Does being a Professor of Econ make you stupid? Speaking generally- no. Stupid people get PhDs in Econ and some of those stupid people become Professors. It is not the case that teaching stupid shite makes you stupid. This is purely a case of comparative advantage.
Obviously, there are some exceptions to the rule. Graciella Chichilnisky appeared one such. However, having spent 40 years as a professor of a shite subject, she is now as stupid as shit.
In a 2016 paper she writes-
Based on the axioms of quantum theory we identify a class of topological singularities that separates classic from quantum probability, and explains many quantum theory's puzzles and phenomena in simple mathematical terms so they are no longer 'quantum pardoxes'.
Who now thinks there are quantum paradoxes? We believe instead that thinking we can access 'God's eye view' is bound to cause us to believe stupid shit. A paradox is simply our common sense telling us not to shit higher than our arsehole. We are not Professors trying to assert authority over fractious adolescents. We work for a living.
Essentially, things which look like events or interactions only register as such if there is a coevolved process or the system is far from equilibrium. Probability theory isn't exactly the sort of thing God has to resort to. Indeed, it only gains salience under Uncertainty- i.e. where states of the world are unknown because their number and type is affected by knowing- or itself being- a state of the world.
What is the fucking point of having an 'unicity assumption' such that there is just one big big sample space with a single coordinate system?' Statistically, we don't exist in that space. As far as the Universe is concerned, the null hypothesis- viz. we don't exist- overwhelmingly prevails. Indeed, this is the steady state equilibrium. We understand this. What underlies all physical or social processes that are of interest to us is indeterminate 'co-evolved' and 'far from equilibrium' phenomena.
This is in fact the common sense view of the world reflected in our natural language. Before you can get to 'paradoxes' and 'aporias' and 'scandals' you have to stop speaking sensibly. You have to shit higher than your arsehole. Stuff like this-
The singularities provide new experimental insights and predictions that are presented in this article and establish surprising new connections between the physical and social sciences. The key is the topology of spaces of quantum events and of the frameworks postulated by these axioms. These are quite different from their counterparts in classic probability and explain mathematically the interference between quantum experiments and the existence of several frameworks or 'violation of unicity' that characterizes quantum physics.
Every fucking thing we think or think we know is a 'violation of unicity'. Indeed everything or event that is distinguishable is also such a violation. Where unicity obtains nothing is distinguishable. No doubt, we can make a toy and pretend that toy is 'unicity'. But this is mere pretense.
On the other hand, for a specific purpose, we can use a 'mechanism' which can be thought of as a game with a toy. But only if it is useful to do so. If there is a more useful toy or way to play with it- we move on without shedding a tear- though, no doubt, some stupid pedants will get their knickers in a twist about this.
They also explain entanglement, the Heisenberger (sic) uncertainty principle, order dependence of observations, the conjunction fallacy and geometric phenomena such as Pancharatnam-Berry phases.
'Explain'? Utterly mad! The uncertainty principle is based on something obvious- viz. measuring a thing, which only exists so as to interact, will changes the thing. That's why we try to find indirect methods of comparison.
Suppose you measure my dick. If you are a beautiful lady- I'm pretty certain the outcome won't be too humiliating to me. If you are a well built man- I can only hope this is not so but prefer to remain in a state of uncertainty.
Order dependence is part of our own cognitive bias precisely because cognition is usefully diverse because of hysteresis. The conjunction fallacy arises from the assumption that more detailed descriptions correspond to more partitions upon the information set- i.e. greater precision.
The notion of an adiabatic process is simply that something is changing too fast for the normal adjustment. A fire can spread faster than we can put it out. We have understood this sort of thing since we were swinging from tree to tree and escaping forest fires by scampering, in an ungainly fashion, across the savannah.
Somewhat surprisingly we found that the same topological singularities explain the impossibility of selecting a social preference among different individual preferences: which is Arrow's social choice paradox: the foundations of social choice and of quantum theory are therefore mathematically equivalent.
But Arrow's paradox was based on saying 'Define a Dictator as someone who isn't a Dictator'. It was pure ex falso quodlibet.
As a matter of fact, unproblematic- 'single peaked'- Social Choice does occur all the time and, unless there actually is a Dictator who shoots 'dissidents', some cretins will scream 'this is dictatorial!' just as Quantum stuff is going on all around us all the time though some cretins say 'Heisenberg and Dirac and all them other eggheads were talking through their arse. I have discovered- using just a small aubergine and a couple of rubber bands- that Einstein was a fraud. His real name was Weinstein- that's right, Harvey Weinstein! Theory of Relativity explains that my relatives are actually Harvey Weinstein and are sexually abusing me!'
We identify necessary and sufficient conditions on how to restrict experiments to avoid these singularities and recover unicity,
Obviously, one can say 'we will only look at situations we define as representing 'unicity'. Then, using our own logic, we will prove that we did indeed succeed in sticking our head up our own arse. This means we are smarter than all them Scientists. Sadly our rectums don't smell good and we're not getting a lot of oxygen. Help!'
avoiding possible interference between experiments and also quantum paradoxes; the same topological restriction is shown to provide a resolution to the social choice impossibility theorem of Chichilnisky (1980).
Obviously, if you have different frames of reference such that observers see different things though the fabric of reality suffers no tear because causality hasn't really been compromised- or if you have a bunch of people whose preferences can't be aggregated algorithmically though the fabric of society suffers no tear because they find some other way to agree- then, in the sense that having imposed mathematical stupidity was stupid, it is indeed the case that Social Choice theory is like Quantum Mechanics.
Consider a 'new' quantum paradox discovered by a Giffiths University lead team-
“The paradox means that if quantum theory works to describe observers, scientists would have to give up one of three cherished assumptions about the world,” said Associate Professor Eric Cavalcanti, a senior theory author on the paper.
“The first assumption is that when a measurement is made, the observed outcome is a real, single event in the world. This assumption rules out, for example, the idea that the universe can split, with different outcomes being observed in different parallel universes.”
“The second assumption is that experimental settings can be freely chosen, allowing us to perform randomised trials. And the third assumption is that once such a free choice is made, its influence cannot spread out into the universe faster than light,” he said.
“Each of these fundamental assumptions seems entirely reasonable, and is widely believed. However, it is also widely believed that quantum experiments can be scaled up to larger systems, even to the level of observers. But we show that one of these widely held beliefs must be wrong! Giving up any one of them has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the world.”
Actually, our understanding of the world is predicated upon giving up all sorts of beliefs in favor of finding something which is useful. Indeed, beliefs are things we strategically maintain only so as to trade them for something cool.
Physics is useful. Auction or other mechanism design may be very useful. Professors of Economics writing shite about Social Theory or explaining QMT away are utterly useless. Crush the loathsome thing- écrasez l'infâme, as Voltaire said of an equally useless Catholic Church which, forgetting diakonia, thought it should interfere in Physics and Social Choice.
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