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Comment by polymathemagics | Hacker News Reader

Reading these comments make me feel sad about the state of Hacker News. As with any large public forum, it's turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer. It's either engineer syndrome, or it's brigading from other niche political forums. I'm tired of reading knee jerk reactions to fields from commenters that have zero experience in but have all the conviction in the world.

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To me as outsider economics often seems more like an ideology vs reproducible science. As far as Bernanke goes none of his work helped him to recognize a monstrous real estate bubble that was building. And when it popped all he could come up with was to shovel money to the banks and wealthy people. What was his work good for?

It has really gotten out of hand. I'm no fan of Ben Bernanke there's a way to have a constructive discussion about his work and waving a wand of preconceived notions is not one of them.

> turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer

A bank taking an endowment awarding a prize and money to physicists, chemists and biologists, and ramming in to it a prize for economists saying nonsense the bankers like to hear, is the definition of anti-intellectual.

The physicists, chemists and biologists are the intellectuals and scientists, the economists are frauds telling the bankers what they want to hear.

Argument:

> turning into an anti intellectual space where takes like "economics is not a science, it's a social science!" are the best we have to offer

Evidence: VictorPath's reply

> A bank taking an endowment awarding a prize and money to physicists, chemists and biologists, and ramming in to it a prize for economists saying nonsense the bankers like to hear, is the definition of anti-intellectual. The physicists, chemists and biologists are the intellectuals and scientists, the economists are frauds telling the bankers what they want to hear.

Q.E.D.

Neither of these intellectuals and scientists are any good for doing economics, precisely because they are on a wrong level of abstraction.

How does one evaluate the work of an economist - repeatably and independently?

It’s the same vein as the comments in cryptocurrency/blockchain tech threads.

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