Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

In physics general relativity and quantum field theory are applied to different domains and at least one, possibly both, are widely recognized as mere approximations to the ultimate theory that subsumes them.

I'll defer to Dr. Miller on this if he cares to weigh in, or any other professional economist, but my outsider's impression is that in economics as discussed by Romer the situation is more that contradictory theories are being applied to the same domain, without a serious effort to determine experimentally which (if either) is correct.

Hanson once said that testablity is not a useful notion in the social sciences. That seems kind of crazy to me, but I am not an economist.

1[anonymous]11y

Sometimes, yes. And at least one school loudly insists that they don't need no stinkin' experimental evidence, because they're actually doing a deductive formal science. In a sign of uncertain health for economics, they are considered heterodox, but not yet laughed out of polite academia.

-127chaos11y

I have no idea which one you are talking about.