Dan_Moore comments on Scholarship and DIY Science - Less Wrong

18 [deleted] 18 February 2011 06:37AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 18 February 2011 05:22:16PM 5 points [-]

I get very different results using the same heuristics. They may be overly vague, or too open to interpretation. It's not clear that they're useful for much other than rationalization.

Here, I'll apply it point by point to microeconomics.

1: For example, microecon explains prices, essentially correctly, as arising out of supply and demand.

2: Adam Smith and many other economists have offered valuable and true advice about how to fix the economy, advice which worked repeatedly. Advice such as opening foreign trade.

3: Isn't this just a variation on "fix"? See 2.

4: Economists can easily predict the results of various policies, such as, to give one instance, price controls. To give another, the establishment of monopolies.

5: Microecon has been put to the empirical test repeatedly - see 4. A satisfied prediction is a passed empirical test.

Are these points, any or all, debatable? I don't think so. But the fact is you got 0/5 and I got 5/5. Makes me wonder about the real value of the heuristics as something other than rationalization.

Comment author: Dan_Moore 18 February 2011 06:40:39PM 1 point [-]

It makes sense to consider microeconomics separately from macroeconomics, as the results are quite different. Maybe the heuristics are OK; you just need to clearly identify the field of study.