Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I guess the parts you skimmed didn't include the introduction, eh?

It says:

  We want to change the way economics is taught [...]
  Students in economics all over the world were asking,
  just as I had asked a few years previously: ‘Why has the
  subject of economics become detached from our experience
  of real life?’
  [...]
  we have tried an experiment in classrooms around the
  world. We ask students: ‘What is the most pressing
  problem that economists should address?’

...and the that experiment said inequality. At least according to students at three universities and professional economists at two central banks.

If you want to write a book that starts with motivations before delving into the nuts and bolts, and you ask customers what they think is most important and they all say the same thing, it seems reasonable enough to put that first.

View on HN

> If you want to write a book that starts with motivations before delving into the nuts and bolts, and you ask customers what they think is most important and they all say the same thing, it seems reasonable enough to put that first.

Starting with motivations is great.

An introduction where an expert explains why economists think economics is important would be interesting and compelling. Telling us about a topic that students think are what makes economics is important is silly. If the students are right that the topic is most important, then it will come out in the expert introduction. If they're wrong, then wouldn't the version that actually gets at what makes economics compelling and interesting be better?

I'm not sure.

Experts often tend to be focused on the details, the minutiae, and the leading edge of research.

A cooking expert (5-star chef) is not likely the right person to teach an introduction to cooking class (cooking basic foods using everyday techniques).

That said, novices often don't know how a subject impacts their lives. I was skeptical of income inequality's prominence, but by the "how does it impact me", it may not be a bad start.

Except they didn't ask the students what they thought "makes economics important". Since the intended audience is undergraduate economics students, they probably don't need or want to be patronised with an explanation of why a professor thinks they should study the subject they've already chosen to study. That would be silly.

What they did ask is, "what is the most pressing problem that economists should address?" If the intention, as stated, is to write a textbook that helps reduce the gap between economics as a theoretical discipline and economics as experienced in the real-world, then it absolutely makes sense to begin with what students consider to be the most pressing real-world economic issue, and use that as a springboard to explore the rest of the discipline.

In fact, starting with real world examples and applications, and gradually building towards fundamental, mathematical theories and models is the right way to teach any scientific subject. It mirrors the actual development of science, where fundamental theories are derived based on observation of the real world, and can be later disproved by new evidence. Introducing abstract and theoretical models too early not only risks confusing students, but it risks creating a situation where the models are considered intrinsically "real", and contradictory evidence is ignored. This issue has plagued economics, have taken abstract and simplified theories about markets and human behaviour and made them ideological dogma. The theories end up becoming lenses through which all evidence about the world is viewed, rather than imperfect attempts to explain the evidence.

In a semi unrelated note I'm curious what Yannis Varoufakis found while working on understanding the virtual economics of Valve's online community.

> We ask students: ‘What is the most pressing problem that economists should address?’

What should we ask Computer Science students?

I can try it on a couple of hundred tomorrow and get back to you. I don't know what they will say.

> What should we ask Computer Science students?

"What is the most important problem (of policy, not of specific technology development) that Computer Scientists should be addressing and currently are not?"

(The parenthetical is to forestall nearly-content-free responses like "We should do more with AI!" and similar.)

That's a very interesting question that presumes that any policy problems at all are among problems that computer scientists should be addressing. IMHO pretty much any solution to a policy problem would by definition not be a computer science problem.

Developing a very specific technology might help solve a social problem if it's applied properly and if social scientists believe that this particular technology will actually have the intended social effect and not backfire.

Other than that, I'd argue that computer scientists can (and likely should) have an informed opinion on various policy problems and how technology could affect them (or be affected by them), but that it's not their role, skillset or responsibility to address any policy problems; if they're tackling policy problems, then they're doing it "wearing a hat" of a citizen-activist, but not really as a practitioner of computer science - if there's an argument that they should be tackling a particular policy problem, then that's only if everyone should be tackling that policy problem, not particularly for the field of computer science and the related technologies.

> What is the most important problem (of policy, not of specific technology development) that Computer Scientists should be addressing and currently are not?

My answer would be: the problem that we always do "introducing a new technology" and "thinking about the consequences of it" in the wrong order.

Despite how you phrase the question, if I had to hazard a guess about how they'd answer, I'd say AGI.

I'd like to see the answer for both Economics and Computer Science. Should be interesting.

i'd say an AI policy advisor (full blown AI governor would be extremely uncomfortable for most, i'd wager).

Ask: Which areas of comp-sci study are engineering disciplines and which are sociological/political? For extra credit: which are both? I think you will get a boatload of anecdotal grievance, though that's not saying much nowadays.

... and maybe which are science, as well :)

You could just go with: "what is the most pressing problem that computer scientists should address?" It seems like it might result in some interesting data.

The answer would likely be AI risk. Then someone similar to this author will write an introduction to computer science that starts with a science fiction-esque warning of doom and gloom

It's actually more engaging to start with a topical story. Venezuela's would be would be a good one. It would provide ample motivation for exploring the concepts in the rest of the text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com