Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • Exasperation: Trading Miracles for Probabilism

    A long day of reading. A long day of studying college course curricula from a dozen large universities. A long day of discovering that far too many feign scientific methods, and deliver theology. (No, really.) The university has become a vehicle for tradesmen. It is almost impossible to obtain a meaningful education. And worse, that it’s almost impossible to find courses where you can actually learn synthesis rather than (trivial) analysis. All the while, the American work place craves individuals who can synthesize and critique – solving problems in millions of meetings, held every day, where common dialogs, presentations and rhetoric are filled with sophistry and error, negating the speaker’s position. Confusion, deception, politics ensue, and sometimes shouting. All for want of basic understanding. I used to wonder, if we invented time travel, who was the one person you’d want to kill? And I thought it was Napoleon, because he ruined Europe. Or maybe Zoroaster, for creating scriptural monotheism. But today, I think it’s Rothschild.

    [callout]We traded god and miracles for government and probability.And given the history of probability’s use in financial markets, it has the same record as magic and divinity: a failure.
    [/callout]

    We traded god and miracles for government and probabilism. And given the history of probability’s use in financial markets, it has the same record as magic and divinity: a failure. The technology of probability employed for political purposes, in the course of credit, is the new magic or miracles, or divine command.

  • Is Economics Ideological By Nature? (Yes and No.)

    The Curious Capitalist at Time Magazine posts: “Is economics ideological by nature?” by Barbara Kiviat

    It’s easy to rag on economics as not being a “real” science, and I try not to do things that are too easy. But in recent weeks I’ve really started to wonder. It is fascinating, and frightening, to me that smart economists can disagree about whether what the economy needs right now is more government spending or less. The debate isn’t about how much stimulus, or how much austerity, or the way such stimulus/austerity should be applied, but rather about which one is called for in the first place. How is this possible? It’s like a group of doctors not being able to agree whether a patient’s blood should be thinned or coagulated. What am I supposed to make of that?

    Let’s be technical for a moment:

    [callout]Whether we do better governing with econometrics than random guessing, or by asking the average man on the street, or than relying on traditional wisdom, or better than interpreting a deity, or even interpreting entrails, is yet to be proven. In fact, it appears from the data that asking a random person on the street is a better predictor than any economic model. — And anyone who tells you differently is not scientific but ideological.[/callout]

    1) Economics is a correlative mathematical discipline. Science is a methodology for incremental improvement of knowledge. Economists are attempting to act scientifically in their research. (Many of them anyway.) However, unlike the physical world, reproduction and interpretation of economic data are very hard to accomplish. We are doomed to eternally vulnerable correlations. Our mathematics and our measurements are too simple for the problem we’re taking on. But we know that. Everyone in the field knows it. As such, we’re acting scientifically, but our answers are not scientific, only our process of discovery is scientific. And our process of discovery is incomplete. People often equate scientific with ‘true’. But that’s an error. Science is a process of refinement whose purpose is to reduce human error. All scientific knowledge is tentative. It’s just the best we have to date. Economics (econometrics) must, of necessity, require assumptions because of ‘causal density’. The number of causal factors is very, very high. Human economic activity includes shocks (shortages) and inventions, and as such it’s economics are not gaussian (normally distributed), so any one event in a myriad of causal hierarchies can radically alter the entire network of human behavior. Unfortunately our mathematics, even in economics, tends to be probabilistically gaussian (normally distributed), rather than probabilistically mandelbrotian (abnormally, or randomly distributed). Simply because we do not know what we do not know, and have not figure out yet, ‘where’ there is a likelihood that we may ‘know’ something in the future that will effect our economy, and how people may react to it. 2) Political Economy is a moral philosophy that makes use of economic data for the purpose of determining the investments and returns on a society’s investment portfolio. A society is best thought of as a joint stock company with larger and smaller shareholders with different classes of shares each trying to get the management team to work in their favor. These shareholders have different interests. They want different things. They all ‘invest’ in society if only by not undermining it, or engaging in theft, fraud and violence. Most pay taxes. Some risk their lives in military service. We all buy our shares differently, and are rewarded differently. We do not understand the mathematics of human reasoning. It is largely the result of the properties of memory and of our cognitive biases. We are using correlative mathematics from the physical sciences to compensate for the fact that we do not understand the mathematics of human memory – probably because it is vastly more complex, and we do not have enough of the right kind of data. However, our use of current mathematics leads us to errors of aggregation and misunderstanding of causes. In fact, many have argued that all human knowledge is correlative, not causal. So we may always be working with insufficient information. 3) Politics is Decision Making: As a body politic, we disagree about the goals of political economy. We disagree about the purpose of government itself. This is because there are varying groups in our polity with different class, cultural, generational value systems, as well as different resources, and different biological capabilities. Our entire body of human moral codes are based upon circumstantial values (farming societies), and we no longer live in a farming society but an urban one. We are not even sure what a ‘good economy’ looks like for a densely urban society, or even if our limited tools of laws, religion and credit are sufficient technologies for maintaining social order: respect for some form of property, political decision making, cooperation, and redistribution. So, the problem is that we MUST use some sort of bias in resolving economic problems. We are using limited tools and a model of decision making in government that is probably antiquated for our circumstances. It was designed for city states. It seems inadequate for an empire. Society is changing very rapidly. We are open to many different unpredictable shocks. We have different preferences we apply when solving economic problems. And we must have those preferences in order to make some sort of decisions. And no matter what decision we make some faction of society will want another decision made instead.

    [callout]This is because of the fundamental problem of human cooperation: while we can agree upon ends, we cannot agree upon means. And even when agreeing upon ends, it requires that we know and catalog ALL ends, and then sort among them. And given a multitude of ends, it becomes impossible for people to prioritize them, or even comprehend them. Our society is simply too large. [/callout]

    This is because of the fundamental problem of human cooperation: while we can agree upon ends, we cannot agree upon means. And even when agreeing upon ends, it requires that we know and catalog ALL ends, and then sort among them. And given a multitude of ends, it becomes impossible for people to prioritize them, or even comprehend them. Our society is simply too large. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL ECONOMY As such, a large economy is better, but politically difficult to govern unless it is very homogenous with people sharing very similar values. A smaller economy is less strong, but easier to govern. The worst economy of all is a large strong one like that of an empire, with many, many factions – because there are too many choices and people are not gregarious in diversity, just the opposite. And that’s the political environment that we have to work with. To make matters worse, our federal government can print money which makes it seem like we can either solve fewer more complicated ends, or we can solve a larger number of ends, than we actually can. Printing money as a means of redistribution or insurance are one thing. Printing money so that there isn’t any shortage of it is another. Printing money so that we just distort and confuse everyone, including economists, is something else. And we are doing too much ‘something else’. We are not the blind leading the blind. But we are definitely expecting too much of our current level of understanding of economics, when economic reasoning has become the primary means of decision making in human political systems. Whether we do better governing with econometrics than random guessing, or by asking the average man on the street, or than relying on traditional wisdom, or better than interpreting a deity, or even interpreting entrails, is yet to be proven. In fact, it appears from the data that asking a random person on the street is a better predictor than any economic model. And anyone who tells you differently is not scientific but ideological.

  • From Modeled Behavior: On The Religions Of Positivism, Secular Humanism and Monotheism

    Karl Smith, writing on Modeled Behavior, in response to Ron Rosenbaum falls into a rational argument between theism and atheism. And demonstrating that both he and Rosenbaum err. Even the early theologians did not make this mistake. Religious debate is allegorical, not scientific. Only fundamentalists argue for the sicentific basis of gods and religion. And fundmentalism is a political reaction to the rise of science in politics. However, neither side of this populist debate (and it is a populist debate, not an intellectual one) has much to offer. Karl says:

    Ron Rosenbaum launches a long and varied attack on the New Atheism. His complaints are many and his tone heavy, but I don’t think I do him much injustice by saying his central claim is this:

    Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation “ex nihilo” (from nothing). . . In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

    If Rosenbaum means that he wishes us to explain the “universe” then we should talk about the properties of high density energy and the creation of bubble universes. Or, we can tell a story about 11-dimensional membranes which may have collided and produced everything that we could ever see. However, I think the Rosenbaum wants more than that. I think he doesn’t want to stop at our universe but wants to ask – from the outside of everything in the moment before the first event – why did it become so?

    Actually, that’s a false premise he’d be arguing if he did. The question he’s really asking is “what are the implications for my anthropomorphic anthropocentric view of the universe. In other words, how can I make this universe about the creature man rather than a universe in which man is not central, and in fact, may be an improbable accident? That’s the question he’s asking and the problem he’s seeking, becaus that is the comfort that religion brings to man: anthropocentrism. But that anthropocentrism also adds value to political discourse. Because ANY ANSWER includes a proscription for human behavior. I think we forget too often that the purpose of religion is to provide an inexpensive means of proscribing behavior for humans who must coexist in large numbers. Externalizing requirements as scriptural is simply an inexpensive means of lawmaking.

    However, there simply is no sense to be made of these propositions. Equally, there is no sense to be made of the question “why is there something” that is unless Rosenbaum is using different definitions of “why” and “something.”

    This just misses the point. It confuses truth with utility, and in politics these things have no relevance.

    Now, if I don’t believe that science, reason or logic can answer “why something as opposed to nothing.” Then what do I mean when I say that I am an atheist? I mean that I believe all answerable questions can be answered with science, reason and logic. Said slightly more formally, there exists no question which can be meaningfully answered that cannot be answered by science, reason and logic.

    Lets return to Rosenbaum’s query to see how that works. He asks “why is there something” The theist might answer that God created the something. But, then the theist must be referring to a limited set of something. Indeed, typically we imagine the theist as referring to the physical universe, space, time, etc.

    Well, you’re making an argument against his STATED reasoning instead of his UNDERLYING reasoning. And, as Pareto, Weber, Michels, and Sorrel will remind you, this is YOUR error, not theirs.

    Now, does my belief in science, reason and logic constitute a faith? No.

    Perhaps. But your use of logic for the purpose of political debate is pretty ameturish.

    First, I have evidence for the belief. Predictions based on science, reason and logic tend to come true.

    Oh no. You don’t realize what youve stepped into here. In fact, you’re making the EXACT mistake that your opponent is. You have incomplete knowledge and the process you follow may yield consistent results, even if you do not fully understand the process. The process of religion and belief in god produces consistent results, even if that process is irrational. In fact, in the history of science, those predictions that exist int he physical world have largelly been false, and tehrefore they are scientific but wrong. The problem with the sphere of human action is that we know less about it than we do the physical world, simply becuase itis more COMPLEX than the physical world, because humans can LEARN.

    Indeed, I am not currently aware of a case where they have failed to come true and no subsequent reasoned explanation was found. So the trio of science, reason and logic carry with them an incredible track record.

    Phlogiston theory? Aristotle’s motion? The human genome project’s assumption of a manufactured man rather than a grown one? The limits of Aristotelian, Newtonian and Einsteinian physics?

    However, this track record could plausibly come to a halt. A pillar of fire could appear before me and declare that he is the lord. He could then go on to predict the violation of the laws of physics and subsequently show them to be false.

    Or we could find that the mythical structure is a very useful pedagogical contrivance and that the unarticulated content of these myths contains devices for assisting people with cooperating in agrarian society and in a division of labor and knowledge, where the limits of their perceptions and knowledge in a complex society exceed their tribal biological capacities. This is actually what’s expressed by the content of most of the christian mythos and dogma. Now, conversely, there is a great deal of incredibly destructive content in the monotheistic religions. One could successfully argue that they institutionalize ignorance. The appear to institutionalize poverty. But they appear to spread like a virus along with the underclasses. But they do serve their purpose, which is to override tribal sympathies and sentiments, and essentially create a new tribal identity, while preserving of class systems. Some are simply far worse than others (Islam). Some are useful despite their ridiculousness (Judaism).

    He could show me that despite all of my reasoning to the contrary that 2 + 2 = 5, that the logic I depend on explains nothing and that my confusion of this moment tells me nothing about my confusion in the next. Every prediction I make would have results no better than chance but every prediction the pillar makes would come true.

    Any number of fairly great minds have pondered this problem at length, and you’re really not even scratching the surface at the level of an undergraduate. I’m not trying to be antagonizing, I’m just stating the obvious. There are volumes on this subject.

    [callout]The only reason for this debate, is for the purpose of coercing someone to do with himself or his property what you wish, against his desires, without compensating him with something for which he would willingly part with it.[/callout]

    “Gods exist like numbers exist”. They exist because people act like they exist. People use them in the same way: to calculate. To reason. To estimate. To judge. We lack the knowledge, the experience, the perception, the time and computational ability to exist as a polity in a market, in a division of labor, without them. The question is the form of their existence. Do they have the properties that people attribute to them? No, but neither did shakespeare or Socrates, Washington or Alexander. Edison or Michelangelo. Marx or Machiavelli. And the existence of these concepts as memories, as memes, and as complex symbols have extraordinary long term impact on individuals, groups, cultures, and civilizations. Science is, and always has been, a ‘faith’. Scientific knowledge is the most perishable that we have. Entire bodies of knowledge have expired with one innovation. It’s pretty certain that thousands more will do so. Certainly, we are fairly sure, that we are missing something very important at the subatomic level. Certainly we are very sure that we are missing something very important in the human experience: hume’s problem of induction. Certainly there is something wrong with out entire concept of mathematics. Certainly our belief that the genome project would deliver to us vast knowledge, but in the end, only confirmed our ignorance. Science is a formal process for discovering patterns and replicating them. It is a process. That is all. What we know from science is that which is falsifiable – the negatives, not what’s ‘probable’ – the positives. Science is largely eliminative. But scientific knowledge is constantly open to further revision, greater explanatory power, and the elucidation of error. It is constantly being disproven. Contrary to our religious wisdom, science is egregiously more perishable. In economics in particular, vast swaths of our knowledge is patently false. THe entire DSEM model appears to be false. One should separate fully articulated reasoning from the results produced by it. Our politicians rely upon what they believe is scientific thought, and it is articulated as a rational process, even if with competing means and ends. But they have made a terrible mess of the world economy because they believed Nobel laureates – some of whom are being disproven at this very moment, for reasons that most of history’s philosophers would have stated were obvious, as violation of the calculus of measurement. By contrast the church built a vast bureaucracy that governed europe for nearly two millennia and did exceedingly well at it, despite the fact that it’s dogma was absurd, and methods of argument laughable by almost any measure. Plenty of religious doctrine is simply well-though human behavior codified as the word of god. Sure the reasoning behind it is ridiculous. But it works. Wisdom is generalization. It is rules to apply when facing the unknown. But largely, wisdom is our protection against ignorance and hubris. Warning against Hubris in all it’s forms is the primary teaching of the body of greek mythos. THe fact that it’s conveyed by the allegory of the gods is simply a pedagogical device. Secular humanism is as much a religion as is any other silly set of beliefs. Humans aren’t that plastic. The greek myths are just as important a set of lessons as are fairy tales, and the two sets of knowledge may be more useful than all the knowledge that science bequeaths to us. The most important question is this: The only reason for this debate, is for the purpose of coercing someone to do with himself or his property what you wish, against his desires, without compensating him with something for which he would willingly part with it. In other words, these are political arguments. As political arguments, like all law, they are practical, not truthful. THey are for the purpose of persuasion. And the only reason for political persuasion is to redirect resources and energies from where they are, to wehre you want them to be. And as such, political, pseudo-scientific, religious and moral arguments are nothing but feints and parries in a fencing match. And you, the spectator, are simply distracted by the hand-waving prestige of the magicians on the sidelines. Numbers exist. Gods exist. Science exists. They exist in the same form. As ideas. And the only reason to debate them is to lie, cheat and steal. Because otherwise we would simply engage in mutually beneficial trade. Then another person enters the conversation:

    Curt. Lots of words and hefty references, none of which support your thesis, which I take to be: “But belief in the scientific method, particularly in the social sciences, is entirely erroneous.” Science is empirical, faith isn’t. The scientific method is an attempt to understand the real world based on the measurable properties of the real world. The only faith involved is that the careful use of the senses and invented measuring devices is capable of giving real information about real things. If that is wrong, they we all might as well believe in unicorns. The concept of “social science” is less valid than “natural science” because a collection of people is more different, and in a greater variety of ways than a collection of oxygen molecules or green beans. Hence, the use of probability becomes problematical. Let’s not even go there. Faith involves belief in the unprovable. Science is a search for what can be proven. You might not know this, but before Adam Smith wrote THE WEALTH OF NATIONS he wrote THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. Which, like the writings of Keynes, is totally irrelevant to the discussion. Cheers! JzB

    Curt Doolittle You made my point. Thank you. Empiricism is a ‘faith’. So is Positivism. A positivist or empiricist puts his faith in the process that he uses. A theist puts his faith in the process that he uses. We know that much knowledge provided by these processes is false. But we know that we obtain utility from using these processes, despite their imperfections.

    [callout]Empiricism is a ‘faith’. So is Positivism. A positivist or empiricist puts his faith in the process that he uses. A theist puts his faith in the process that he uses. We know that much knowledge provided by these processes is false. But we know that we obtain utility from using these processes, despite their imperfections.[/callout]

    Religious ‘Faith’ is a political and social concept, and social content is NOT probabilistic. It CANNOT be. We can debate wether in retrospect we can measure correlation of historical data. But human behavior is only correlative and historical. It is not probabilistic and predictive. The fact that legions of positivists fall into the trap of treating empiricism as a truth rather than a method, is no different from the error that theists fall into when they think faith is a truth rather than a method. Knowledge is not finite. It is not static. Knowledge is embodied in our methods, not in what is static and certain. And, contrary to your accusation, all of my references support my position. Almost everything here is just Popper revisited. And popper along with Kuhn is the author of the philosophy of science, as well as much of the theory of knowledge. Popper argues for an open universe. He argues (along with Godel) that we have made a mistake in the calculus of measurement. Nassim Taleb make the same argument and warns of the fallacy of prediction in financial markets. Hume argues that we cannot know what we do not know and correctly posits that this is the fundamental problem that humans must solve. Kant tries to solve the problem and fails miserably, although artfully by trying to create a closed (chrsitian apologist) system. Weber refers to content of religious concepts. Pareto describes the limits of human knowledge and the human reliance upon sentiments when faced with insufficient information by which to make decisions. Hayek warns us about the limits of knowledge, and that we should not debase traditional knowledge. Michels warns us that bureaucracies must possess limited knowledge and therefore become self serving. Mises makes the same proposition in ‘Bureaucracy’. Conversely, the line of probabilists from Walras to Keynes to Samuelson all argue for probabilism, but all their models are demonstrably false in practice. They are false in practice for this reason: the categorical representation of any measurable object of utility is necessarily erroneous because the UTILITY of any object is plastic or polymorphic. Unlike the physical world. And therefore it is the DIFFERENCE between possibilities that is the real, and therefore, hidden cost of all human behavior. (All costs are opportunity costs.) Therefore we only record and quantify history but not our hypotheses, because the hypothesis is unimaginably complicated and purely mental in construct without external representation and therefore not readily open to categorization and quantitative representation. Likewise, (via Mandelbrot) people and markets react to learning curves and forgetting curves. The greater and more frequent the stimulation the more attention it gets, and the less the less it gets. This is the only logic present in the stock market: frequency of stimuli and the plasticity of the objects traded in reaction to that stimuli. There is a vast body of knowledge that is critical of the philosophy of secular humanists (which is the religion you’re a member of). The point is, that you are confusing TWO DOMAINS OF KNOWLEDGE that are critically analyzed by different METHODOLOGIES and committing an ERROR in doing so. The gains from science are in the PHYSICAL non-heuristic fields of DISCOVERY of an existing and CLOSED system. The gains in the political sphere are horrendously more complicated than that of the physical world and far less open to our method of scientific testing as we currently understand it. And our current understanding is limited by the somewhat linear and non-causal, categorically implastic mathematics that we make use of in our analysis, exposition, and prediction. So in making your argument with me, and with Rosenbaum, you are applying an irrelevant standard to the concept of god. ( And it’s an impossible problem to define these things rationally. Social Good is one of my favorites. So is the french “liberty fraternity equality”. They are meaningless terms. They express sentiments, not reason. If “social good” exists, then god exists. Good luck defining either one of them. And without defining them you cannot argue a position. ) So, you’re making an ERROR, the nature of which you do not understand. Science is a method. What you do not see is that religion is a method. It is an argumentative and philosophical method for the resolving differences between ‘shoulds’ and achieving cooperation of large numbers of people in a vast division of labor, and among vastly different people of different ages. And achieving that vast labor where rational pedagogy (reason and science education) did not exist, or where it is insufficient (where we are too ignorant), or where the people are too limited in ability, or konwledge, or time, to make use of rational means. Or where, because of the pragmatic nautre of politics, reason, which is an elitist tool, is not available to the majority of the polity engaged in decision making, especially in a democratic society. Reason is a poor political tool. People need narratives. And we have not YET produced sufficient narratives under empiricism to replace mythic content. And the narratives that we have produced (which are those of secular humanism) are patently FALSE. Secular humanism posits: 1) People are equal. (They are unequal) : IQ Deniers. 2) Everyone can be of the same social and economic class (they cannot) : Class Deniers 3) Race is immaterial. (Races are material because people act as if they are material, and they act that way because status in-group and extra group is achieved at different costs) : Race Deniers. 4) Infinite Plasticity of Humans (Natural Law is correct in that people have permanent tendencies) : Anthropo-implasticity Deniers 5) Limits to Political Consensus On Means Of Achieving Goals : Democratic Limit Deniers 6) Limits to empiricism and Probabilism In Human Behaviors : “Positivists”, or Limits Of Empiricism Deniers. These are all failures of the religion of secular humanism, that is the result of empiricism. The great thinkers alive today would state (because they do) that they are not trying to solve a problem of objective truth but of practical utility, while understanding that scientific thought is very limited in scope. The fact that you do not take this same position of skepticism, and that moreover you ignore the record of the history of what utility that civilizations have gained from the absurd technology of monotheism, means that you are indeed a member of the positivist ‘faith’. The monotheistic religions are ridiculous as stated. But they are terribly successful algorithms. Much of science in human history has been well articulated, but entirely false. That said, I’m not supporting monotheistic religion but I do understand the problem of pedagogy: 1) children must learn symbolic social judgements by habit and narrative before they have the capacity to understand rational judgements. 2) people are vastly unequal in their ability to make rational judgements. In fact, it is an expertise and a product of life long mastery. 3) reason has been demonstrably ineffective compared to law and religion and credit, in creating social order. Largely because it is so susceptible to error and fraud. Reason is insufficient and the narrative method and allegorical content are a superior means of providing actionable content to human beings of different abilities, different ages and different experiences. We live in a vast division of knowledge and labor, with multiple social classes, multiple mythologies, and multiple forms of social cooperation encoded in different categories of property rights, freedoms and constraints. Science is the process by which we slowly chip away at discovering fundamental objective causality. But as it stands, it is insufficient for the composition of a social order. And it has been demonstrably harmful to apply such standards to the social order in the vain assumption that our traditions err. =====

    Curt, Impressive.

    “Politics is a process of utility not truth. And the only purpose of debate is to obtain another’s property for one’s desires rather than theirs. By inventing politics we traded violence for fraud. ”

    Shouldn’t this be: property is theft, war is struggle over it, politics negotiation on it, and trade exchange of it? In war, might makes right, politics lowers the cost through the fraud of property, which trade can then exchange. Even the prehistory is reversed. Politics can reduce war, and trade can reduce politics, but larger populations, densities, and interactions increase politics and politics increase war. -Lord

    @Lord. First, thanks. Second, your summary is both astute and accurate. Although, the form you’re using (which is the civic republican set of assumptions, and assumes equality) employs a neutral point of view, and the form I’m using (which is is machiavellian politico-scientific which assumes inequality) is intentionally constructed to demonstrate the error of applying the criteria of either religion, science, or philosophy, to the field of politics — when the first three presume a search for objective truth, and the latter is the domain intentional rhetorical fraud for the purpose of obscuring the contests over property and masking the facility with which the bureaucracy exploits it’s position for self gain behind the necessity of implied moral contrivance, and political expediency. In other words, I’m assaulting the assumptions upon which republican government are based. So I was chastising the authors for silliness by stating that the only reason for debate is to mask their attempt at taking each other’s property. But back to forms: The civic republican model is based jupon the assumption that public debate and voting will produce optimum use of resources among people with similar interests. However, this model originated with small populations, with a minority of the productive social class of participants, with hard money, and where these politicians possessed similar economic incentives, and where the agrarian model, and sail-based shipping guaranteed long time frames for decisions, and accounting periodicity, and where production consisted of fairly simple products converted from a resource to a consumable. All of wich allow for fairly simply accounting processes, and limit the bureaucracy to what can be borrowed from external entities, and therefore what non-bureaucrats are willing to subsidize. Today, instead, we live in an industrialized world of multi-part products composed from across the world, with complex human capital requirements, and vast differences in price structures, and where the rate of movement of economic forces is incomprehensible to an individual. (And where it is precisely that incomprehensibility that makes socialism impossible – socialism being management of production, but which is now commonly applied to redistribution.) Further, we live in a world where the government is both a domestic and international empire that abuses multiple groups under the auspices of shared benefit, while bankrupting the civilization on scale unimaginable by the Athenians. Where politicians do not read, and cannot even understand much of the law that they pass. And where, having removed the gold standard, and allowed the pooling of financial information both through taxation on the way in and lending on the way out, we launder all ability of individuals to comprehend the instructions we give each other through the pricing system, both temporal, and inter-temporal. And by this laundering, and loss of the boundary held in place by hard money, have removed the only means by which external wisdom can limit the ignorant politicians, and the corrupt and ideological bureaucracy. So, In practice, debate is fraught with fraud. There is nothing dishonest about violence. ie: we have traded violence and the use of the parliamentary system to protect us from undue violence by the king and unite us in that pursuit, for fraud, and the use of parliamentary drapery to subject us to extortion and class warfare. So, in practice, yes, you are both succinct, and correct. But you’re not providing the reason why – and as such, are positing a memorable solution but one easily dismissed. The reason you’re missing out on is an epistemic one: That the government is large enough, over too divergent a set of interests, and our pricing, accounting, tax and law systems inadequate to provide politicians with the information necessary to make decisions about the matters with which we charge them, and possessing levers that are too imprecise to achieve their desired ends. In this environment of inadequate information, bureaucrats have no choice but to rely upon metaphysical and cognitive biases when making decisions. And because law makers feel the need to make laws, they do so, and poorly. And because laws do not perish with the fools that write them, the are calcifying the body of law, and as a byproduct losing the faith of the populace not only in them, but in rule of law itself. Politicians are not evil. they are merely human. And they are unable to synthesize sufficient information about our state of affairs to make rational judgements because our information systems are insufficiently complex enough to allow them to do so. Consequently, rhetorical debate is easily fraudulent under this system because there are no external checks and balances via credit and hard money, vie minority vote, vie accounting, on the politicians or on the bureaucracy. And in this arena a fraud, debates about religion, science, and the like are ridiculous. They are ridiculous first, because they are insufficient means of solving the problem, and second because the only reason you would need to rely upon them is because you lack rational, scientific, quantitative information, OR are not regulated externally by limits to credit, and as such, one must resort to Morality, Beliefs, Preferences, instead of resorting to facts as established by monetary information and access to credit. Personally, I would much rather than we stop debating the virtues of science or religion, because both are falsehoods, and instead discuss implementing schemes by which we improve our accounting, tax, credit, baking, and forecasting abiltites so that our politicians cannot hide from information, or make obviously erroneoius statements about fianances. And if christians want to do some moral good, stay off the biblical quotes and get onto the real issue: economic calculaitno is now impossible for our governemnt, and teh tools we thought we had, in the Dynamic Stochastic Equilibrium Model and the ambitions of full employement under Keynesianism are profounding erroneous, ans simply a schme by which we have dstroyed western civilizatoin and force our politicians to resort to chicanery, fraud, ideology, ignorance, and pettiness. The bible, and all scriptural religion are allegorical wisdom.They are not science. Even Science itself is inapplicable to the social sciences. And as such neither religion or science is sufficient to replace ‘quantitative information’ given to us by the system of prices and credit. Because the only truth we know of, is the truth men tell by their actions with their money.

  • We Won’t Stop Bloggers From Telling Us Otherwise. This Isn’t A Pursuit Of Truth.

    In an essay that has attracted some interest from the blogging community, Kartik Athreya of the Richmond Fed, correctly states that there are political hacks misusing economic arguments. But she misses the point.

    Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise “In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given fillip to something bigger than a cottage industry. Examples include Matt Yglesias, John Stossel, Robert Samuelson, and Robert Reich. In what follows I will argue that it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors have anything interesting to say about economic policy. This sounds mean-spirited, but it’s not meant to be, and I’ll explain why.”

    [callout] Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness.[/callout]

    “The question is: can they provide you, the reader, with an internally consistent analysis of a dynamic system subject to random shocks populated by thoughtful actors whose collective actions must be rendered feasible? For many questions, I and my colleagues can, and for those that the profession cannot, the blogging crowd probably can’t either.” “…just below the surface of all the chatter that appears in blogs and op-ed pages, there is a vibrant, highly competitive, and transparent scientific enterprise hard at work. At this point, the public remains largely unaware of this work. In part, it is because few of the economists engaged in serious science spend any of their time connecting to the outer world (Greg Mankiw and Steve Williamson are two counterexamples that essentially prove the rule), leaving that to a group almost defined by its willingness to make exaggerated claims about economics and overrepresent its ability to determine clear answers.”

    [callout]So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not.[/callout]

    In a polity where we have traded traditional moral principles for the abstractions of economic theory as the means of resolving differences between the ambitions of our politicians, and where at the same time, economics is a nascent, and perhaps insufficient body of knowledge to adequately inform both our polity and its leaders, both sides of any debate are required to rely upon the accumulated erroneous judgements and confirmation biases inherent in their constituents. Bloggers then, like everyone else, are arguing against error with error. Against sentiment with sentiment. Against bias with bias. Against foolishness with foolishness. Your analysis assumes that economists can be of much help in the public debate. When in fact, there is also a body of economic philosophy that states that the entire DSEM, as well as equilibrium itself, and the descriptive, probabilistic, non-causal mathematics employed in it, are insufficient methods for representing and forecasting economic interactions. In fact, the great progress of economists over the past fifty years has largely been to supply quantitative proof that confirms the traditional descriptions of the consistency of human error, bias and information asymmetry — a set of errors which only needed exposition because of the false pronouncements of the theorists who created the idealistic models suitable for simplistic mathematical modeling.

    [callout]Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.[/callout]

    In other words, politics has little to do with economics. And all economic science seems to have accomplished, is to trade one set of traditional wisdoms for another set of speculations. And while you refer to economics as ‘scientific’, the political use of economic theory has been anything but scientific. And to a large degree, the immature nature of economic theory combined with the foolishness of political rhetoric, has created as much harm as good. In the comfort and support it gave to communism and socialism alone, the record of economic theory is the record of bloodshed, fraud, deception and heady murder. So while I laud your ambitions, it seems, that you have fallen into the same error that you accuse of others: to pretend to possess knowledge that you do not. The greater economists who do much of the great work, often refrain from the political discourse, largely because they possess sufficient wisdom to know that it is a pointless exercise. Economics as we know it is a process of describing the past. Politics is the process of inventing the future. The difference between description and invention is infinite.

  • Hubris, Regulation, Artificial Life and Zombies

    Mariam Melikadze at Adamsmith.org references the movie 28 Days in order to criticize irrational and premature regulation.

    “And so, much like of the opening scenes of an apocalyptic movie, science has reached a great milestone, … The era of bioengineered creatures has officially begun. … But in all apocalyptic movies the great invention inevitably goes wrong. The environmentalists seem to have picked up on this: only a few days have passed since the discovery was revealed and they are already demanding a ban on synthetic biology. Enter regulation, the obvious answer to all of mankind’s problems.”

    Of course, the sentiment expressed in these movies, and our greek myths, is a warning against hubris. In science, economics, politics, and any other personal vanity we engage in. She is right that we cannot unlearn technology. She is right that civilizations who do not adopt technology are conquered by those who out-gun, out-germ, and out-steel them. She is right that these technologies once mastered, tend to deliver material benefits to the survivors. However, that doesn’t mean we should not be cautious, experimental, and cogent of our potential for hubris. And to be cautious, we need to keep that particular mythology alive, lest we invent other technologies like eugenics, complex derivatives, communism and thalidomide. Or engage in other acts of hubris, like the belief that regulation solves mankind’s problems.

  • What Problems Should Austrians Solve. Different Ones Apparently.

    Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving. The problems that economists need to solve are not those which derive from the antiquated process of pooling, or aggregating quantities into categories. We know that aggregation of categories a failure as a strategy. We know that we must apply statistical methods across periods of differing utility and differing sentiments in order to find correlations from which we can deduce theories of causation. It is a loose set of tools for a complex world. The problem is to define institutions that would allow us to posses knowledge of human activities so that we can measure distortions of policy. The problem is institutions and data. It is not how to further plumb the depths of error – to divine nonsense from the nonsensical. The problem is our institutions.

  • Climate Data, Trust In Science, Secular Humanism, Truth, and Economics

    The crisis over climate data has been met with numerous statements about preserving the “sanctity” or trust in the wisdom of science and scientists. As if our scientists were an improvement over their theological predecessors, or their pragmatic and prostituting peers in politics. But that can hardly be true, if one understands the history of science, or the scientific method and it’s limits, or the behavior of human beings belonging to schools of thought, in history. People are driven by material gain, status, and power, and have significant cognitive biases in favor of those selfish traits, that appear in all aspects of human behavior, not just in politics, commerce, or religion, but also in science. My position has been, along with many, that it certainly appears as though the data says the climate is cooling, along with it’s normal historical ice age cycle. The public does not trust academia, or the scientific community. It does trust particular scientists who are also public intellectuals. THe press likes to trust and advocate science because secular humanism has become today’s religion. In an effort to counter scholastic religion, secular humanists frequently tolerate what it considers acceptable losses. But given that, due to current events, we know most mathematical economics since the second world war is faulty, because the logic behind it was faulty. Because they sought to justify government intervention in the economy by monetary policy: Something Hayek believed was the intellectual’s fascination with their levers and their desire to run tests on society to experiment with their efficacy. And there are numerous other ‘givens’. Given that over nine tenths of research papers contain logic errors that invalidate their conclusions, whether in physical science or social science. Given that it at least appears that the peer review method of publishing articles is becoming invalidated when compared to the more difficult job of writing books that require broader integration of a paper into a network of theory. Given that our universities are rated by input rather than output criteria, and that this bias has material impact on society. Given that it certainly appears that there is a great deal of ’skewing’ in the community, on top of the pervasive errors in the logic of conclusions. Given that academic departments are not materially meritocratic, but political – and radically so. Given that we produce large bodies of research that are faulty and repeatedly proven faulty whenever they aspire to affect the political debate, in order to make it easier to obtain grants. Given that academia does not separate teachers from researchers, and that students see their best teachers evicted from universities, for what appears to be political interests of intrenched parties, and all of us who are educated walk around with this knowledge and experience. It becomes somewhat hard to understand why the public should believe in the myth of scientific ethics. Scientists pursue self interest, just like the rest of us. But there are no checks on that self interest when the testing criteria for that self interest is obscured by all the behaviors above. The rest of us are tested by the market. And it appears that the market is a much better test. Scientisim has replaced theology as a means of influencing policy. But I’m not entirely sure it’s all that much better than arguing about angels on the head of a pin. It certainly seems we should be at least as skeptical of our scientists as we were of our theocrats. And perhaps more so.

    Adam Ozimek Curt, The scientific community is a market; a market of ideas. You should not put more stock in individual scientists or “public intellectuals” than in scientific consensus and the market of ideas in which consensus if forged and challenged. The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.

    @Adam “The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.” That *cannot* be true. The market has no claim to truth, nor is it a weapon of political coercion. It is ultimately and entirely pragmatic, and the means by which we fill each other’s wants by the pursuit of self interest, at the lowest cost, despite the fact that all people seek to game, or circumvent that market whenever possible. Markets exist, and always have. The state has generally, created sufficient stability so that markets can evolve in a fashion in which only the government molests them. And the government molestation is determined as good or bad only by how it redistributes the profits of its molestation: to itself or to the public. A public who must also fail to molest itself by interfering with trade or property, as well as refrain from molestation of the state. But, the moment that ideas are used to influence government policy, they make claims to truth. Our concept of truth is as a method of coercion. In the context of this discussion, which was the public TRUST in the scientific community, trust must imply truth not pragmatism. Otherwise the conversation is meaningless.

  • Comparing Medical, Technical, Educational, and Political Testing Methodologies

    There was a great deal of research and discourse on technology in medicine when computing systems began to enter the operating room in the 1990’s. In particular, in the use of anesthesia. The most commonly discussed example was a difference in turning knobs, in which one machine turned right to increase and another turned left to increase, and in confusion the patient was killed. This and other events caused a systemic review of medical equipment and the development of standards. THe emphasis in the medical community however, was just as directed at training it’s staff as it was at the hardware. This has not been the case in IT, largely because costs of risk are more easily assumed, and costs of failure are perceived as more tolerable. However, this tolerance is due in large part to a lack of visibility by executive management, to the breadth and impact of those risks, partly because of a lack of understanding of business risk measure by IT management, and in many businesses a failure of IT and Accounting and Finance to share sufficient information for IT to do so. The medical and engineering fields attempt to solve the problem of risk and recovery differently. They do so because of biases. Those biases evolved from the methodology and traditions of the culture of the profession. There is a tendency to think that IT has fully commoditized and therefore can be regulated as is plumbing and electricity, but IT is far closer to medicine in it’s complexity than are the more mechanical traditions. And this confusion, or error in philosophy is common within many different specializations or social groups. From technical specialties to the philosophical biases of entire civilizations. The medical field, especially in surgery and hospital care, includes infinite risk (people die, and there is a high liability cost) and consists of actions are taken by people using tools. This set of properties has made their industry focus on the human element: on improving people, and in particular, on the assumption of failure, therefore improving people. In medical devices, there is an extraordinary emphasis (due to research papers) on producing tools with very consistent user interfaces that are extremely simple and consistent (such as dials turning the same direction producing similar results) and an emphasis on protocol (scripts that are followed), and lastly on training people to use these tools in order to reduce failure. But every process is seen as a human problem of discipline and training. Not of engineering at lower cost, or productivity — but as risk reduction. Production costs are far lower than the costs of failure. This is true for the military as well, where vast numbers of people must work in extraordinarily deadly conditions, under extreme duress and exhaustion, using complex and dangerous tools. Soldiers are taught very simple behaviors, one of which is to speak entirely in facts, rather than interpretations – one of the primary purposes of western basic training. To teach soldiers to separate opinion from recitation of observation. Similarly, when it was found that different hierarchical social structures around the world prohibited airline crews from communicating effectively and was causing deadly crashes, these crews were taught english and declarative mannerisms by training specifically to overcome these cultural biases and lack of clarity in communication –which is why english is the language of transportation. English contains a spoken protocol of clarity which english speakers do not understand, just assume, and that clarity originated in the western military tradition of enfranchising all citizens in a militia. Epistemology. This is a word meaning, in practice, ‘the study of how we know what we know’. Every field has an assumed epistemology. Teaching, Soldiers, Politicians, Engineers, Plumbers, and even psychologists, have a means of understanding causality, and a means of testing themselves. Because each field is limited and includes different kinds of risk and failure, people use different testing criteria for planning and choosing their actions. Teachers for example over rely on written tests rather than question and answer, and therefore test most often for short term memory rather than understanding. This has consequences for all societies, but largely for our political system which relied on rhetorical ability. Protestant churches in the colonial period were effectively debating forums for local social solutions — something that is required of a democratic system. Furthermore, another consequence of teaching methods, that attempts to reduce costs, is that of literally destroying boys minds (physical damage to the brain development) by making them sit for hours a day. (Or by the use of drugs to cause similar brain damage.) This destroys society in doing so, because while girls learn to cooperate through compromise, men learn to cooperate through displays of competition and experimentation with dominance, and if prevented from doing so they will not develop a interest in the real world, fail to take responsibility and have little interest in society. All because of the epistemology of teachers, in an effort to perform ‘efficiently’. (And as fathers they will play world of Warcraft, not because they want to but because during their development they were forcibly harmed by these teachers.) Doctors do not make these kinds of errors. Because the cause and effect of their actions are visible. The cause and effect of political policy, in particular, monetary policy, is likewise opaque, and politicians seek to keep it so. Fire regulations are fascinating, and building codes in particular, because of how few office building fires we have. The cost of construction is heavily influenced by these codes, and has dramatically risen, and both regulations and costs continue to expand despite the fact that they appear no longer to reduce risk. Conversely, firemen still drill and practice on a regular basis which is good, but we still allow tall buildings to be constructed despite the fact that it is dangerous to put many people in a building of more than six stories, that it creates congestion, and in general, research is conclusive, that people don’t like working in them, and that they are unhealthy environments, and heat dissipators and energy consumers. Effective military organizations run drills. Lots of them. The US in particular runs them constantly. Some NATO countries (Hungary) by contrast only allow their soldiers to shoot one to three bullets in all their basic training in order to reduce costs. But in practice, these organizations are symbolic in nature and are incapable of fighting. Partly because fighting in adverse conditions is largely dependent upon the relationships between soldiers built through shared experiences. People are not that smart IN time, but fairly smart OVER time. We can solve problems given time. The only way to reduce the time, which is equivalent to cost, of recovery from failure is to pre-compute, or pre-train people to recover from failure, and in particular in the process of discovering how to recover from failure. If IT management applied the same discipline, they would, once a quarter, create a scenario where three or more elements of their systems failed within a short period, and the staff had to recover from it. This is the approach most military tacticians take to educating their people. There is too often an emphasis on the efficient achievement of goals, rather than on giving people goals and inserting ‘lessons’, or hurdles and obstacles for them to overcome. In IT engineering, risk is rarely stated, because it is rarely visible, despite the catastrophic cost to business. Errors are considered to be functions of the machinery, rather than of the people using and maintaining it. People are considered a cost to be minimized so that more work can be put through them. If a system cannot be assembled and disassembled and tested at every point in the process, then the people cannot understand how to recover it under duress. This mastery by intentional reconstruction is how Formula One racing teams think of the process of engineering. They constantly drill, because of the value of time in racing. IT is this value of time, and its lost productivity cost, that is hidden by IT. furthermore, IT does not report on the problems it solved and the cost of those problems sufficiently to keep management informed and educated on risks. THe converse happens as well, which is that IT is a resistance to change, because the impact of that change is something they don’t understand, because they have spend too little time in drills. Some companies are constantly fighting this battle. Citicorp for example, was a cluster of different banks under one management system and brand name, but not under one infrastructure (I hope I have the bank right here, I am pulling from memory). This meant that in the financial crisis, it was less able to react, because they kept costs down by keeping risk high, by not developing a common infrastructure, both technologically and organizationally. Doctors have extraordinary peer reviews post success and post failure. They spread knowledge by discourse and question and answer. (Part of this is the skill of medical students in analytical thinking and rhetoric versus that of the IT population.) However, the concept of improving people thorough discourse is consistent in their approach. Each patient is a new experiment, having the potential for failure or success and the consequential new learning that comes from either. Retail shops use secret shoppers to test for shoplifting and customer service. The military uses maneuvers, and even uses it’s own members to test it’s own security. IT rarely conducts planned failures. To see how the staff reacts and to educated them. IT does perform upgrades. And for this reason, upgrades and system maintenance are one of the most important means of keeping the staff trained, because they fulfill as similar function to drills and teach the value of redundancy. These assumptions, this epistemology, is different for every little field of specialization. But what happens in each field is that they in turn confuse the methods, practices, tools, means of testing, and general operating philosophy then become assumptions about the nature of the real world, and assumptions about human nature, and even human capability, and in particular human plasticity and adaptability, as well as human learning and understanding. WHen in fact, we must first understand the human animal as the maker and maintainer of complex systems, and that the human animal has very specific properties, none of which are terribly impressive without extraordinary role playing, testing and training in real world (versus written or spoken) conditions, where, they must cooperate toward complex ends, in real time, under conditions of duress. For example, human civilizations are different largely because social orders were initially established by their warriors and their battle tactics. It may seem odd that the east, west, steppe, desert, and mystical civilizations all are caused (Armstrong, Keegan) . It is uncommon that even westerners understand that western battle tactics in europe were heavily based on maneuver (chariots) the required cooperation. Cooperation required political enfranchisement, political enfranchisement led to equality, equality led to debate, debate led to logic, logic led to science and rationalism. This is different from both the tribal raiders, the mystical zoroastrian as well as the chinese familial and hierarchical traditions. An interesting problem for intellectual historians has been why Confucius could not solve the problem of politics and directed the civilization to familial structures instead. Or that the primary difference between east and west is the assumption that our job is to leave the world better than we entered it, that the purpose of man is to transform the word for his utility, that man is the ultimate work of nature, versus the eastern view that our job is to work in harmony with the world, (non-disruption), that humans are somewhat vile by nature, that man is necessarily in class structures, and that truth is less important than the avoidance of conflict (except when it involves barbarians). These differences led to our different concepts of life itself. In IT there is a cultural assumption that the engineers job is to prevent failure, or, to work with the systems without causing additional complexity that increases the probability of failure, or to repair from failure. However, few organizations are structured such that there are drills, and processes by which to recover from failure for the entire purpose of educating the human element in the system. This cultural legacy is largely due to the perceived (although not factual) high cost of IT implementations, largely as a remnant of the fact that during IT’s development, a great deal of research and development, in pursuit of competitive advantage, was conducted in-house, with the resulting failure of research and development programs. In fact, IT infrastructure costs were significantly lower than many previous innovative technologies adapted by business. (In particular, electricity as a replacement for steam or water power.) And by comparison, the calculative burden an uncompetitiveness placed upon companies by antiquated accountancy methods, or government taxation programs, or building codes, are often higher than IT costs. In Europe for example (as well as in California) businesses for small networks, rather than more efficiently combine into larger organizations with lower administrative costs, just to avoid these external expenses. So, this is not only an IT problem, but an executive management problem: the CEO cannot authorize budget for risk mitigation, (nor cover himself by doing so) if the IT management does not understand and quantify the risk, or it’s probability. ( If Executive management does not promote better methods once presented with the information, then the popular revolt is the only real solution (go work somewhere more worthy of your talents that doesn’t reduce it’s cost of doing business by counting on the fact that you’ll live under greater unnecessary stress, and possibly lose sleep and health, or even risk your job, because you were not allowed to engage in preventative activities. Conversely, if you dont provide them with that knowledge, in form and quality at least equal to those provided by sales and accounting organizations then they are not to blame for your inability to do so. They have an epistemology too: which is that they are told many things by many people, and must be able to test these bits of gossip and opinion somehow and only numbers can provide that ability.) IT management has long been criticized for wanting a seat at the table, but not warranting a seat at that table. (Nick Carr) But in general, these people may understand the craft, but often fail to understand the metrics and management of capital in a business, In other words, executives are included for their ability to postulate theories and deliver results. Customer service internally and externally, Risk (Failure Management), Productivity Contribution by the improvement of competitiveness, and Cost OF SErvices, are all criteria by which IT organizations should be measured. From the “ultimate question” for customer service, to cost of service, all of these are measurable. But you cannot judge that service if the management does not adequately measure it, and report on it, so that the executive management of the organization is capable of understanding and making decisions that support IT’s mission. Think of how much information the Accounting (history) and Finance (future) organization gives to the CEO. THink about how much the Sales organization gives to the CEO. THink of how LITTLE marketing organizations tend to give by comparison, and think of how much less than marketing, the IT organization gives. The respect and influence that a function of the company has over the distribution of resources in the company has largely to do with the metrics that it provides the management team. And how much exposure to risk the IT organization inserts into the business by failing to see the management of complex systems as one of engineering rather than one of human development and the testing of humans for failure, and the measurement of humans in their ability to recover from failure. Just as public intellectuals try to change public opinion to influence policy, by the use of narrative and argument, as well as data and it’s interpretation, because they need to help people think differently who have previous intellectual assumptions and biases dependent upon the methods and tools that they use in daily life and then apply outside of that domain of experience, IT management, and to some degree, the staff, must look at the underlying assumptions both in IT and in general business management and develop the discipline internally to experiment with failure, in order to teach the human component of complex systems, how to react in short time periods, while at the same time, using metrics and measures to inform the policy makers in executive management, so that they can intelligently and rationally make decisions about the allocation of resources for the purpose of creating profit (a measure of our use of the world’s resources), and the reduction of risk, so that all members of the organization, who are choosing to invest in this stream of income and friendships and knowledge at this organization, instead of an alternative stream of income, friendships and knowledge at another organization, can reduce the risk and cost to themselves in the event of failure of those estimates of risk. It’s all economics after all.

  • is writing a posting on “Marketing Is A Social Science”

    is writing a posting on “Marketing Is A Social Science”

    Source date (UTC): 2009-01-30 20:05:00 UTC