Eric Weinstein: Economic Thinking In A Fallible World
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- Опубліковано 21 чер 2014
- By Marshall Auerback
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that we cannot know empirical truths with absolute certainty.
According to Popper, even scientific laws can't be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt. They can only be falsified by testing. One failed test is enough to falsify, but no amount of conforming instances are sufficient to verify. Scientific laws are hypothetical in character and their truth remains subject to testing. Ideologies that claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by force.
This concept creates particular challenges for economists, who like to think of themselves as "scientists" subject to the disciplines of rigorous empirical truths. But economics and economic policy don't work that way because empirical economic truths typically are open to interpretation.
The reality is far more complicated. In situations with thinking participants, the participants' view of the world is always partial and distorted. So our view of the world by necessity is fallible and incomplete. In addition, these distorted views can influence the situation to which they relate because false views lead to inappropriate actions, as we've seen in many different spheres, such as policy making, central banking practices, and investment decisions.
Eric Weinstein of Thiel Capital, a mathematician, physicist, and economist, explains these issues and their potential consequences in the interview.
Eric Weinstein IMHO is the most brilliant mind in the IDW by far. He's a spectacular thinker across many fields, and the best living critic of today's media. He needs a far larger audience because he's this generation's Marshall McLuhan. Weinstein is more solid in his commonsense and his high-level abstraction ability than Peterson or Harris by far.
Well said.
his convo w rubin peterson and shapiro make them all look like big dummies, particularly shapiro.
You did mention the top 3 of the group, that is certain
The guy is a charlatan, and he has all of you fooled, as well as himself.
I clicked on this video because of Marshall Auerback’s reference to Karl Popper in the title. After watching it, I was surprised that there was no mention of Popper in the interview. Concerning Popper, I do have some severe criticisms:
1) Auerback state’s Popper epistemological position incorrectly. It is not that we can never know if a scientific proposition is true with complete certainty. Instead, we can’t say if a proposition is true at all. All we can know is that it hasn’t yet been disproven.
2) We cannot disprove a proposition with one counter-example. Instead, our confidence in the proposal decreases with each counter-example until we lose all faith in it and discard it as useless.
3) A proposition is a mere pseudo-science if we cannot formulate it clearly enough to be disproven.
4) I am skeptical if Eric Weinstein’s economic formulations utilizing physics and highly complicated mathematics can be disproven.
5) My hypothesis: this whole video was a charlatan’s exercise in pseudo-science. (By the way, my idea can be falsified by showing how Weinstein’s formulations can be disproven.)
Weinstein makes me want to study Mathematics.
He makes me regret why I did not study Mathematics!!!
How are we going to incent humanity and its corporations and institutions to properly deal with the astonishing amount of waste and trash it creates? It seems as if organic compost ought to be our most valuable commodity.
There’s a lot of self important SHITE talk in this comment section.
I wonder could the Organic Compost revolution, recycle Sophists and Bullshitters ??
I'm ready to try
white balance isn't the same on the 2 cameras...... Eric is a genius
He is right. Economists are terrified of Knightian Uncertainty. Whereas Physicists seem more comfortable with embracing Heisenberg's Principle. Both disciplines fail of course to capture it all though don't they :)
gmshadowtraders it depends ofcourse what you mean by that, it’s a triumph of scientific knowledge to know that the uncertainty principle exists as a limit in the first place despite being a limit, in that sense the uncertainty principle is itself a ‘known unknown’, whereas Knightian uncertainty refers to ‘unknown unknowns’. That’s not to say Physics is entirely devoid of the latter but just that the uncertainty principle isn’t the case in point.
Also Physicists must be comfortable with the uncertainty principle because it’s a precise mathematical statement about the structure of nature which is objectively verifiable, they have no choice but to accept it to the extent that experimental observations verify it, which they do very well.
Fiber Bundles?! Holy crap!
Wow, please make it Clear , how the Banking System is So Corrupt......
Friends laugh whenever I assert that truth is 'tentatively final' (my oxymoron)! Below is a poem I wrote - it explains why we can never be 100% certain of any truth - or for that matter, of any lie!
Addressing the Truth
Address the truth!
Nor dress nor cover but bare her beauty
Naked to the bone!
Nurse, suckle, covet
And fete her; too oft the virginal youth
Pines alone!
But know, though
Truth is tentatively final - her fount
And mount
Want certainty of one
Osmotic-thin and diaphanous line
Betwixt truth and lie!
Lawrence Chew
6 April 2014
You seem like a narcissistic pervert.
@@pinksalt1057 You do so too.
Sorry Dude, the poem is shit.
Go get laid, then write poetry.
All or most poets were sex mad.
E Weinstein, S Harris, G Soros and even this interviewer are all personifications of Disassociated Ideologues.
Anyone who’s voice doesn’t resonate form their Belly, is living a half life. They are seriously Disconnected in their own body.
Just observe any of the four I’ve mentioned, they have a dead, lifeless, zombie like demeanour.
It’s very unlikely that a half alive, Disassociated Ideologue will contribute anything to any field.
The Disassociation is symptomatic of low functionality and all the High Brow Intellectualism is just compensation.
It’s not the case that people do not understand the genius, it is the case that the intellectualism is a cover for personal inadequacies.
Big Gestures = Small Penis.
Epic Weinstein
info mapping. what if we incetivized behaviors so that the collective behavioral flux could be modeled fractally or self similarly?
Buenísimo
OK, who stole the interviewer's stapler?
I think he was missing his black/white board in the end haha. Explaining mathematics in words can be difficult.
Shit. I am missing so much information needed to make sense of this for the most part. Any recommended reading?
I don't think most people will make sense of it. Seems like a lot of advanced math(PhD level) stuff applied to economics
there is also the land economics of Henry George that was inconveniently ignored by the neoclassical neoliberals. most of the classical liberals agreed land value tax was the least worst tax. Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson. so did Milton Friedman. Einstein was also a fan. so, make sure that makes it into your TOE-E (theory of everything economical) tensor equations.
Mathematics is gods language
God: I took algebra 4 times
Yeah,New Economic thinking ? - Give it all to the Hedge fund managers who can now tart it up in all manner of spangly,glittering numbers.
STINE NOT STEEN...BRO!
There is never going to be a realistic economic model. All models are simplified representations of a system...How many types of agents should we introduce into the model to make it realistic? 2, 5, 10, 100, 1000 or 1000000? Perhaps, it depends on the question you want to answer. Maybe some questions do not depend heavily on the heterogeneity of agents in the model...
dude is a genius
Modelling behavioural economics AND reflexivity deterministically (even in stochastic deterministic) terms in order to find a solution that actually *predicts* (with some degree) market moverments sounds like an impossibility.
BTW, Quantum mechanics is NOT deterministic , Schrödinger equation is a deterministic solution that gives useful predictions, but it is NOT equat to quantum mechanics NOR does it prove that QED is deterministic (in classical or stochastic sense).
I wish I was smart enough to understand half of what this dude says.
you can be, if you study! No one is this smart without aquiring knowledge every single day. It sounds like a cliché but it is true! :-)
most of what they talk is already embedded in modern macroeconomics. Its is amazing how they are proposing key aspects of mainstream macro as new ideas (heterogenous agents described by a distribution). The beliefs part of the reflexivity thing they are talking is part of all microfinance model (through noisy rational expectations, a la Grossman and Stiglitz). The only new part that I can see is the dynamic taste thing whose magnificent relevance I still fail to see (I should check it out for sure, there may be something truly new there). Even that idea I would imagine that has been contemplated by decision theorists, but I am not sure. I like the spirit of what INET is doing but in their videos they are alway criticizing a straw-man version of economics.
What of the CPI bulldog presupposition that consumers wants are static and univariant and its echoing effects on inflation analysis? Whether or not the ideas are new isn't as important as where they aren't being implemented.
@@1Plebeian How can consumer wants be univariant when they are all encompassing? People want everything. How can they be static when new products are constantly emerging?
@@dontaskme9047 exactly
Did you forget the microphones?
Please plug in your earphones or turn on your speakers.
@@NewEconomicThinking Pl enable subtitles or captions in English.
I’ve been saying this for years. 😁
Probably not
These are the virtual markets of derivative traders, whose maths comes from their Phys. PhD to start with ;-)
It is fantasy even. It is real as a boda. But is maybe a geopolitical issue
All he left out is the classic differential bi-singsong quantum hotdog whippywham but with an inverse booger picking offset to level out the diarrhea viscosity.
Weinstein and the interviewer seem like they are trying to sound smart by explaining pretty simple, and by no means new, concepts in ornamental language and by making elevating comparisons. This sort of thing disguises some of more vacuous assessments, such as that heterodox economists have not unified around a single, simple model. Heterodox economics is a broad category, unlike neoclassical economics, which is built around an almost religious ideology. The heterodox school is small, not because of breadth, but because it is made up of an attempt to bring back philosophical traditions that were systematically excised from learning institutions in the twentieth century--political economy, history of economics, and the purging of Marx from curricula. Much of what Weinstein is saying is that he is building mathematical models that distill principals about price movement from available time and price curves. Perhaps he is using other sorts of data, like mentions of keywords in news media, etc. However, unlike the mathematics of general relativity, which models the behavior of matter and space, investment mathematics is modeling distribution of information (a social process), social and business psychology, and historical events. So, he's just doing a bit of engineering work, coming up with some predictive mathematical relations that work in certain types of historical situations. But he associates it with fundamental science to give make the work sound profound. In actuality, it's theories of political economy that have proven the most profound in describing fundamental relationships in economics despite not having the two the nano-second pricing prediction powers of the type of thing that Weinstein is describing. If Einstein were doing this kind of mathematical modeling work, he wouldn't be trying to elevate it with the same level of pretense, trying to leave you with the impression that the modeling of historical and social events using empirical data was a similar type of thing as work in the physical sciences just because both use predictive mathematics. Am I being a jerk for saying this, for being weirded out by the pretense on display? Kudos for the callout on modern economists not being schooled well in true multivariable calculus.
I also was not impressed with this conversation and thought it was a bit pretentious. I don't think we are jerks. I don't expect any amazing revolutionary ideas to come from this.
say whaAAT????
Does Eric have a glass eye, or can he use them independently one hemisphere each, perhaps sometimes wishing he had two mouths and 10 arms and hands? Watch around 13:51
A lazy eye I believe.
Can someone mention any practical suggestions Eric has made to improve the economy or quality of life? I'm sure he has but I always hear him talking theory and have never heard any practical suggestions for improvement to anything.
His calculation of CPI would capture real inflation and force the government to update benefits.
It would also make your fixed rate mortgage cheaper in real terms, and wages could be higher.
And it would disincentivize the FED of printing more money to bail out rich guys
For anyone looking to join a discussion group - make sure to answer the entry questions
facebook.com/groups/Bret.Eric.Weinstein.PARTY.CANOE/
*Austrian economics has entered the chat*
I usually enjoy Eric's topics he's a very smart guy, but I was unaware he works for Peter Thiel... That is a bit disappointing.
How so? I only started to take Eric seriously once I found out he works for Peter Thiel.
Weinstein and Clinton sitting in a tree....