Saturday, February 14, 2015

WHAT IF? Asking the Dangerous Questions | Following the Evidence


Video below providing some perspective on the work of going up against entrenched dogmas from Dr. Tom Wilson of the Electric Universe group.

I can't help but to draw parallels between the fashion of resistance to new ideas that these EU people find themselves up against and that which those of us in the "MMT paradigm" usually face; both for those within the academe and those of us outside the academe.

Wilson addresses the concept of FEAR in this video and I think this is important to recognize that FEAR is operating on both sides in a contest such as the one we find ourselves in presently.






13 comments:

NeilW said...

FUD

Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt

standard tools of the Status Quo everywhere.

Peter Pan said...

Who gives a hoot whether the Electric Universe theories are accurate or not? MMT faces opposition from groups who are a lot more powerful than the scientfic community.

The average person is not in a position to reform the institutions of science - that is something that those involved must do themselves. If there is a better way to fund science, let the general public know.

What if scientists didn't have to waste time securing funding? Could they do more science? Could they fund more 'out of the box' inquiries?

Cosmology is of concern to relatively few people. An economic system affects everyone. If we're going to change the status quo, the economy is a damn good place to begin.

Matt Franko said...

Agree Bob but the main problem is not the economics.... we know how to do that... the main issue is one of overcoming the cognitive biases of those in positions of authority (ie morons...).

So I like to look at this issue from the perspective of different areas of science and perhaps we can learn something about how these cognitive defects operate and how they can be best overcome...

the issue is not ultimately with the economics we have had a surplus society for 1,000s of years minimum... the real issue is with human cognitive functions that are manifest in the morons who are occupying positions of authority imo...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

Sociologically, it's a matter of specific instances of a general case. The majority of people function within a familiar POV and anything that would question or, especially, disrupt that POV threatens the conceptual structure through which they function and take to "reality." When a person or group's view of reality is one the line, the reactions are quite predictable, whether this involves science, politics, economics, religion, etc. The logical and linguistic structures, and the psychological and sociological mechanisms are quite similar across the spectrum.

What is surprising is that this manifests in science when the key assumptions of scientific method include methodological skepticism and the tentative nature of all conclusions in light of new evidence. There is nothing so firmly established that further knowledge and evidence cannot at least call it into question and possibly overturn it.

Ryan Harris said...

Science as an industry doesn't want to reward scientists that don't work hard to come up with novel ideas that are right. Science journals only publish positive results or hypothesis that couldn't be disproved. The science culture that has resulted has been perverted with scientists who fabricate ideas, create models to fit their data and other sorts of unscientific behavior. It's so bad that multiple studies over many years must be repeated simply to verify no one cheated. Worse the public trusts little from science because there are so many bad actors, whether vaccination safety studies ginned up, climate models massaged to give immediacy and alarming results, medical trials faked, toxicology mismanaged, the list is nearly endless, while the political and social consequences of quackery are huge because in a modern world awash in technology we have to trust the experts that aren't trustworthy.

Ideally publishers should publish negative results, when an idea is proved wrong, and then allow the scientist to fit data and speculate to formalize the process and then allow a new study to independently re-test the speculation. By formalizing the process it reduces the motivation for scientists to invent to get published and advance their career.

More data should be published when ever practical so it is easier to compare results, see their statistical analysis and to inspect and audit. I'm not sure econ is comparable to science though.

Econ is just a mess, beyond anything in the sciences, there is more non-sense that gets published than meaningful work. It's now well established that econ isn't a hard science or a soft science. Some people were categorizing it as a social science. But as practiced now in its entirety, it isn't as rigorous as social science or even a philosophical framework. More of an abstract art combined with politics. There are periods where there were different popular styles of economics. Some are more colorful than others and the entire industry is dominated by cults of personality and non-fact. Maybe not even as rigorous as art because in the arts there are at least very introductory materials that can be put in text books and sort of agreed upon as being true. Even basic textbooks like Mankiw or Krugman are questionable in value to students and contain so much irrelevant and wrong materials that they might be more like scriptures or religious text.

Matt Franko said...

Easy for you to say Tom as you are not a moron ;)

I would refer readers to Roger's podcast with Mike here:

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2014/12/podcast-for-dec-10-interview-with-roger.html


for some further revealing discussion on this topic... Roger having experience as a neuro-physiologist and having done research on cognition in other types of living organisms...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

Ideally publishers should publish negative results, when an idea is proved wrong, and then allow the scientist to fit data and speculate to formalize the process and then allow a new study to independently re-test the speculation. By formalizing the process it reduces the motivation for scientists to invent to get published and advance their career.

Science proceeds by falsification rather than confirmation, on the basic logical principle that a general proposition is falsified by a single negative instance and is not confirmed by any number of positive instances where the positive instances do not exhaust the set of possible instances.

We celebrate the instances in which hypothesis that test theories are "confirmed," but ignore the testing that points up the roads that lead nowhere, so we don't have to continually run down that tunnel in the maze.

In conventional economics, we as a profession and society influenced by it are still running down tunnels where we never find the cheese, or even find poison. Dumb. Even rats learn to forget a tunnel after three negative attempts. And a lot of rats get poisoned.

Peter Pan said...

Matt,

I'm suspicious of those in positions of authority (ie morons) who happen to benefit from their cognitive dissonance. This is too much of a happy coincidence.

Tom Hickey said...

There's a difference between dissonance and bias, and bias often has interest behind it.

Peter Pan said...

Dissonance is where they're at, with regards to MMT.

Roger Erickson said...

It's all about systemic momentum.

To change systemic momentum requires a threshold change in systemic methods, and NOT in systemic information or knowledge.

The methods in question are those used to
a) utilize available & emerging data, and
b) prepare system components to do "a)"

In biology, evolution occurs by the altered systemic momentum statistically enforced by an altered momentum in the emergence of all distributed catalysts.

It's a distributed thing. :)

Anonymous said...

Why are you embarrassing this blog by posting stuff by random crackpots?

Tom Hickey said...

Some of my best friends are crackpots. One (theoretical physicist) even won an Ignoble Prize and accepted it with good humor.

And remember in the eyes of the ROW we are all crackpots.

The point of the talk is that the crackpots of the past got us to where we are now. The challenge is sort out the crackpots. It's sort of like panning for gold.

Actually, I recall how I came to discover MMT. I read a comment by Ramanan somewhere and my initial reaction was "crackpot." But he sounded like a smart guy and provided references, and, of course, there is always the possibility that a "crackpot" or "conspiracy theory" will turn out correct. So I followed the trail and here I am.