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Javier E

The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-failure-of-rational-choice

rational choice philosophy economics theory individualism

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • According to Hegel, history is idea-driven.
  • Ideas for him are public, rather than in our heads, and serve to coordinate behavior. They are, in short, pragmatically meaningful words.  To say that history is “idea driven” is to say that, like all cooperation, nation building requires a common basic vocabulary.
  • One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.”
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  • individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.
  • individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.
  • it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism
  • Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist.
  • rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and governme
  • Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality  is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.
  • At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice.
  • But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not.
  • Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!
  • Today, institutions which help individuals do that (corporations, lobbyists) are flourishing; the others (public hospitals, schools) are basically left to rot. Business and law schools prosper; philosophy departments are threatened with closure.
  • Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.
  • By 1953, W. V. O. Quine was exposing the flaws in rational choice epistemology. John Rawls, somewhat later, took on its sham ethical neutrality, arguing that rationality in choice includes moral constraints. The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than previously thought.
Javier E

Minsky's moment | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...omic-ideas-looks-hyman-minskys

economics theory finance crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Minsky started with an explanation of investment. It is, in essence, an exchange of money today for money tomorrow. A firm pays now for the construction of a factory; profits from running the facility will, all going well, translate into money for it in coming years.
  • Put crudely, money today can come from one of two sources: the firm’s own cash or that of others (for example, if the firm borrows from a bank). The balance between the two is the key question for the financial system.
  • Minsky distinguished between three kinds of financing. The first, which he called “hedge financing”, is the safest: firms rely on their future cashflow to repay all their borrowings. For this to work, they need to have very limited borrowings and healthy profits. The second, speculative financing, is a bit riskier: firms rely on their cashflow to repay the interest on their borrowings but must roll over their debt to repay the principal. This should be manageable as long as the economy functions smoothly, but a downturn could cause distress. The third, Ponzi financing, is the most dangerous. Cashflow covers neither principal nor interest; firms are betting only that the underlying asset will appreciate by enough to cover their liabilities. If that fails to happen, they will be left exposed.
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  • Economies dominated by hedge financing—that is, those with strong cashflows and low debt levels—are the most stable. When speculative and, especially, Ponzi financing come to the fore, financial systems are more vulnerable. If asset values start to fall, either because of monetary tightening or some external shock, the most overstretched firms will be forced to sell their positions. This further undermines asset values, causing pain for even more firms. They could avoid this trouble by restricting themselves to hedge financing. But over time, particularly when the economy is in fine fettle, the temptation to take on debt is irresistible. When growth looks assured, why not borrow more? Banks add to the dynamic, lowering their credit standards the longer booms last. If defaults are minimal, why not lend more? Minsky’s conclusion was unsettling. Economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.
  • Minsky’s insight might sound obvious. Of course, debt and finance matter. But for decades the study of economics paid little heed to the former and relegated the latter to a sub-discipline, not an essential element in broader theories.
  • Minsky was a maverick. He challenged both the Keynesian backbone of macroeconomics and a prevailing belief in efficient markets.
  • t Messrs Hicks and Hansen largely left the financial sector out of the picture, even though Keynes was keenly aware of the importance of markets. To Minsky, this was an “unfair and naive representation of Keynes’s subtle and sophisticated views”. Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis helped fill in the holes.
  • His challenge to the prophets of efficient markets was even more acute. Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas, among others, persuaded most of academia and policymaking circles that markets tended towards equilibrium as people digested all available information. The structure of the financial system was treated as almost irrelevant
  • In recent years, behavioural economists have attacked one plank of efficient-market theory: people, far from being rational actors who maximise their gains, are often clueless about what they want and make the wrong decisions.
  • But years earlier Minsky had attacked another: deep-seated forces in financial systems propel them towards trouble, he argued, with stability only ever a fleeting illusion.
  • Investors were faster than professors to latch onto his views. More than anyone else it was Paul McCulley of PIMCO, a fund-management group, who popularised his ideas. He coined the term “Minsky moment” to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging. Mr McCulley initially used the term in explaining the Russian financial crisis of 1998. Since the global turmoil of 2008, it has become ubiquitous. For investment analysts and fund managers, a “Minsky moment” is now virtually synonymous with a financial crisis.
  • it would be a stretch to expect the financial-instability hypothesis to become a new foundation for economic theory. Minsky’s legacy has more to do with focusing on the right things than correctly structuring quantifiable models. It is enough to observe that debt and financial instability, his main preoccupations, have become some of the principal topics of inquiry for economists today
  • As Mr Krugman has quipped: “We are all Minskyites now.”
sissij

A Map of Corruption in France | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...a-map-of-corruption-in-france

corruption psychology bias

shared by sissij on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Yet corruption is not a victimless crime. Cutting corners on good governance costs money, endangers lives and erodes the public trust that oils the machinery of state in modern democracies.
  • Conversely, the interior of France is largely corruption-free, some departments even entirely so. Of course, the incidence of corruption varies with the density of population, and perhaps declines disproportionately in the almost-empty interior because there are so few people to be corrupted by.
  • Mapping corruption at country level brings home the pervasiveness of the problem.
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  • This corruption map of France seems to be a local initiative. Similar maps of other countries would make for equally compelling reading. Except of course the corruption maps of Somalia, South Sudan and North Korea – they would be totally blank.
  • sissij on 28 Feb 17
     
    Corruption in government leads to Pareto inefficiency. I remember in a book about game theory, this is a malicious cycle in hiring government employees. For example, there are four people competing for the same position in government. One is lazy and stupid, One is hardworking but stupid. One is lazy but clever. The last one is hardworking and clever. The first one is obviously the first one to be eliminated. The leader of the government won't hire the last person because he is a potential threats to the leadership of the higher-up. The third one will often mess things up. So the only choice left for them is people who are lazy but clever. These people won't make any contribution to the government, but they occupy the money and regulation. This game theory behind hiring in government indirectly suggest the corruption in government is inevitable.
Duncan H

The Materialist Fallacy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-the-materialist-fallacy.html

education research

shared by Duncan H on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class.
  • In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.
  • Liberals congregated around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration.
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  • Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.
  • Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.
  • a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research
  • tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.
  • Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values. Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.
  • disruption breeds disruption
  • children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.
  • Duncan H on 14 Feb 12
     
    What do you think?
grayton downing

How the Brain Creates Personality: A New Theory - Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281287

brain personality research science brain science

shared by grayton downing on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • It is possible to examine any object—including a brain—at different levels
  • if we want to know how the brain gives rise to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we want to focus on the bigger picture of how its structure allows it to store and process information—the architecture, as it were. To understand the brain at this level, we don’t have to know everything about the individual connections among brain cells or about any other biochemical process.
  • top parts and the bottom parts of the brain have differ­ent functions. The top brain formulates and executes plans (which often involve deciding where to move objects or how to move the body in space), whereas the bottom brain classifies and interprets incoming information about the world. The two halves always work together;
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  • You have probably heard of this theory, in which the left and right halves of the brain are characterized, respectively, as logical versus intuitive, verbal versus perceptual, analytic versus synthetic, and so forth. The trouble is that none of these sweeping generalizations has stood up to careful scientific scrutiny. The dif­ferences between the left and right sides of the brain are nuanced, and simple, sweeping dichotomies do not in fact explain how the two sides function.
  • top and bottom portions of the brain have very different functions. This fact was first discovered in the context of visual perception, and it was supported in 1982 in a landmark report by National Medal of Science winner Mortimer Mishkin and Leslie G. Ungerleider, of the National Institute of Mental Health.
  • scientists trained monkeys to perform two tasks. In the first task, the monkeys had to learn to recognize which of two shapes concealed a bit of food.
  • These functions occur relatively close to where neural connec­tions deliver inputs from the eyes and ears—but processing doesn’t just stop there.
  • top parts of our frontal lobe can take into account the confluence of information about “what’s out there,” our emo­tional reactions to it, and our goals.
  • Four distinct cognitive modes emerge from how the top-brain and bottom-brain systems can interac
  • The two systems always work together. You use the top brain to decide to walk over to talk to your friend only after you know who she is (courtesy of the bottom brain). And after talking to her, you formulate another plan, to enter the date and time in your calendar, and then you need to monitor what hap­pens (again using the bottom brain) as you try to carry out this plan (a top-brain activity).
  • speak of differences in the degree to which a person relies on the top-brain and bottom-brain systems, we are speaking of differences in this second kind of utilization, in the kind of processing that’s not simply dictated by a given situation. In this sense, you can rely on one or the other brain system to a greater or lesser degree.
  • The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feel­ings, and behavior in profound ways. The notion that each system can be more or less highly utilized, in this sense is the foundation of the Theory of Cognitive Modes. 
Javier E

How Game Theory Helped Improve New York City's High School Application Process - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chool-application-process.html

game theory economics social science schools

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • “It was an allocation problem,” explained Neil Dorosin, the director of high-school admissions at the time of the redesign. The city had a scarce resource — in this case, good schools — and had to work out an equitable way to distribute it. “But unlike a scarce resource like Rolling Stones tickets, where whoever’s willing to pay the most gets the tickets, here we can’t use price,”
  • In the early 1960s, the economists David Gale and Lloyd Shapley proved that it was theoretically possible to pair an unlimited number of men and women in stable marriages according to their preferences.In game theory, “stable” means that every player’s preferences are optimized; in this case, no man and no woman matched with another partner would both prefer to be with each other.
  • a “deferred acceptance algorithm.”
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  • Here is how it works: Each suitor proposes to his first-choice mate; each woman has her own list of favorites. (The economists worked from the now-quaint premise that men only married women, and did the proposing.) She rejects all proposals except her favorite — but does not give him a firm answer. Each suitor rejected by his most beloved then proposes to his second choice, and each woman being wooed in this round again rejects all but her favorite.
  • Professor Abdulkadiroglu said he had fielded calls from anguished parents seeking advice on how their children could snare the best match. His advice: “Rank them in true preference order.”
  • The deferred acceptance algorithm, Professor Pathak said, is “one of the great ideas in economics.” It quickly became the basis for a standard lesson in graduate-level economics courses.
  • In the case of rejection, the algorithm looks to make a match with a student’s second-choice school, and so on. Like the brides and grooms of Professors Gale and Shapley, students and schools connect only tentatively until the very end of the process.
  • The courting continues until everyone is betrothed. But because each woman has waited to give her final answer (the “deferred acceptance”), she has the opportunity to accept a proposal later from a suitor whom she prefers to someone she had tentatively considered earlier. The later match is preferable for her, and therefore more stable.
  • It seems that most students prefer to go to school close to home, and if nearby schools are underperforming, students will choose them nevertheless. Researching other options is labor intensive, and poor and immigrant children in particular may not get the help they need to do it.
jongardner04

Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ing-more-flawed-than-you-think

reasoning scientific method

shared by jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • And in a world where many high-stakes issues fundamentally boil down to science, this is clearly a problem. 
  • Naturally, the solution to the problem lies in good schooling — emptying minds of their youthful hunches and intuitions about how the world works, and repopulating them with sound scientific principles that have been repeatedly tested and verified. Wipe out the old operating system, and install the new
  • Although science as a field discards theories that are wrong or lacking, Shtulman and Valcarcel’s work suggests that individuals —even scientifically literate ones — tend to hang on to their early, unschooled, and often wrong theories about the natural world.
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  • Taken together, these findings suggest that we may be innately predisposed to have certain theories about the natural world that are resilient to being drastically replaced or restructured.
  • hile some theories of learning consider the unschooled mind to be a ‘bundle of misconceptions’ in need of replacement, perhaps replacement is an unattainable goal. Or, if it is attainable, we may need to rethink how science is taught.
  • jongardner04 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Discusses scientific reasoning, which relates with the things we are learning about with scientific method. 
Sophia C

When Nature Looks Unnatural - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...when-nature-looks-unnatural

research knowledge science

shared by Sophia C on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Nature is not always so kind, however. Fields like particle physics and cosmology sometimes include good theories that fit all the data but nevertheless seem unsatisfying to us.
  • Faced with theories that fit all the data but seem unnatural, one can certainly shrug and say, “Maybe that’s just the way it is.” But most physicists take the attitude that almost none of our current models are exactly correct; our best ideas are still approximations to the underlying reality. In that case, apparent fine-tunings can be taken as potential clues that might prod us into building better theories.
  • Rather than predicting definite outcomes, we attach probabilities to members of an ensemble of many different experimental outcomes.
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  • So even if inflation itself seems unlikely, multiplying by the infinite number of universes it creates makes it quite plausible that we find ourselves in a post-inflationary situation.
  • ather than explaining why we live precisely in this kind of universe, eternal inflation admits there are many kinds of local universes, and expresses the hope that ones like ours are more likely than other kinds.
  • aturalness is a subtle criterion. In the case of inflationary cosmology, the drive to find a natural theory seems to have paid off handsomely, but perhaps other seemingly unnatural features of our world must simply be accepted. Ultimately it’s nature, not us, that decides what’s natural.
kushnerha

Are scientists blocking their own progress? - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ts-blocking-their-own-progress

washington post scientific revolution kuhn bias science

shared by kushnerha on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Max Planck won a Nobel prize for his revolutionary work in quantum mechanics, but it was his interest in the philosophy of science that led to what is now called “Planck’s Principle.” Planck argued that science was an evolving system of thought which changes slowly over time, fueled by the deaths of old ideas. As he wrote in his 1968 autobiography: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
  • Is our understanding of the world based in pure objective reason, or are the theories that underpin it shaped by generational biases? Do our most famous thinkers actually block new ideas from gaining ground?
  • A new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that fame does play a significant role in deciding when and whether new scientific ideas can gain traction. When a prominent scientist dies, the paper’s authors found, the number of articles published by his or her collaborators tends to fall “precipitously” in the years following the death — those supporters tend not to continue advocating for a once-famous scientist’s ideas once the scientist is gone.
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  • the number of research articles written by other scientists — including those with opposing ideas — increases by 8 percent on average, implying that the work of these scientists had been stifled before, but that after the death of a ubiquitous figure, the field becomes more open to new ideas. The study also found that these new articles are less likely to cite previous research and are more likely to be cited by others in the field. Death signifies a changing of the guard
  • Our instinct is often to view science as a concrete tower, growing ever upward and built upon the immovable foundations of earlier pioneers.  Sir Isaac Newton famously characterized this as “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
  • Mid-20th century philosopher Thomas Kuhn was among the first to come to this conclusion, in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He argued that scientific theories appeared in punctuated “paradigm shifts,” in which the underlying assumptions of a field are questioned and eventually overthrown
  • Kuhn’s book was, to some extent, a paradigm shift in its own right. According to his logic, commonly held notions in science were bound to change and become outdated. What we believe today will tomorrow be revised, rewritten — and in the most extreme cases ridiculed.
  • the journal Nature earlier this year said scientific data is prone to bias because researchers design experiments and make observations in ways that support hypotheses
  • equally as important are simple shifts in perspective. It only takes one researcher seeing an accepted scientific model in a new light for a solidified paradigm to enter what Kuhn called a “crisis phase” and beg for alternative explanations
  • The NBER study shows that those who questioned consensus ought to be given the opportunity to make their case, not ignored, silenced or pushed to the back of the line.
  • We’re likely to see these “paradigm shifts” happen at a much faster rate as data and research become easier to share worldwide. For some, this reality might seem chaotic; for the truly curious, it is exhilarating. The result may be a more democratic version of science — one in which the progress of ideas doesn’t have to wait until the funeral of a great mind.
kushnerha

Philosophy's True Home - The New York Times - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...philosophys-true-home

new york times areas of knowing philosophy natural sciences

shared by kushnerha on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.
  • This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.
  • identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.
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  • The authors claim that philosophy abandoned its relationship to other disciplines by creating its own purified domain, accessible only to credentialed professionals. It is true that from roughly 1930 to 1950, some philosophers — logical empiricists, in particular — did speak of philosophy having its own exclusive subject matter. But since that subject matter was logical analysis aimed at unifying all of science, interdisciplinarity was front and center.
  • Philosophy also played a role in 20th-century physics, influencing the great physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The philosophers Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach reciprocated that interest by assimilating the new physics into their philosophies.
  • developed ideas relating logic to linguistic meaning that provided a framework for studying meaning in all human languages. Others, including Paul Grice and J.L. Austin, explained how linguistic meaning mixes with contextual information to enrich communicative contents and how certain linguistic performances change social facts. Today a new philosophical conception of the relationship between meaning and cognition adds a further dimension to linguistic science.
  • Decision theory — the science of rational norms governing action, belief and decision under uncertainty — was developed by the 20th-century philosophers Frank Ramsey, Rudolph Carnap, Richard Jeffrey and others. It plays a foundational role in political science and economics by telling us what rationality requires, given our evidence, priorities and the strength of our beliefs. Today, no area of philosophy is more successful in attracting top young minds.
  • Philosophy also assisted psychology in its long march away from narrow behaviorism and speculative Freudianism. The mid-20th-century functionalist perspective pioneered by Hilary Putnam was particularly important. According to it, pain, pleasure and belief are neither behavioral dispositions nor bare neurological states. They are interacting internal causes, capable of very different physical realizations, that serve the goals of individuals in specific ways. This view is now embedded in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
  • philosopher-mathematicians Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing invented symbolic logic, helped establish the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics, and gave us the formal theory of computation that ushered in the digital age
  • Philosophy of biology is following a similar path. Today’s philosophy of science is less accessible than Aristotle’s natural philosophy chiefly because it systematizes a larger, more technically sophisticated body of knowledge.
  • Philosophy’s interaction with mathematics, linguistics, economics, political science, psychology and physics requires specialization. Far from fostering isolation, this specialization makes communication and cooperation among disciplines possible. This has always been so.
  • Nor did scientific progress rob philosophy of its former scientific subject matter, leaving it to concentrate on the broadly moral. In fact, philosophy thrives when enough is known to make progress conceivable, but it remains unachieved because of methodological confusion. Philosophy helps break the impasse by articulating new questions, posing possible solutions and forging new conceptual tools.
  • Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves expands like a ripple surrounding a pebble dropped in a pool. As we move away from the center of the spreading circle, its area, representing our secure knowledge, grows. But so does its circumference, representing the border where knowledge blurs into uncertainty and speculation, and methodological confusion returns. Philosophy patrols the border, trying to understand how we got there and to conceptualize our next move.  Its job is unending.
  • Although progress in ethics, political philosophy and the illumination of life’s meaning has been less impressive than advances in some other areas, it is accelerating.
  • the advances in our understanding because of careful formulation and critical evaluation of theories of goodness, rightness, justice and human flourishing by philosophers since 1970 compare well to the advances made by philosophers from Aristotle to 1970
  • The knowledge required to maintain philosophy’s continuing task, including its vital connection to other disciplines, is too vast to be held in one mind. Despite the often-repeated idea that philosophy’s true calling can only be fulfilled in the public square, philosophers actually function best in universities, where they acquire and share knowledge with their colleagues in other disciplines. It is also vital for philosophers to engage students — both those who major in the subject, and those who do not. Although philosophy has never had a mass audience, it remains remarkably accessible to the average student; unlike the natural sciences, its frontiers can be reached in a few undergraduate courses.
Javier E

There Is No Theory of Everything - The New York Times - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ere-is-no-theory-of-everything

philosophy meaning of life scientism explanation elucidation

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • fered by science and the kinds of humanistic description we find, say, in the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, or in the sociological writings of Erving Goffman and David Riesman. His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark.
  • His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.
  • However efficacious the blue pill might be, in this instance the doctor’s causal diagnosis is the wrong one. What is required is for you to be able to talk, to feel that someone understands your problems and perhaps can offer some insight or even suggestions on how you might move forward in your life. This, one imagines, is why people go into therapy.
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  • On a ferry you want a blue pill that is going to alleviate the symptoms of seasickness and make you feel better.
  • Frank’s point is that our society is deeply confused by the occasions when a blue pill is required and not required, or when we need a causal explanation and when we need a further description, clarification or elucidation. We tend to get muddled and imagine that one kind of explanation (usually the causal one) is appropriate in all occasions when it is not.
  • What is in play here is the classical distinction made by Max Weber between explanation and clarification, between causal or causal-sounding hypotheses and interpretation. Weber’s idea is that natural phenomena require causal explanation, of the kind given by physics, say, whereas social phenomena require elucidation — richer, more expressive descriptions.
  • In Frank’s view, one major task of philosophy is help us get clear on this distinction and to provide the right response at the right time. This, of course, requires judgment, which is no easy thing to teach.
  • Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.
  • One huge problem with scientism is that it invites, as an almost allergic reaction, the total rejection of science. As we know to our cost, we witness this every day with climate change deniers, flat-earthers and religious fundamentalists
  • in order to confront the challenge of obscurantism, we do not simply need to run into the arms of scientism. What is needed is a clearer overview of the occasions when a scientific remark is appropriate and when we need something else, the kind of elucidation we find in stories, poetry or indeed when we watch a movie
  • People often wonder why there appears to be no progress in philosophy, unlike in natural science, and why it is that after some three millenniums of philosophical activity no dramatic changes seem to have been made to the questions philosophers ask. The reason is because people keep asking the same questions and perplexed by the same difficulties
  • Wittgenstein puts the point rather directly: “Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?”
  • Philosophy scratches at the various itches we have, not in order that we might find some cure for what ails us, but in order to scratch in the right place and begin to understand why we engage in such apparently irritating activity.
  • This is one way of approaching the question of life’s meaning. Human beings have been asking the same kinds of questions for millenniums and this is not an error. It testifies to the fact that human being are rightly perplexed by their lives. The mistake is to believe that there is an answer to the question of life’s meaning
  • The point, then, is not to seek an answer to the meaning of life, but to continue to ask the question.
  • We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew
Javier E

This Is Not a Market | Dissent Magazine - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/...t-economy-bad-metaphor-transit

market fundamentalism market theory economics American idea language

shared by Javier E on 25 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Given how ordinary people use the term, it’s not surprising that academic economists are a little vague about it—but you’ll be glad to hear that they know they’re being vague. A generation of economists have criticized their colleagues’ inability to specify what a “market” actually is. George Stigler, back in 1967, thought it “a source of embarrassment that so little attention has been paid to the theory of markets.” Sociologists agree: according to Harrison White, there is no “neoclassical theory of the market—[only] a pure theory of exchange.” And Wayne Baker found that the idea of the market is “typically assumed—not studied” by most economists, who “implicitly characterize ‘market’ as a ‘featureless plane.’
  • When we say “market” now, we mean nothing particularly specific, and, at the same time, everything—the entire economy, of course, but also our lives in general. If you can name it, there’s a market in it: housing, education, the law, dating. Maybe even love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity.”
  • The use of markets to describe everything is odd, because talking about “markets” doesn’t even help us understand how the economy works—let alone the rest of our lives. Even though nobody seems to know what it means, we use the metaphor freely, even unthinkingly. Let the market decide. The markets are volatile. The markets responded poorly. Obvious facts—that the economy hasn’t rebounded after the recession—are hidden or ignored, because “the market” is booming, and what is the economy other than “the market”? Well, it’s lots of other things. We might see that if we talked about it a bit differently.
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  • For instance, we might choose a different metaphor—like, say, the traffic system. Sounds ridiculous? No more so than the market metaphor. After all, we already talk about one important aspect of economic life in terms of traffic: online activity. We could describe it in market terms (the market demands Trump memes!), but we use a different metaphor, because it’s just intuitively more suitable. That last Trump meme is generating a lot of traffic. Redirect your attention as required.
  • We don’t know much about markets, because we don’t deal with them very often. But most of us know plenty about traffic systems: drivers will know the frustration of trying to turn left onto a major road, of ceaseless, pointless lane-switching on a stalled rush-hour freeway, but also the joys of clear highways.
  • We know the traffic system because, whether we like it or not, we are always involved in it, from birth
  • As of birth, Jean is in the economy—even if s/he rarely goes to a market. You can’t not be an economic actor; you can’t not be part of the transport system.
  • Consider also the composition of the traffic system and the economy. A market, whatever else it is, is always essentially the same thing: a place where people can come together to buy and sell things. We could set up a market right now, with a few fences and a sign announcing that people could buy and sell. We don’t even really need the fences. A traffic system, however, is far more complex. To begin with, the system includes publicly and privately run elements: most cars are privately owned, as are most airlines
  • If we don’t evaluate traffic systems based on their size, or their growth, how do we evaluate them? Mostly, by how well they help people get where they want to go. The market metaphor encourages us to think that all economic activity is motivated by the search for profit, and pursued in the same fashion everywhere. In a market, everyone’s desires are perfectly interchangeable. But, while everybody engages in the transport system, we have no difficulty remembering that we all want to go to different places, in different ways, at different times, at different speeds, for different reasons
  • Deciding how to improve the traffic system, how to expand people’s opportunities, is obviously a question of resource allocation and prioritization on a scale that private individuals—even traders—cannot influence on their own. That’s why government have not historically trusted the “magic of the markets” to produce better opportunities for transport. We intuitively understand that these decisions are made at the level of mass society and public policy. And, whether you like it or not, this is true for decisions about the economy as well.
  • Thinking of the economy in terms of the market—a featureless plane, with no entry or exit costs, little need for regulation, and equal opportunity for all—obscures this basic insight. And this underlying misconception creates a lot of problems: we’ve fetishized economic growth, we’ve come to distrust government regulation, and we imagine that the inequalities in our country, and our world, are natural or justified. If we imagine the economy otherwise—as a traffic system, for example—we see more clearly how the economy actually works.
  • We see that our economic life looks a lot less like going to “market” for fun and profit than it does sitting in traffic on our morning commute, hoping against hope that we’ll get where we want to go, and on time.
Javier E

How YouTube Drives People to the Internet's Darkest Corners - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ets-darkest-corners-1518020478

youtube social media advertising google partisan extremism research bias

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • YouTube is the new television, with more than 1.5 billion users, and videos the site recommends have the power to influence viewpoints around the world.
  • Those recommendations often present divisive, misleading or false content despite changes the site has recently made to highlight more-neutral fare, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.
  • Behind that growth is an algorithm that creates personalized playlists. YouTube says these recommendations drive more than 70% of its viewing time, making the algorithm among the single biggest deciders of what people watch.
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  • People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012
  • After the Journal this week provided examples of how the site still promotes deceptive and divisive videos, YouTube executives said the recommendations were a problem.
  • When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more-extreme viewpoints.
  • Such recommendations play into concerns about how social-media sites can amplify extremist voices, sow misinformation and isolate users in “filter bubbles”
  • Unlike Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. sites, where users see content from accounts they choose to follow, YouTube takes an active role in pushing information to users they likely wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
  • “The editorial policy of these new platforms is to essentially not have one,”
  • “That sounded great when it was all about free speech and ‘in the marketplace of ideas, only the best ones win.’ But we’re seeing again and again that that’s not what happens. What’s happening instead is the systems are being gamed and people are being gamed.”
  • YouTube has been tweaking its algorithm since last autumn to surface what its executives call “more authoritative” news source
  • YouTube last week said it is considering a design change to promote relevant information from credible news sources alongside videos that push conspiracy theories.
  • The Journal investigation found YouTube’s recommendations often lead users to channels that feature conspiracy theories, partisan viewpoints and misleading videos, even when those users haven’t shown interest in such content.
  • YouTube engineered its algorithm several years ago to make the site “sticky”—to recommend videos that keep users staying to watch still more, said current and former YouTube engineers who helped build it. The site earns money selling ads that run before and during videos.
  • YouTube’s algorithm tweaks don’t appear to have changed how YouTube recommends videos on its home page. On the home page, the algorithm provides a personalized feed for each logged-in user largely based on what the user has watched.
  • There is another way to calculate recommendations, demonstrated by YouTube’s parent, Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It has designed its search-engine algorithms to recommend sources that are authoritative, not just popular.
  • Google spokeswoman Crystal Dahlen said that Google improved its algorithm last year “to surface more authoritative content, to help prevent the spread of blatantly misleading, low-quality, offensive or downright false information,” adding that it is “working with the YouTube team to help share learnings.”
  • In recent weeks, it has expanded that change to other news-related queries. Since then, the Journal’s tests show, news searches in YouTube return fewer videos from highly partisan channels.
  • YouTube’s recommendations became even more effective at keeping people on the site in 2016, when the company began employing an artificial-intelligence technique called a deep neural network that makes connections between videos that humans wouldn’t. The algorithm uses hundreds of signals, YouTube says, but the most important remains what a given user has watched.
  • Using a deep neural network makes the recommendations more of a black box to engineers than previous techniques,
  • “We don’t have to think as much,” he said. “We’ll just give it some raw data and let it figure it out.”
  • To better understand the algorithm, the Journal enlisted former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on its recommendation engine, to analyze thousands of YouTube’s recommendations on the most popular news-related queries
  • Mr. Chaslot created a computer program that simulates the “rabbit hole” users often descend into when surfing the site. In the Journal study, the program collected the top five results to a given search. Next, it gathered the top three recommendations that YouTube promoted once the program clicked on each of those results. Then it gathered the top three recommendations for each of those promoted videos, continuing four clicks from the original search.
  • The first analysis, of November’s top search terms, showed YouTube frequently led users to divisive and misleading videos. On the 21 news-related searches left after eliminating queries about entertainment, sports and gaming—such as “Trump,” “North Korea” and “bitcoin”—YouTube most frequently recommended these videos:
  • The algorithm doesn’t seek out extreme videos, they said, but looks for clips that data show are already drawing high traffic and keeping people on the site. Those videos often tend to be sensationalist and on the extreme fringe, the engineers said.
  • Repeated tests by the Journal as recently as this week showed the home page often fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC.
  • Searching some topics and then returning to the home page without doing a new search can produce recommendations that push users toward conspiracy theories even if they seek out just mainstream sources.
  • After searching for “9/11” last month, then clicking on a single CNN clip about the attacks, and then returning to the home page, the fifth and sixth recommended videos were about claims the U.S. government carried out the attacks. One, titled “Footage Shows Military Plane hitting WTC Tower on 9/11—13 Witnesses React”—had 5.3 million views.
Javier E

Opinion | Even Physicists Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...quantum-physics.html

quantum physics theory measurement

shared by Javier E on 08 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
  • What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.
  • Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics
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  • There are two problems. One is that quantum mechanics, as it is enshrined in textbooks, seems to require separate rules for how quantum objects behave when we’re not looking at them, and how they behave when they are being observed
  • Why are observations special? What counts as an “observation,” anyway? When exactly does it happen? Does it need to be performed by a person? Is consciousness somehow involved in the basic rules of reality?
  • Together these questions are known as the “measurement problem” of quantum theory.
  • The other problem is that we don’t agree on what it is that quantum theory actually describes, even when we’re not performing measurements.
  • We describe a quantum object such as an electron in terms of a “wave function,” which collects the superposition of all the possible measurement outcomes into a single mathematical object
  • But what is the wave function? Is it a complete and comprehensive representation of the world? Or do we need additional physical quantities to fully capture reality, as Albert Einstein and others suspected? Or does the wave function have no direct connection with reality at all, merely characterizing our personal ignorance about what we will eventually measure in our experiments?
  • For years, the leading journal in physics had an explicit policy that papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics were to be rejected out of hand
caelengrubb

Investment - Econlib - 0 views

www.econlib.org/...Investment.html

shared by caelengrubb on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • nvestment is one of the most important variables in economics.
  • Its surges and collapses are still a primary cause of recessions.
  • By investment, economists mean the production of goods that will be used to produce other goods. This definition differs from the popular usage, wherein decisions to purchase stocks (see stock market) or bonds are thought of as investment.
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  • Investment is usually the result of forgoing consumption. In a purely agrarian society, early humans had to choose how much grain to eat after the harvest and how much to save for future planting. The latter was investment.
  • In a more modern society, we allocate our productive capacity to producing pure consumer goods such as hamburgers and hot dogs, and investment goods such as semiconductor foundries. If we create one dollar worth of hamburgers today, then our gross national product is higher by one dollar.
  • Investment need not always take the form of a privately owned physical product. The most common example of nonphysical investment is investment in human capital.
  • In an economy that is closed to the outside world, investment can come only from the forgone consumption—the saving—of private individuals, private firms, or government.
  • In an open economy, however, investment can surge at the same time that a nation’s saving is low because a country can borrow the resources necessary to invest from neighboring countries.
  • That economists have a fairly strong understanding of firms’ investment behavior makes sense. A firm that maximizes its profits must address investment using the framework discussed in this article.
  • This method of financing investment has been very important in the United States. The industrial base of the United States in the nineteenth century—railroads, factories, and so on—was built on foreign finance, especially from Britain. More recently, the United States has repeatedly posted significant investment growth and very low savings.
  • Investment fluctuates a lot because the fundamentals that drive investment—output prices, interest rates, and taxes—also fluctuate. But economists do not fully understand fluctuations in investment. Indeed, the sharp swings in investment that occur might require an extension to the Jorgenson theory.
  • In Jorgenson’s user cost model, firms will purchase a machine if the extra revenue the machine generates is a smidgen more than its cost.
  • The general conclusion is that there is a gain to waiting if there is uncertainty and if the installation of the machine entails sunk costs, that is, costs that cannot be recovered once spent.
  • Although quantifying this gain exactly is a highly mathematical exercise, the reasoning is straightforward. That would explain why firms typically want to invest only in projects that have a high expected profit.
  • The fact of irreversibility might explain the large fluctuations in investment that we observe.
  • The theory of investment dates back to the giants of economics. irving fisher, arthur cecil pigou, and alfred marshall all made contributions; as did john maynard keynes, whose Marshallian user cost theory is a central feature in his General theory.
  • Consumer behavior is harder to study than firms’ behavior. Market forces that drive irrational people out of the marketplace are much weaker than market forces that drive bad companies from the market.
  • Because the saving response of consumers must be known if one is to fully understand the impact of any investment policy, and because saving behavior is so poorly understood, much work remains to be done.
Javier E

My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...on-parents-millennial-children

QAnon conspiracy theory language psychology

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
  • “The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”
  • By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
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  • The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.
  • The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.
  • “I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”
  • Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.
  • Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.
  • But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.
  • With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.
  • Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me
  • She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.
  • The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.
  • With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.
  • The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.
  • “I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”
  • She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”
  • Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.
  • I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen
  • What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.
  • I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
  • understand
  • now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | The Social Sciences' 'Physics Envy' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ial-sciences-physics-envy.html

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
  • Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.
  • it’s not even a good description of how the “hard” sciences work. It’s a high school textbook version of science, with everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry safely ignored.
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  • For the sake of everyone who stands to gain from a better knowledge of politics, economics and society, the social sciences need to overcome their inferiority complex, reject hypothetico-deductivism and embrace the fact that they are mature disciplines with no need to emulate other sciences.
  • Or consider the famous “impossibility theorem,” developed by the economist Kenneth Arrow, which shows that no single voting system can simultaneously satisfy several important principles of fairness. There is no need to test this model with data — in fact, there is no way to test it — and yet the result offers policy makers a powerful lesson: there are unavoidable trade-offs in the design of voting systems.
  • Unfortunately, the belief that every theory must have its empirical support (and vice versa) now constrains the kinds of social science projects that are undertaken, alters the trajectory of academic careers and drives graduate training. Rather than attempt to imitate the hard sciences, social scientists would be better off doing what they do best: thinking deeply about what prompts human beings to behave the way they do.
  • theoretical models can be of great value even if they are never supported by empirical testing. In the 1950s, for instance, the economist Anthony Downs offered an elegant explanation for why rival political parties might adopt identical platforms during an election campaign. His model relied on the same strategic logic that explains why two competing gas stations or fast-food restaurants locate across the street from each other — if you don’t move to a central location but your opponent does, your opponent will nab those voters (customers). The best move is for competitors to mimic each other. This framework has proven useful to generations of political scientists even though Mr. Downs did not empirically test it and despite the fact that its main prediction, that candidates will take identical positions in elections, is clearly false. The model offered insight into why candidates move toward the center in competitive elections
  • Likewise, the analysis of empirical data can be valuable even in the absence of a grand theoretical model. Did the welfare reform championed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s reduce poverty? Are teenage employees adversely affected by increases in the minimum wage?
  • Answering such questions about the effects of public policies does not require sweeping theoretical claims, just careful attention to the data.
  • theories are like maps: the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere.
  • Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and chemistry.
  • The ideal of hypothetico-deductivism is flawed for many reasons. For one thing,
katedriscoll

What is Falsification? | TOKTalk.net - 0 views

www.toktalk.net/...what-is-falsification

shared by katedriscoll on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This is how science works, and how it should work. If the theory fails to make the correct predictions, then you have to replace the theory. This is what you call scientific progress. You replace old theories with better ones.
  • And now to a question that some of you are burning to know the answer of: “Is the falsification principle falsifyable?” I once read, I don’t know if it’s true, that Karl Popper used to kick his students out of the classroom for asking such a question. The falsification principle is that what its name says, it is a principle and not a scientific theory. No, the falsification principle itself is not falsifyable, it is not scientific. It belongs to metascience, or philosophy. Don’t forget: the scientific method – hypothesis, experimentation, observation, conclusion – is also not falsifyable, still it is used by scientists on a daily basis.
Javier E

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic - 4 views

www.theatlantic.com/...267255

rational choice rationality psychology consumer economics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 15 - No Cached
  • Atlantic.displayRandomElement('#header li.business .sponsored-dropdown-item'); Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website. More Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. All Posts RSS feed Share Share on facebook Share on linkedin Share on twitter « Previous Thompson Email Print Close function plusOneCallback () { $(document).trigger('share'); } $(document).ready(function() { var iframeUrl = "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"; var toolsClicked = false; $('#toolsTop').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'top'; }); $('#toolsBottom').click(function() { toolsClicked = 'bottom'; }); $('#thanksForSharing a.hide').click(function() { $('#thanksForSharing').hide(); }); var onShareClickHandler = function() { var top = parseInt($(this).css('top').replace(/px/, ''), 10); toolsClicked = (top > 600) ? 'bottom' : 'top'; }; var onIframeReady = function(iframe) { var win = iframe.contentWindow; // Don't show the box if there's no ad in it if (win.$('.ad').children().length == 1) { return; } var visibleAds = win.$('.ad').filter(function() { return !($(this).css('display') == 'none'); }); if (visibleAds.length == 0) { // Ad is hidden, so don't show return; } if (win.$('.ad').hasClass('adNotLoaded')) { // Ad failed to load so don't show return; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('display', 'block'); var top; if(toolsClicked == 'bottom' && $('#toolsBottom').length) { top = $('#toolsBottom')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsBottom').height() - 310; } else { top = $('#toolsTop')[0].offsetTop + $('#toolsTop').height() + 10; } $('#thanksForSharing').css('left', (-$('#toolsTop').offset().left + 60) + 'px'); $('#thanksForSharing').css('top', top + 'px'); }; var onShare = function() { // Close "Share successful!" AddThis plugin popup if (window._atw && window._atw.clb && $('#at15s:visible').length) { _atw.clb(); } if (iframeUrl == null) { return; } $('#thanksForSharingIframe').attr('src', "\/ad\/thanks-iframe\/TheAtlanticOnline\/channel_business;src=blog;by=derek-thompson;title=the-irrational-consumer-why-economics-is-dead-wrong-about-how-we-make-choices;pos=sharing;sz=640x480,336x280,300x250"); $('#thanksForSharingIframe').load(function() { var iframe = this; var win = iframe.contentWindow; if (win.loaded) { onIframeReady(iframe); } else { win.$(iframe.contentDocument).ready(function() { onIframeReady(iframe); }) } }); }; if (window.addthis) { addthis.addEventListener('addthis.ready', function() { $('.articleTools .share').mouseover(function() { $('#at15s').unbind('click', onShareClickHandler); $('#at15s').bind('click', onShareClickHandler); }); }); addthis.addEventListener('addthis.menu.share', function(evt) { onShare(); }); } // This 'share' event is used for testing, so one can call // $(document).trigger('share') to get the thank you for // sharing box to appear. $(document).bind('share', function(event) { onShare(); }); if (!window.FB || (window.FB && !window.FB._apiKey)) { // Hook into the fbAsyncInit function and register our listener there var oldFbAsyncInit = (window.fbAsyncInit) ? window.fbAsyncInit : (function() { }); window.fbAsyncInit = function() { oldFbAsyncInit(); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); }; } else if (window.FB) { FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { // to hide the facebook comments box $('#facebookLike span.fb_edge_comment_widget').hide(); onShare(); }); } }); The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices By Derek Thompson he
  • First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb.
  • Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.
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  • Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences.
  • The third check against the theory of the rational consumer is the fact that we're social animals. We let our friends and family and tribes do our thinking for us
  • neurologists are finding that many of the biases behavioral economists perceive in decision-making start in our brains. "Brain studies indicate that organisms seem to be on a hedonic treadmill, quickly habituating to homeostasis," McFadden writes. In other words, perhaps our preference for the status quo isn't just figuratively our heads, but also literally sculpted by the hand of evolution inside of our brains.
  • The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.
  • the final message is that neither the physiology of pleasure nor the methods we use to make choices are as simple or as single-minded as the classical economists thought. A lot of behavior is consistent with pursuit of self-interest, but in novel or ambiguous decision-making environments there is a good chance that our habits will fail us and inconsistencies in the way we process information will undo us.
  • Our brains seem to operate like committees, assigning some tasks to the limbic system, others to the frontal system. The "switchboard" does not seem to achieve complete, consistent communication between different parts of the brain. Pleasure and pain are experienced in the limbic system, but not on one fixed "utility" or "self-interest" scale. Pleasure and pain have distinct neural pathways, and these pathways adapt quickly to homeostasis, with sensation coming from changes rather than levels
  • Social networks are sources of information, on what products are available, what their features are, and how your friends like them. If the information is accurate, this should help you make better choices. On the other hand, it also makes it easier for you to follow the crowd rather than engaging in the due diligence of collecting and evaluating your own information and playing it against your own preferences
clairemann

Opinion | How to Talk to Friends and Family Who Share Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...onspiracy-theories-family.html

election trump thinking conspiracy social media Technology education

shared by clairemann on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Online, somebody they know and love has stumbled into the treacherous world of online conspiracy theories and, in some cases, might not even know it.
  • How do you talk to people you care about who might be on the precipice of or headed down the conspiratorial rabbit hole?
  • Conspiracy theories (like Pizzagate and now QAnon, anti-vaccine claims, disinformation around the coronavirus suggesting the virus was engineered in a laboratory) are a chronic condition that will long outlive the 2020 election.
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  • I’d non-defensively ask them, ‘Do you know how Google works?’ ‘What do you think my news feed looks like? Do you know why yours looks that way?’”
  • I would expect the following to happen.’ I
  • cognitive dissonance.
  • is to acknowledge that some conspiracies do exist — Watergate, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s network of underage sexual abuse.
  • And if people better understood the mechanisms and the economics, maybe then you can talk about the content.”
  • Witnesses come forward, then victims. And journalists circle like sharks to get the story. I try to get them to think about concrete things and logistical details, including the bureaucracy that’s required to maintain these vast alleged plots.”
  • “Sometimes it’s about turning the ‘do your research’ paradigm back on them,” he said. “I never appeal to authorities like the government or mainstream media, but I subtly imply that what they’re saying doesn’t match the historical record, which works better than outright dismissing them.”
  • Unfortunately, social platforms are often the worst forum for talking about these thorny issues. In many cases, a face-to-face conversation is a better place to voice your concerns.
  • They can also allow participants to pick up on subtle facial and body language expressions — or tone of voice — that may dissolve tensions.
  • “There it is. Biden’s wearing a wire.” It’s actually just a crease in his shirt. And a popular meme among teens was the claim that Wayfair is shipping children in industrial-grade cabinets.
  • The main gist of QAnon is that elite satanic pedophiles are everywhere and they’re coming to get your kids. More specifically, pedophiles are everywhere among liberals, celebrities, and the media.
  • “Q is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” There are now 87 QAnon supporters who have run for Congress, and the first will be elected this November. “I think it’s something worth listening to and paying attention to.” And Trump refuses to push back against QAnon because QAnon loves Trump.
  • One of the major reasons QAnon is on the rise right now is because when the world is scary and uncertain, we are drawn to magical thinking.
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