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The Sokal Affair

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26 pointsTravisLS15 comments

There are also "science war" in the field of economics, especially regarding what is knowable what isn't.

We have one side that is largely deductive, do not assume that humans are "rational", and distrust mathematical models and believe that economists are misusing statistics.

Another side is economic that attempt to imitate the scientific methodology of physics and as well being largely inductive. This is now the current and newest trend in the field of economics.

From my point of view, the Austrian school("Pyschological") is victorious over both the mainstream neoclassical and neo keynesian schools. Those who are of the Austrian prediction have successfully predicted the recession for quite some time now.

You may have different view which schools is superior but the battle is not decided. Until the field of economics matured, there will be many ruthless debates among those who are in the profession of economics for years to come.

The Economic Calculation Debate anyone?

From what I've gathered, the real debate is between neoclassical economists and behavioral economists. Behavioral economists are more empirical, studying exactly how incentives work and how people behave in the economy. "Austrian" economics (aside from what was done decades ago, in Austria) only lives on as a pseudoscientific attempt to justify libertarian politics. Politically, I'm largely libertarian myself, but there's nothing more unscientific than turning something like economics into an apologia for anarcho-capitalism.

So you believe that "government cannot calculate, ever" is bullshit?

If government can calculate the allocation of resource then it invaildated the entire concept of anarcho-capitalism.

This seem an unlikely hypothesis because government tend to listen to political talking points rather than economic talking points. Whatever is political prudent tend to not be neccesary economically prudent.

I think economics should be a descriptive science, not a set of arguments for one particular political system. Markets have certain consequences that we may or may not want, and so do certain types of government interventions. Planned economies don't tend to have very many desirable consequences, as far as I can tell, but that's not how most economic policies work anyway.

I'm not a good enough economist to give an intellectually honest account of what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist system, but I doubt from a historical and anthropological standpoint that anarcho-capitalism is likely to ever happen anyway.

A lot to respond to there, but I'll keep it to this for now:

"Those who are of the Austrian prediction have successfully predicted the recession for quite some time now."

...and radical Muslims have been predicting the downfall of American superiority for the past fifty years based on the theory that God will take us down because we're godless heathens.

If America falls into a pit of poverty at some point over the next 20 years, does that mean that the radical Muslim theory was correct, and it happened because God is punishing us for our sins?

If not, then how can you possibly take a recession (which tends to happen like clockwork every couple decades anyhow) as evidence for a theory of economics that has considered America too socialist to thrive since the inception of the theory?

They created a theory called ABCT(Austrian Business Cycle Theory) which explain why those cycle happens like clockwork.

They also predicted the Great Depression.

Business cycles are well understood in neoclassical economics, too.

The Depression started 80 years ago. That was before the advent of econometrics, before monetarism, and even before behavioral economics. What have the Austrians given us since? Behavioral economics is a lot like Austrian economics (it bases economic theory on human psychology) except better (it uses empirical measures of actual human behavior instead of unfalsifiable first principles).

Austrian economics, 80 years ago, was an innovation. It had its influence, particularly in the marginal revolution, and we moved on. Since about Rothbard, Austrian economics has been more about "let's come up with a nice-sounding argument for anarcho-capitalism" than "let's study how the economy works".

While it's amusing for us computer science majors to poke fun at the scientific irrelevance of postmodernism, its influence is undeniable.

Few academic fields have been left untouched by postmodern thinking, and you'll quickly run into it if you're studying art, literature, philosophy, architecture, social science, feminism, political science, and more.

A religious person might rightly point out that Darwin's theory of evolution hasn't changed his faith in a higher power, but it's foolish of him to fail to notice that the world around him has been revolutionized.

"Few academic fields have been left untouched by postmodern thinking, and you'll quickly run into it if you're studying art, literature, philosophy, architecture, social science, feminism, political science, and more."

Though, if you're studying philosophy in the analytic tradition (most English-speaking philosophy since the turn of the 20th century), postmodernism and its antecedents in continental philosophy have been consciously rejected in an attempt for greater linguistic precision.

Okay, I have yet to understand what the heck postmodernism really is. Apparently, everybody I've asked cannot define it without resorting to incomprehensible explanations. Could anybody shed some light on what has become the whipping post of philosophy?

I think you know all you need to know about postmodernism.

"There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

  -- Noam Chomsky

From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

[..] it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

In short: it about bending language to such extent that all meaning is distorted to the point of being broken.

Oh, so they're bullshit artists. I wonder how much of my tax dollars get paid for these people to talk out their asses.

I'll stick with people who actually produce things that move the world forward.

Well, it's a pretty important, and counterintuitieve, property of language that it is even possible to do the things they do. In The Matrix terms: they show us just how deep the rabbithole goes.

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