility maximization. A data set of observed consumption at different budgets is either in contradiction with the hypothesis of utility maximization, or it can be explained using a utility function that is easy to maximize. Our paper is not a critique of the literature on complexity and economics in general; rather, we take issue with the idea that worst-case hardness of a model implies that the model is flawed. We emphasize that the existing results on complexity are useful for understanding how economics can be applied in a normative and algorithmic way — for example, to engineer economic systems with desirable properties. We posit that while computer scientists tend to think ‘algorithmically’ about economic models, economists tend to think ‘empirically’ about the models. There is a need for considerations of computational complexity in both views. In particular, an algorithmic view of economic models assumes that the model is fixed and literally true, and then proceeds to ask about the computational demands placed on the agents by the model. That is, it assumes that the agent is simply an implementation of the model and asks whether the agent can efficiently compute its decisions. In contrast, an empirical view takes the model as a tool for thinking about reality. One does not presume agents literally follow the model, only that the model provides a way to explain the observed behavior. In this view, a model still loses credibility if the agents must solve computationally hard problems; however, worst-case complexity is no longer the relevant concept. Instead, the question is whether data from an observed phenomenon can always be explained by the theory with the additional constraint that agents are not required to solve computationally hard problems. This is the case with the theory of the consumer. On the other hand, we expect complexity to matter empirically for other economic models. When that is the case, one would want to characterize the added empirical consequences of assuming that economic agents do not solve hard problems." Source pdf: http://users.cms.caltech.edu/%7Eadamw/papers/letter_sigexc.p...

TL:DR; Yes the critique is completely valid, except in highly restricted environments that never occur in the real world. But look, that's not what we are actually trying to do, oh and by the way, those critics just don't understand economics. In any other field you'd be laughed out of the room, economists parade this stuff with a straight face, and if you object "you just don't understand economics".

> The world is a complex adaptive system, how does micro or macro equilibrium fit that any better than homo economicus? If anything it sounds even worse to me...

Chemistry is a field of complex and dynamic systems, yet we are still able to talk about equilibria there. Equilibrium doesn't mean nothing is changing - and in fact, it doesn't mean that the equilibrium corresponds to any actual observable state of the world. Due to aforementioned dynamism, observation effects, and other complications, it may not be possible to observe the true equilibrium state at all, but it's still a useful construct in our understanding of the chemical world.

I might have worded that awkwardly. Yes equilibrium is a thing, I don't see how modeling markets as tending towards equilibrium is helpful in any meaningful sense. In fact, I think it actively obscures the dynamic nature of real world economics.

> I mean, I have never seen an econ 101 lecture mention things like path dependence

I'm sorry to hear that you've never experienced a good introductory economics course. However, that experience (or lack thereof, as the case may be) doesn't serve as testimony against the field.

No comment :)

If the word rational bothers you, replace it with equilibrium.

The world is a complex adaptive system, how does micro or macro equilibrium fit that any better than homo economicus? If anything it sounds even worse to me...

They’re Newtonian mechanics to the economics discipline.

To me this is really the crux of the issue... how is it desirable to model the world in terms of static mechanics, when it is clearly a dynamic system?

For example, I find this on the Wikipedia page about Market Clearing:

In economics, market clearing is the process by which, in an economic market, the supply of whatever is traded is equated to the demand, so that there is no leftover supply or demand. The new classical economics assumes that, in any given market, assuming that all buyers and sellers have access to information and that there is not "friction" impeding price changes, prices always adjust up or down to ensure market clearing.

And then at the bottom there's this nugget:

Most economists see the assumption of continuous market clearing as not very realistic. However, many see the assumption of flexible prices as useful in long-run analysis, since prices are not stuck forever: market-clearing models describe the equilibrium towards which the economy gravitates. Therefore, many macroeconomists feel that price flexibility is a good assumption for studying long-run issues, such as growth in real GDP. Other economists argue that price adjustment may take so much time that the process of equilibration may change the underlying conditions that determine long-run equilibrium. That is, there may be path dependence, as when a long depression changes the nature of the "full employment" period that follows.

I mean, I have never seen an econ 101 lecture mention things like path dependence, which seems to be a very big deal indeed. That to me makes it seem this emphasis on being the equivalent of Newtonian mechanics is a bug and not a feature. I mean, I don't want to single anyone out here, but it seems to me this talk about "simplifying assumptions" and "toy models" is just some elaborate ex-post justification for keeping outdated (and hugely invested-in) models around.

Where did I say I have a problem with it?

Homo economicus is a pedagogical tool and toy model. Utilitarian economics feature pretty much nowhere because defining a single utility function for real people is impossible.

Then what is the point? I mean, seriously, what is the point of teaching it? Why not simply use a different model that doesn't result in all kinds of awkward edge cases?