Thursday 3 February 2022

David Orrell's infinite stupidity

 An Aeon author has responded to a comment by me as follows.


David OrrellAuthor

3 February 2022

In your blog post I see you write that “David Orrell is a year older than me and better qualified in Math. Yet he is almost infinitely more stupid.” So I am certainly honoured to have the opportunity to communicate with someone who is infinitely smarter than me. 


Something which is 'almost infinite' is still infinitely smaller than infinity. This is the first thing kids students learn in Analysis. Thus Orrell is either being stupid or else he is saying he has zero smartness in which case mine would be undefined, not infinite, with respect to his. Indeed, because I'm a socioproctologist, it is likely that my smartness approaches zero. Is Orrell making a claim re. Cohen forcing &  the continuum hypothesis? No. He is merely babbling nonsense. That's the problem with 'Quantum econ' or other such modish shite.  Once you go down that rabbit hole, there is no coming back. You are doomed to get even sarcasm wrong. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are there any conjugate variables in economics? If so, what type of Uncertainty arises?

windwheel said...

Economic models may exhibit duality or adjointness- e.g. Legendre transformation arises where a cost function is related to a supply function or a direct utility function is related to a indirect one. More generally, when you move from comparative statics to dynamic models, conjugate quantities arise. However these are artefacts of the model. They have no independent existence in 'reality'. One might think that the policy space in macroecon features conjugate variables and that there is a similar type of Uncertainty such that precise knowledge of one variable means its conjugate variable is more uncertain. However, all such supposed relationships broke down immediately if anyone tried to use them for any purpose. Goodhart's law or Rossi's Metallic laws explain why trying to measure a thing and then use it as a policy instrument is useless. Essentially, the regularity that was posited was not in fact an adjointness relationship at all.

Uncertainty in Econ is Knightian- we don't know all states of the world or what probability distribution attaches to them. Furthermore, whereas identity in the natural sciences is Liebnizian the opposite is the case in Social Science. In other words, the objects of a natural science model are genuinely identical and any experimental finding which suggests otherwise is either wrong or shows the theory is superficial. At a deeper level, that identity will be established. In Social Sciences, objects aren't identical but may be shoved into the same class for some particular purpose. But this also means that the statistical picture is always subject to 'Simpsons' type paradoxes and so good judgement is needed. Thus you may look at the data and do a bit of econometrics not to discover something new but to get an idea of where you should look in order to find a better way forward. Some people have better hunches than others in this respect. That's why the economists working for Bezos, though quite well paid, aren't billionaires.