Human intelligence and the environment (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Human intelligence and the environment (2010)

chomsky.info

"This all happened under the impact of a kind of fanatic religious ideology called economics -- and that's not a joke -- based on hypotheses that have no theoretical grounds and no empirical support but are very attractive because you can prove theorems if you adopt them: the efficient market hypothesis, rational expectations hypothesis, and so on. The spread of these ideologies, which is very attractive to concentrated wealth and privilege, hence their success, was epitomized in Alan Greenspan, who at least had the decency to say it was all wrong when it collapsed. I don't think there has ever been a collapse of an intellectual edifice comparable to this, maybe, in history, at least I can't remember one."

This is something we need to talk about. It's true. The german "Ordaliberalism" is at work in the greek debt crisis at this moment. I'm sure there is some superficial mathematics at work to prove the ideology. But where is the criticism?

So Ask HN: Where is the macroeconomics rooted in scientific principles and empiricism? I'm sure it's there but policy makers don't look like they see it. Everyone is talking about big-data... where are the papers that prove or disprove economic theories? We have the data. Let's be scientific and kick out ideology like all did with the "Deutsche Physik[1]" - it's time for it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

If we could plot the life of a dollar or credit we could create a science of money. Could something like the blockchain offer the opportunity to build a solid theory of money by mapping transactions? I imagine the blockchain, as it is now, is a bit of a mutant given transactions are limited to select goods and services, however if it was widely adopted as a transactional ledger by banks we could better understand how money flows.

Maybe I've been in a bubble but my impression was that economists generally think the Germans are at fault in the Greece thing, for the way that the Euro was set up and run, and that Greece was just the weakest link in a chain that was inevitably going to be put under pressure.

So if I was going to blame any large group of people I'd maybe point at politicians, or voters, who have locked Europe into a collective action problem where they beggar their neighbours rather than work together effectively for their collective benefit.

Even the austerity stuff, which only seemed briefly popular because politicians wanted to believe it and could sell it to voters, only made the problem worse, it didn't create it.

It's interesting to think that very probably during the lives of many of the people on HN, we're going to see some pretty massive geo-engineering projects on a global scale. Probably 2040-2050 or thereabouts, once the basic fact of climate change is utterly undeniable to even the loudest idiots.

A decade or so after that we should have our verdict whether intelligence is truly a lethal mutation, or not. Of course it's still only a sample size of one - Mayr's argument has little to do with the Drake equation.

The following comment is quite thought provoking and stayed with me for quite a while:

  intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation

Video snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBqPiSpgVA

Marine biologist explores this in the sci-fi Blindsight, suggesting that self-awareness is an evolutionary hiccup that in the long-run wastes resources that could be spent towards building a better species. See: ants, for example.

Pretty sure big animals being fewer in number can be better explained by their need for larger and more specific territories than by their intellect.

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