On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 2:18:56 PM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 5:45:45 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute
Economics isn't difficult: it is the commonsense activities of individuals considered in aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many economists with real life experience in business are moving away from the first two great commandments of classical economics, viz that all individuals in every market are fully informed and fully rational in every decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary member of RBT.

Andre Jute
Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is a
real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator. Nor
infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute
I can't believe the foolishness of historians who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...77?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian, so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough to know that his dissection of all the other theories is fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices, which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated into intelligent design and will be something different in five years -- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated, retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Uh-uh. This isn't "some current controversy", this has been burbling along since Darwin's time. Darwin himself was aware of the problem of the animals of the Cambrian Radiation having no ancestors in the fossil record. You understand, Darwin didn't want to publish, don't you; he was forced to publish by someone else coming up with the same theory of evolution. The big reason Darwin wasn't ready to publish was the problem with the Pre-Cambrian, the missing fossils. Darwin admitted in his book that there were no antecedent fossils and that he hoped they would be found by digging deeper. Quite literally from Darwin's own time, there was serious discontent in the palaeontology community with the holes in Darwin's theory, and it didn't stand long before it was replaced by neb-darwinism, which is the version which larger and larger numbers of developmental biologists are now saying isn't the answer either. BTW, nothing to do with religion, whatever you read in the paper or on the net or TV -- those clowns just can't get anything right. These scientists are being driven to intelligent design in the most profoundly non-religious sense imaginable because none of the other theories can demonstrate the causa vera of the sudden arrival of so many large and complex animals in the Cambrian apparently whole and all at once.

You should keep up to date, Jay, not for the sake of being current on evolution theory, but because this is a true revolution in science, happening before your eyes. It's been growing like a boil, starting with Darwin himself, and now it has come to a head, and the whole profession is in turmoil and in a slow burst. See also my posts to Tom.

Andre Jute
I've seen whole professions and disciplines under stress before, but nothing like this

And many disagree. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annal...-darwins-doubt https://www.nationalreview.com/magaz...-nature-works/ From the National Review, no less.

This isn't a revolution in science. It's just argument based on existing scientific works created by others. It is a retrospective review spun as support for ID which, BTW, could be true. I'm not saying it isn't, and in fact, my money is on ancient alien H1Bs. Clearly, the guy who designed the Trilobite had a sense of humor and kind of a 1930s art deco design aesthetic.

-- Jay Beattie.