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RobinHanson comments on Awful Austrians - Less Wrong
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I'm an economics professor in one of the few departments where people specialize in Austrian economics, and after years of exposure to them: I still don't understand what they are claiming. Of course each person ends up with many specific beliefs, and many of those beliefs are correlated with being in that group. But that is not the same as core claims that they share because they are in that group.
If I can't understand someone's claims, and I'm not sure they even have clear claims, then I can't exactly say they are wrong. In contrast, theism does make relatively understandable claims.
Depends what you mean by "understandable". It seems to make claims that most people think they understand, but I am inclined to think that this is an illusion, that actually religious language only has connotations and doesn't denote anything. As teageegeepea references below, religion is "not even wrong". This case is made pretty strongly at the start of George H Smith's "Atheism: the case against God".
Agreed --- most religion is poetry masquerading as assertion. What makes it nasty is when people think they can pin down those assertions precisely and live their lives by them.
You will know a good epistemology by its fruits.
What in particular do you not understand? I think there are plenty of problems with Austrian arguments (and the OP does a good job of explaining some of them), but I can't say I've run into many cases where I felt that I just didn't understand what was going on. Do you mean that different Austrian economists make fundamentally incompatible arguments, or that the arguments that they do make just... don't say anything meaningful?
I mean I have some text in front of me, and I make up several possible interpretations of it. Some are trivial, some are crazy, and so I dump those and keep the rest and then go on to another text and do the same. Then I try to find an intersection of the reasonable interpretations across different texts, in the hope of finding "what they mean." I might find specific claims on which several authors happen to agree, but not claims that are plausibly the more basics claim that could be the cause of them saying there is this thing called "Austrian econ" with some important basic differences from regular econ.
Would that make them "not even wrong"?