General

Re: Fear and loathing in academia

AJ — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:27:25 GMT

Partly because of this.

Re: Fear and loathing in academia

xahrx — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:58:38 GMT

Prateek Sanjay:
Why is that all these PhD types are so viciously hostile to each other? And just how is it that economists, the people who claim to be a kind of scientists, resemble more warriors of some religious fundamentalism rather than rational skeptics of any and every idea.

Because they're not really scientists. At least not in the common understanding of presenting a falsifiable theory and then testing/modifying/abandoning it as needed. No scientist is really that kind of scientist, because all scientists are human. Some branches of science adhere more to that ideal standard because there's no real money to be made in their field of study nor political points to be scored. No one cares about you if you study frog shit in eastern Illinois. Economics? Well politicians can use that to justify their idiocy. Climate Science? Well if we're all gonna cook what a covenient excuse that provides for politicians for the B they want to do anyway. Generally speaking, the more tied to politics the field, and the less that field truly presents a possibility of the ideal, the more assinine the practitioners will be. Climate Science and Economics are two perfect examples. Each has profound political/social implications, but because of epistimological and practical concerns about the ability to set up controled experiments, neither can present a falsifiable theory to test either. Similarly, they both rely on moronic models that do more to reflect the biases of the modelers than describe reality. And predictably, they are both corrupt to the core.

Re: Fear and loathing in academia

Smiling Dave — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:32:30 GMT

liberty student:

Prateek Sanjay:
It's all about learning and ideas, right?

We'd like to believe so but frequently it is not.

It's about money and power. And not just in economics.

Re: Fear and loathing in academia

liberty student — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:03:46 GMT

Prateek Sanjay:
It's all about learning and ideas, right?

We'd like to believe so but frequently it is not.

Fear and loathing in academia

Prateek Sanjay — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:01:09 GMT

Why is that all these PhD types are so viciously hostile to each other? And just how is it that economists, the people who claim to be a kind of scientists, resemble more warriors of some religious fundamentalism rather than rational skeptics of any and every idea.

There's a large bunch of articles on Paul Samuelson coming out in the papers lately, and what many economists are saying about him and the work they did along with him and other economists makes me feel that these are a very oppressive people to each other.

An article by Subramanyam Swamy tells that Paul Samuelson was held back at Harvard, because he was a Keynesian. The Harvard economics department did not appreciate people who proposed Keynesian ideas, and would shut them out as much as possible. Swamy, who was his student, would himself become a pariah elsewhere.

Subramanyam Swamy, a self-proclaimed opponent of government control and intervention, went back to India to become a professor of economics. However, Amartya Sen, who was the dean of the state-sponsored university, found out that he was a pro-market thinker, and thus did everything possible to push him as down below as possible. It was a rather unfortunate thing, and Swamy simply could not bear to be in India, where was pushed out for being a radical. He went back to US and worked at MIT, but got the chance to come back to India again when another university gave him an offer. And yet, the prime minister of India herself tried to prevent his return, pressuring the dean of the other university to not let him come back, lest her state-funded institute end up becoming a breeding ground for dissent against her policies.

All the same, Amartya Sen himself wrote an article, dedicated to Samuelson, where he claims that members of the Left such as him, have been persecuted by "market fundamentalists" and that there is a need to have people who look at facts and not ideologies. His point may be legitimate, but one wonders why he still is the way he is, with respect to the fact that he tried to browbeat Swamy. Why not apply it to oneself? Of course, this article that he wrote recently tries to show Milton Friedman and his Chicago School as people who have tried to destroy dissension, and interestingly, similar complaints have been made about Friedman by Keynesians like Stiglitz and Galbraith's son.

And this too, that Keynesians claim to be a victimized minority, even though they have had strong influence on public policy, seems ironic, because they don't like dissent either. Much of their efforts are in pushing down or ignoring anyone who seems like a "market fundamentalist" and so on.

So it's like everybody is a victimized minority in academia, and they all have lobbied against other groups wherever they have been powerful. Instead of cementing such divisions, why don't they all be okay with working with each other? People are not constant with opinions. Thomas Sowell was a Marxist who became extremely pro-market. It's all about learning and ideas, right?