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poslushnik September 27 2012, 23:22:45 UTC
This guys resume is pretty impressive, as a quick googling reviels. I do not understand why have this discussion at all when you can check persons credentials. User shwarz admits he is not familiar with field of economics, but when real life economists such as user gaus or hiring comittee at UCLA share theirs, he is not happy either.

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shvarz September 28 2012, 01:46:32 UTC
We never really had a discussion about his credentials. Most of the discussion was focused on the meaning of my short comment, which arbat and stas misinterpreted multiple times.
I have nothing against UCLA, although that is not a foolproof criteria on its own either. For example, Peter Duesberg, a famous AIDS-denialist, is a professor at UC Berkeley.
And with gaus we talked about the content of the paper, not about credentials.

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poslushnik September 28 2012, 02:53:41 UTC
Thats a good point. I've heard economists say similar thing about Krugman: he fully deserves Nobel price for his research, but as a specialist on real world economics he is no more qualified than you or me.

Its a pity the discussion was so much centered around your comment, it would have been really interesting to read substantive discussion of his bias scale. My impression is that it was an honest attempt to develop a fair scale, and other economists tend to like it as such (hence publication in a strong journal, etc.).

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arbat September 28 2012, 03:20:22 UTC
I agree with one correction: the discussion didn't just centered on something on its own. Someone had to initiate that with a shallow and stupid attack.

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shvarz October 1 2012, 13:21:26 UTC
You never really know what the reviewers said and their number is so small that it's hard to judge whether economists in general really did like it based just on the fact of publication. A re-use of the system is a much better indicator - since 2004 how many political scientists or economists used the system in their research? Did it produce results consistent with some alternative methodologies? Or did it provide useful information that helped move some other research along? That would have made a much more convincing case than just pointing to the fact of publication.

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arbat September 28 2012, 03:15:55 UTC
"And with gaus we talked about the content of the paper, not about credentials."

Actually, it was gaus who talked about the content, since he was the one who read it.
You offered an opinion of a third party.

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