ciphergoth comments on Awful Austrians - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Swimmy 12 April 2009 06:06AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (88)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Swimmy 13 April 2009 01:44:22AM 1 point [-]

I'm not looking for Popperian falsifiability. I'm looking for Bayesian inferential updating. If the argument is that no evidence of any form could ever change the Austrian's probability estimate of a certain theory, I charge the Austrian is either being overconfident or violating the conservation of expected evidence.

Even extremely messy evidence can still be evidence. In economics, messy evidence that is messy in a stable way can be very good evidence. For instance, Mises explains that we can never find examples of irrationality, because preferences can never be frozen in time. So the preference reversal involved in the Allais Paradox is perfectly rational. But even if it's a rational preference change, those constant changes are stable over time. If you ask a person which gambles they prefer a second time, they'll give the same answers, and so on. By saying "it's not a controlled experiment so it doesn't count," the Austrian misses out on a key insight about how people can be milked. The Austrian tells us that this person wants to be milked!

Comment author: ciphergoth 13 April 2009 09:57:40AM 1 point [-]

Was your "Allais Paradox" link meant to go to this article? The Wikipedia page is also good.