Michelle Starr — Tomorrow The Definition of The Kilogram Will Change Forever. Here's What That Really Means

This is a big deal even though it won't be noticed by most people. However, precise measurement essential to science and measurement involves application of metrics defined by criteria. The units and their criteria are arbitrary. There was no such thing as a kilogram prior to the development and introduction of the metric system. Same with other measurement systems. The "trick" is to establish a constant criterion in a relative universe. That is as close to an absolute as human can construct. This post explains how the issue has been approached in physics.

Of course, a great deal more precision can be arrived at through physics than other science, which strive to use the measurements developed by physics in so far as possible, but physical measurement is applicable only to quantity. Measuring quality presents greater challenges. So do psychological "dimensions."

Science Alert
Tomorrow The Definition of The Kilogram Will Change Forever. Here's What That Really Means
Michelle Starr

Natalie Wolchover — First Support for a Physics Theory of Life

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”...

Quanta
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life
Natalie Wolchover | Senior Writer

David F. Ruccio — Science and socialism

"It's doesn't take an Einstein," although Einstein did put his finger on it.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Science and socialism
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Jason Smith — How do you know if you're researching in bad faith? A handy checklist.

10 points checklist.

If you don't follow it, then you either don't know what  you are doing as a scientist, or you are pushing an agenda and not disclosing it, or you are fooling yourself.

Information Transfer Economics
How do you know if you're researching in bad faith? A handy checklist.

Jason Smith

Compare Richard Feynman:

 The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. —  adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 343

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.  "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 342

All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however. For example there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell.

Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science. — "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345

rousseau1214 — Science and Induction

Induction.

Gedanken zur Geschichte
Science and Induction
rousseau1214

Fiona Macdonald — Russian Researcher Illegally Shares Millions of Science Papers Free Online

Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

"Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,"Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. "Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. 

Russia Insider

Russian Researcher Illegally Shares Millions of Science Papers Free Online
Fiona Macdonald

Sputnik — China to Create Super-Collider Double the Size of CERN's

China is planning to build the world's largest super-collider. According to China Daily, scientists have already completed an initial conceptual design of the mega facility. With construction slated to begin as early as 2020, the super, super-collider will be double the size of the Switzerland-based CERN LHC, with seven times the power.…

I guess they can "afford" it.

Sputnik
China to Create Super-Collider Double the Size of CERN's

JR Barch — … On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]

There are three major fields of thought or areas, before our consciousness, present in the mind:

1. Science – including education

2. Philosophy – great conditioning ideas

3. Psychology – what is man essentially, and how does he function?

The first two deal with the proper use of the mind and intellectual faculty – the power of discrimination – so that correct knowledge arises from correct perception, correct deduction, and correct witness (accurate evidence). Governments around the world commit a grave crime against humanity by LYING in order to sustain their particular ideology. So does the advertising and entertainment industries. No parent would LIE to their children if they wanted their kids to grow up with a clear mind and right habitual use of the mental faculties; and to be in touch, inside of themselves, with a sense of integrity, dignity and self-respect, extending to others. People forget that it is our behaviour towards one another, based on the inclusivity and universality of the sense of self, that determines what happens in the world; the ideologies are not necessarily compelling. It depends upon whether or not we are willing to be slaves, to whatever mind says. Or to put it in other words, whether or not our relations with ourselves and others come from a deeper place, free of all ideologies, because they are centred in the greater reality of being.…

Inspecting the foundation. If a foundation rests on granite, an edifice built on it can be strong. If  foundation is set in sand, any edifice built on it will not only be weak but also dangerous.

heteconomist
… On Raising the Level of Collective Consciousness [I]
JR Barch

Why Won't More Scientists Peer-Review Reality? Citizens Too.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Scientists are hopless. Not THAT beer reviewed journal, silly. I mean ones critical for democracy.

Let's get serious.

Why do our rulers carry out winning political campaigns in trashy tabloids ... rather than peer-reviewed journals? :(

Prof. Brad Lewis notes that "I think many economists just ignore it because it's not in the peer-reviewed stream" - which brings up fundamentally interesting questions about power, politicians and scientists.

And overall, that's just not good enough. After all, if war is too important to be left to the generals, surely every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

So why won't more scientists peer-review reality?

In science programs, we're taught everything about science, except WHY to pursue it, and how best to leverage it for mankind. That's stunning, if you stop and think about it.

Rulers & politicians like their scientists meek, malleable, and above all else, submissive.

Pair that with how little it takes to bribe & neutralize scientists & academics, and you have our quasi-feudal NeoLiberal state.

Here's my contention:

'The most important question in every science field - in fact in every human discipline - from day 1, may well be:

"how do we coordinate current & emerging knowledge in each discipline, with current & emerging knowledge in all disciplines?" '

That, after all, is how aggregates evolve.

Move over combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial Cultural Evolution is demanding it's due. Or else!

Let's drill down a bit deeper into this same topic.

Why don't more scientists use "Design of Experiments?" There are some fundamentally solid reasons in key instances (i.e., when experimental space or "policy space" includes discontinuities such as phase-changes, rather than smoothly extrapolated functions), but let's leave that question to later. The bigger & more immediate conclusion is that asking why more scientists don't use "Design of Experiments" is a relatively trivial question - asked most frequently by investors and accountants.

The far bigger question?

Why don't more citizens at least refer to Design of Experiments - and constantly enlarging perspective - when trying to run their [supposed] democracies?

That's a far more fundamental question, and the answer is known. Our entire education system, from top to bottom, trains citizens to seek overly simplistic solutions to a series of increasingly complex tasks. Doh!

Increasingly, our schools stunt, trap and enslave students intellectually, rather than setting them free. If that doesn't change, we can't change, fast enough. Specifically, our Adaptive Rate won't meet the demands of an accelerating Future Shockwave - unless we fundamentally & continuously improve our K-12 schools, so that all citizens act like owners of democracy, and practice contributing to where we're going, instead of leaving it to a small bevy of sociopathic "owners" practicing Central Planning.

If we don't selectively increase our rate of interactions .... we're dishonestly making a mockery of the scientific method, and of evolution.

We already know that aggregate evolution is leveraging the increasing inter-dependencies among growing numbers of components, across multiple levels of organization. That's why we have molecules, cells, cell-types, organs, physiologies, human cultures, and multi-nation alliances.

The way all aggregates handle an unpredictable stream of transient contexts is by reconnecting everything to everything, on-demand, before transiently settling into a relaxed organizational state continuously tuned (but not over-tuned) to a given context. That's exactly what we do every night when we go to sleep. Upon waking every morning, we've done the best we can to make sense of yesterday's data deluge, and interpret it per ongoing models ..... OR ... we've determined that it's time to re-assess everything (which we do mainly by replacing parent models with offspring models).

It seems reasonable to conclude that national aggregates of humans need a sample/assess wake/sleep cycle every bit as much as our personal aggregates of CNS neurons do. If citizens don't do periodic After Action Re-assessments at a quite fundamental level, then we don't have a democracy. Worse, if we don't educate and train citizens to be up to that frequent re-assessment task, then we can't have a democracy.

Daniel Little — Science and decision

Science is uncertain•; and yet we have no better basis for making important decisions about the future than the best scientific knowledge currently available. Moreover, there are powerful economic interests that exert themselves to undermine the confidence of the public and our policy makers in the findings of science that appear to harm those interests. How should we think about these two factors, one epistemic and the other political? The first lays out the reasons for thinking that some of our most confident theories may in fact be erroneous; the second makes us worry that even strongly credible science will be undermined by corporate and financial interests....

Understanding Society
Science and decision
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Science is uncertain in several respects. First, science knowledge is uncertain in the sense of being tentative. Science involves general description, which can be falsified but not definitively confirmed. Secondly, since science is empirical it can only approach probability 1 as a limit. Science is essentially skeptical. Thirdly, no theoretical explanation can be shown to be the "best" explanation possible, only the optimal one available at the time.

This relates to the raging discussion that Paul Romer began with his post on "mathiness." It's still raging.

Steve Randy Waldman — Endogenize ideology

Oldie but goodie that is just as relevant if not more so, since the situation has gotten worse than rather than better.

Paul Krugman understands this stuff. He is in general very sensitive to the political and ideological ramifications of policy choices. Throughout the Bush administration, he highlighted some of the dynamic that brought us from prickly consensus to nasty division. For example, there was the fabulously successful strategy of governing incompetently while using each failure as evidence that government action cannot help but be corrupt and inept. Heckuva job, Brownie!

However, many of Krugman’s professional colleagues really do treat ideology or “political constraints” as given, and perform the exercise that economists perform reflexively, starting with their first grad school exam: constrained optimization. Constrained optimization is a mechanical procedure. The outcome is fully determined by the objective function and the constraints. A party that understands the objective function and can shape constraints controls the outcom….

Economists in particular are disdainful of ideology, on the theory that ideology implies bias and constraint, while optimality requires unconstrained choice. But that is misguided on multiple levels: 1) Supposing the economist could (counterfactually) be non-ideological, the human agents that she studies are subject to ideological biases and constraints, and our non-ideological economist will fail to be a good scientist if she fails to take those into account; 2) The economist is human, and ought to grapple explicitly with her own biases and instinctual constraints, if she is to have any hope of countering them and approximating “unconstrained” choice among available hypotheses and policies; 3) Despite an economist’s best efforts, the true, unconstrained space of models and hypotheses plausibly consistent with evidence is always too large to be exhaustively searched and sorted. Ideology, individual and institutional, will always shape economic conclusions to some extent, and economists ought take responsibility for that and think critically about the effect of their ideology on the polity whose choices they help to shape.

It is childish, and wrong, to imagine that acknowledging the ideological aspects of ones work and self makes one less trustworthy or more dangerous than those whose work is equally ideological, but who mistake their ideology for objectivity or truth and who therefore deny any role for ideology. Many of history’s most dangerous ideologues have been “true believers”, and others have pretended a “scientific” perspective while advancing claims we now recognize as ideological. Being acted upon by, and acting upon, prevailing ideology are part of what it means to be human. It is not just the province of economists or policymakers, or a fabrication of Svengalis in the propaganda ministry. Nevertheless, politicians and economists and other “opinion leaders” probably do have disproportionate influence over ideological change. As far as I’m concerned, they (we) ought to be doing a better, more careful, and more conscious, job of it.

"Ideology" is a bit of loaded terms. Set of assumption, explicit, implicit and hidden, for example, general presuppositions, suffices.

The chief assumption of economics as science is that the observer is a neutral "black slate." To the degree that the observer is well-trained as a scientist, the observed is a mirror of reality free of subjective bias. The findings of psychology and cognitive science contradict this assumption as does elucidation of philosophical logic.

This is a 17th and 18th century Cartesian view that Antonio Damasio demolished in Descartes' Error, for instance. Scientists are not Spock. Cognition and affect are not separate processes in the brain but rather are entangled.

Moreover, the language we use to express thoughts to ourselves and to communicate with others are context-based, and context is both culturally determined and shaped by individual priors, most of which are not entertained consciously. There is no independent observer acting as mirror of reality.

Formalization and criticism can assist in increasing clarity, economy, and precision of thinking and communication, but they cannot hurdle human epistemic boundaries. Rationality is bounded to a greater degree than Herbert Simon realized. Humans are prisoners not only of affect, context and previous impressions, but also they cannot know fully what they do not know.

The second assumption is about the nature of human agency. Economics assumes homo economicus, while findings of social science strongly suggest that this is a fiction. Homo economicus is a picture of economists assumptions about themselves, that is, Spock as atom-like, freely making perfectly "rational" choices.

These assumptions do not accord with reality, and probably most economists would admit it. However, they claim that this is a modeling convenience and the model produced is close enough to provide useful enough information than other methods much more precisely.

This is really what the dispute is about. It was recently ignited by a paper of Paul Romer and the debate it elicited. Romer was accusing some other economists, notably Robert Lucas of being ideological rather than scientific through his use of what Romer called "mathiness," a takeoff on Colbert's "truthiness" as a similar criticism of the media.

The upshot is that methodology, which the mainstream has sought to banish from the debate as an already settled issue, is back. It's long past time to get the assumptions and presuppositions on the examination table and look at them under the microscope, as other disciplines do. Economists that reject or remain aloof from this debate are being not only ideological but dogmatically so.

There is nothing wrong with any assumptions or any model. All models are only representational to a degree without being replicas, and all models, even wildly wrong one, can teach us something. Humanity began its journey with some wildly wrong models, but eventually hit up the scientific method and began the process of refining both models and modeling. However, what is necessary is being circumspect in using models not merely as tools but as guides.

Models with dubious or demonstrably wrong assumptions are unlikely to be adequate when a representational model is called for regardless of the syntactical construction of the model in terms of consistency and economy. Models whose outcomes are called into question by events cannot be considered accurate regardless of the degree of precision achieved syntactically.

Experience shows that economists seems to be tempted to use models either for ideological purposes or based on ideological bias. For example, can it be coincidental that liberal and conservative economists' findings  are almost always respectively liberal or conservative when dealing with similar context, issues, and data.   

Interfluidity
Endogenize ideology
Steve Randy Waldman

Arjun Walia — Quantum Entanglement Verified: Why Space Is Just The Construct That Gives The Illusion Of Separate Objects

On of the fundamental and enduring questions involves the relationships of metaphysics and reality. Does reality provide the foundation for knowledge, or does knowing determine reality. These is the distinction between realism and idealism. Then other option is skepticism, which denies the ability to know this.

Science has been weighing in on this since it's inception. For example, the discovery of optics strongly suggested that what is perceived and identified as "reality" is a confluence of perception and conception that occurs through the operation of the nervous system. The ancients had anticipated this through experience of the senses declining with age. Cognitive science is revealing not this works at a much more refined level. But consciousness is still and unexplained mystery from the scientific point of view, even though it is the primary given as the locus of all experience.

The discovery of quantum mechanics placed the philosophical question on an entirely new level, which different scientists viewed differently. The people involved where classically education and were well of the aware of the philosophical disputation that had been going on since ancient times without resolution. Different scientists took different positions.

The debate continues and the concept of quantum entanglement, aka action at a distance, is germane to it. This latest search suggests that quantum entanglement is testable and preliminary results are positive. Now the question is what the implications of this for the philosophical debate may be.

Collective Evolution

Quantum Entanglement Verified: Why Space Is Just The Construct That Gives The Illusion Of Separate Objects
Arjun Walia

Lord Keynes — The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism

It is high time that the Left dispensed with and put an end to the fashionable nonsense that is Postmodernism (or “Poststructuralism” as the French intellectual movement which gave rise to it was originally called).

I can, incidentally, speak on this subject from personal experience. When I was an undergraduate I learnt a lot of this Postmodernist nonsense myself, and encountered it frequently at university, but I had the great benefit of learning a considerable amount of analytic philosophy (an acid under which Postmodernism dissolves) and listening to, and reading, no-nonsense Leftists who always understood it for the idiocy that it was and still is.

This subject is relevant to economics, because there are some actual Post Keynesians who seem to think that they can adopt a serious “Postmodernist” methodology and epistemology as a foundation of Post Keynesian economics. This, in my view, is a terrible delusion.…

The logical issue involved is criteria, a subject which underlies both meaning and truth as the necessary grounds for communication.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
The Left needs to abandon Postmodernism
Lord Keynes

See also

Steve Keen on Yanis Varoufakis

Mark Buchanan — Arrow-Debreu Derangement Syndrome

Imagine you had never read any textbook economics, or studied any academic research papers. You didn't know the THEORIES of economics, especially in their mathematical form. But suppose you did know some mathematics, and were also generally well informed about the realities and complexities of real world economies. Now, suppose a demon sat you down and made you read and study the famous theorems concerning the existence of a competitive economic equilibrium as developed in the 1950s by Ken Arrow and Gerard Debreu. What would you think? 

My belief is that you would quickly conclude that these theorems probably held little or no importance for understanding any real world economic system. If the demon tried to tell you that these theorems were at the very core of today's theoretical approach to (much of) economics, you'd think he or she was joking. If the demon insisted, you'd suspect you were dealing with an insane demon; and if you discovered the demon was right, you suspect the economics profession of being deranged. At least I would...

I've never yet been able to understand why the economics profession was/is so impressed by the Arrow-Debreu results. They establish that in an extremely abstract model of an economy, there exists a unique equilibrium with certain properties. The assumptions required to obtain the result make this economy utterly unlike anything in the real world. In effect, it tells us nothing at all. So why pay any attention to it? The attention, I suspect, must come from some prior fascination with the idea of competitive equilibrium, and a desire to see the world through that lens, a desire that is more powerful than the desire to understand the real world itself. This fascination really does hold a kind of deranging power over economic theorists, so powerful that they lose the ability to think in even minimally logical terms; they fail to distinguish necessary from sufficient conditions, and manage to overlook the issue of the stability of equilibria.

The Physics of Finance
Arrow-Debreu Derangement Syndrome

Mark Buchanan

Diversity Minus Selection Is Meaningless - Just Stockpiling Static Assets

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

In 1929 [Leslie] White ... realized that socialism was the alternative to capitalism, which was in serious trouble through the 1930s.

A critical attack from Maxim Gorky, claiming that White was not a Marxist and not a Communist but a bourgeois evolutionary scientist who dealt with human problems only through science"

Now THAT is academic infighting! :) Wow! Would that still be classified as criticism today? Sadly, yes, in many circles, for diverse reasons.

How do you get people to explore their options?

Well, first you have to circumvent their life-threatening taboos.

I'm liking this Leslie White. Sounds like he recognized how deeply our processes were flawed, but never quite figured out how to do anything objective about it. 

What tipped him off? One hundred thousand years of exquisitely adaptive & evolving tribalism?

What do you do when you subconscious tells you that NOTHING we are doing currently is accelerating selection, and instead is only building up surplus diversity .... which we may, might, SOMEDAY, maybe actually select from?

What'd Walter Shewhart say? That data minus context is meaningless?

Then simple algebraic substitution leaves us with the following:

"Diversity minus selection is meaningless."

You want a case in point?

Let's start with the axiom that adaptive rate is always the rate-limiting issue, in every profession, within every culture.

So, in all seriousness, what avenues and methods would have triggered a far faster change in economic textbooks, teaching and policy advice?

Note that the recent Bank of England summary of operational reality came 81 years after Marriner Eccles finally took the USA off the gold-std and completely reinvented the FED.

81 years? Seriously?

We'd still be working on the Atomic bomb if physicists worked that slowly!

Some university physics departments probably wouldn't even be teaching relativity or quantum mechanics yet!

If other disciplines shared information that slowly, half of practitioners in relevant fields wouldn't know about DNA, or turbo-charged engines, or autism ... or most other operational advances.

Didn't the UK go off the gold-std a few years before the USA did? I have no idea how much the BoE changed, relative to FED adaptations. Given that the UK also went to a fiat currency, the main adaptations were presumably similar, from the get-go?

Personally, I think that that the topic of Adaptive Rate in Academic Economics is deserving of one helluva serious review paper, targeting the state of economics education. Objectively measured, it's adaptive rate might be honestly estimated at near zero.

Plus, trying to standardize academic economics research & teaching across national policy regimes is mal-adaptive, by definition.

Philip Pilkington — Some Personal Reflections on Contemporary Economic and Scientific Indoctrination

The new religion — science. Same as the old religion when used normatively and prescriptively.

However, to the degree that C. P. Snow is  right about the two cultures, science and the humanities, quite a few people read in the humanities rather than science and come to opposite conclusions. I was one of the latter.

One path leads to materialism and reductionism and the other to humanism and holism.

There is no barrier to their integration, however, other than rigid thinking.

Fixing the Economists
Some Personal Reflections on Contemporary Economic and Scientific Indoctrination
Philip Pilkington

Jared Horvath — The Replication Myth: Shedding Light on One of Science’s Dirty Little Secrets

In a series of recent articles published in The Economist (Unreliable Research: Trouble at the Lab andProblems with Scientific Research: How Science Goes Wrong), authors warned of a growing trend in unreliable scientific research. These authors (and certainly many scientists) view this pattern as a detrimental byproduct of the cutthroat ‘publish-or-perish’ world of contemporary science.

In actuality, unreliable research and irreproducible data have been the status quo since the inception of modern science. Far from being ruinous, this unique feature of research is integral to the evolution of science.

Scientific American
The Replication Myth: Shedding Light on One of Science’s Dirty Little Secrets
Jared Horvath
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Merijn Knibbe — Malinvaud on how USA economists increasingly dismissed measurement

One of the problems of the economics curriculum is that very little attention is paid to measurement. And indeed, academic economists generally know little about this as most measurement is carried out by specialized statistical institutes. What about the history of this regrettable situation? The French economist Malinvaud (and long time head of the French statistical institute INSEE) has a nice metric on how USA economists increasingly dismissed empirical economics (let alone actual measurement) and turned to a-empirical ´high theory´ littered will ill-defined variables instead:

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Malinvaud on how USA economists increasingly dismissed measurement
Merijn Knibbe

Lord Kelvin: “Science is measurement.”

Science is distinguished from philosophy and other speculative thought based on reasoning in that first principles are rejected in favor of empirically determinable assumptions as starting points and empirical testing of hypotheses is based on measurement of observables in accordance with rigorous experimental methodology. Thought experiments are only heuristic devices and cannot be taken as in anyway definitive scientifically. 

Is much of conventional economic modeling actually thought experiments masquerading as definitive scientifically? Is the result social, political, and economic speculation — "philosophy" — rather than science, whose results have an empirical warrant in addition to a logical pedigree in a deductive system based on assumptions?

And, Ironically, We Already Know That Most Of What's Taught In ALL History Is Incorrect!

(Commentary by Roger Erickson)

Yes, all history is at least slightly wrong, directly, or at least indirectly, based on false premises.

I finally watched this Big History Project introductory video.

Pity there isn't yet a similar one specifically for our our own, recent history of political-economics, since propagation of wrongly-taught parts of that history still grossly distorts our current policy choices. That last outcome, of course, is pushing us to needlessly bet the national farm (esp. the MiddleClass) and run untold Output Gaps, all based on faulty understanding of our historical path and the present situation it delivered us to.

Why is all history wrong?

Need you ask? All, "science" is merely a derivative of the Latin word 'scientia,' for knowledge or "knowing" - as opposed to merely thinking or believing. The entire "scientific method" is merely a graceful approach to conflict resolution, for the older, highly violent competition among ideologies (aka, religions).

Most research projects, PhDs and Nobel Prizes are dedicated to disproving what we had previously thought proven.* Live with it. It's called doubt & uncertainty, and it's what we, as Context Nomads, have insane amounts of fun migrating through.

Science is ENTIRELY the practice of further discriminating between what we THINK we know, and what we're SURE we know.

That process, by definition, can never end.

So will we ever truly KNOW our own history?

The more we chase it, the more we extend it! :)

ps: Semantics is also raising it's confusing head again. If we'd just rename the ENTIRE concept of "science" as "Doubt vs Certainty" - then we'd solve untold arguments, worldwide, and alleviate untold man-hours uselessly diverted to them. Then maybe we'd get somewhere from here, sooner.

* Yes, discussing real data is still often verbally violent, but I haven't yet seen the orthodox try to burn Mosler at the stake :) - they've only enforced excommunication. Obviously, they don't want to talk about it. :)

Maybe a movie series called "Warren Mosler and the Aggregate Demand" is in order. Featuring a surprise backlash ending, with Warren himself as "He Who Must Not Be Named."

The Economist — How science goes wrong

It's not just economics.

The Economist
How science goes wrong
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)