Frank Ramsey: A genius by all tests for genius (2020)
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Frank Ramsey: A Genius by All Tests for Genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22321970 - Feb 2020 (23 comments)
Also:
Frank Ramsey: A more human philosophy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24320717 - Aug 2020 (2 comments)
Frank Ramsey – The Man Who Thought Too Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011233 - April 2020 (122 comments)
Edit: Found them. They are Samuelson's own criteria:
1. Test of Time: Samuelson suggested that the work of a genius economist should stand the test of time, remaining relevant and influential long after its initial publication.
2. Transcendence of Paradigms: Genius economists should be able to transcend prevailing paradigms and make significant contributions that reshape the field of economics.
3. Originality and Creativity: Samuelson emphasized the importance of originality and creativity in the work of genius economists, highlighting their ability to generate novel ideas and insights.
4. Broad Influence: Genius economists should have a broad influence beyond their own specialized areas of research, impacting the broader discipline of economics.
5. Impact on Policy: Samuelson suggested that the work of genius economists should have practical implications and influence policy-making decisions.
6. Pedagogical Impact: Genius economists should also have a significant impact on economic education, shaping the way economics is taught and understood by future generations of students.
The field of economics is fatally poisoned by it. I'm obviously pretty cynical about the dismal conscience, particularly because it has proven almost useless in crafting broad policy in the age of global warming and sharp environmental decline.
Quite to the contrary "economics" has been used to maximize consumption, and has little application in any other context.
Any real genius of economics would tear the whole teetering tower of self importance to the ground.
Kind of a nice legacy I guess, considering the short career.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ramsey-economics/
The genius of this viewpoint brings to mind:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”
― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Volume 1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Apostles
Being a great mathematician doesn't always mean you make good decisions.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
What's notable about these two sentences is the second one is being presented as a disagreement with the first one, even though they don't disagree. Redistribution has nothing to do necessarily with state planning of the economy, and is mainly to support people who don't participate in it (i.e. children and the elderly).
Also, ironically, welfare laws in many countries tend to discriminate against homeless people... E.g. the bureaucracy often requires people to provide a home address and have a phone number.
I just said it, children and the elderly. That and a negative income tax covers most of it.
Often people do have bad ideas beyond this, mostly because they're very confused about what encourages work and what discourages it. (which is how you get SSI asset tests)
I submit to you that the most brutal totalitarian existence is hard natural truths when the good times end and famine, war, plague, or pestilence come riding. Or the new horseman: nuclear assured destruction.
Basically really smart people all seem to sense that a higher form of societal conduct is needed to avoid the totalitarianism of environmental Armageddon, but there is no way to do it without lesser totalitarianism.
Be that as it may, but with just eight papers to your name, you'd be gone out of any position in today's academia faster than you can say "key performance indicator".
I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is the most wild understatement I've read all year. Or were they going for deadpan humor?
Ramsey's responsible for the famous theory that bears his name. The core concept of Ramsey Theory is this: Regardless of how extensive and complex a system S is, and no matter how large a positive integer n is, it is possible to find a sufficiently large super system Q that includes S. In such a way, no matter how Q is colored using n colors, Q will always contain a monochromatic copy of S.
So Ramsey Theory explores the mathematics of coloring, but it has exerted tremendous influence on 20th century mathematics more generally -- it works to elucidate a lot of notions surrounding infinite and finite sets. In fact, it's clearly among the most influential 20th century mathematical theories; Paul Erdős' storied career owed an awful lot to Ramsey, and Ramsey theory also inspired Ramsey's friend Ludwig Wittgenstein's work in analytic philosophy.
As a counterpoint, the smartest people I know do all kinds of risky behaviors. If anything one might call it a coping mechanism.
Do we know that it was a lapse in judgement? I'm thinking that's outcome bias. It's speculated that it was the cause of death, but we don't know that. If it was a known risky behaviour, you'd have thought it would have been identified by doctors (it was well known that he swam in the river a lot) and at least these days it's not considered risky behaviour. Either way, a lapse in judgement would imply that the risks outweighed the rewards (and the value of the rewards tends to be personal/contextual).