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Comment by wdr1 | Hacker News Reader

> This rhetoric is ridiculous

Here's what I honestly don't understand about HN:

Climate change has near unanimous support from climatologists. Most (rightly, imho) point that as a reason why it should be accepted by the general public. And those doubting the experts are considered ridiculous.

Here, however, we have an issue to drop corporate taxes which has near unanimous support from economists (across the political spectrum). Yet we call the experts ridiculous.

Why the flip? Why should the general public accept the expert advice in one field, but then turn around & call it ridiculous in another?

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Scientists are often correct in their predictions, whereas economists sort of aren't. It's an epistemology question; these experts are not the same as those experts.

Unfortunately economics is one of those areas where many people who have never studied it think they know everything about it. It doesn't help that politicians (of all types) take advantage of this ignorance to pander to their potential voters to tell them what they want to hear.

Actually, I'm not 100% opposed to abolishing corporate tax altogether and finding other ways to structure tax. I'm not an expert, so I wouldn't know what the most robust structure is.

But I am calling the arguments that they use in the article ridiculous, and in particular the parts that I've quoted in my post above.

It's easier to convince people who have no priors. The majority of people doesn't ever consider the temperature at the polar ice caps unless they are climate scientists, so they'll take accept it easily. But lots of people with a folkish understanding of local weather, specially after some huge snow storm, will mumble something like "so much for global warming".

Even if you put all methodological issues (and citations from Richard Feynman) aside or even whether corporate taxes work or not, lots of social science findings would seem dubious simply because they deal with human behavior, which is something which is almost impossible to not have an opinion on, specially because it attempts to describe our own behavior.

The problem is that, if I were to understand reality through my own behavior, it would be through an unwarranted generalization of my own conditions to the population as a whole. It's like that joke of "why don't they just buy themselves some money?".

That's one of the issues, at least.

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