Consequences

[koganbot]

I have a whole bunch of notes written down that didn't make it into my most recent Department Of Dilettante Research thread (which you should look back at, since byebyepride made a couple of late comments that I've been thinking about

Comments

[martinskidmore]

1) It's not very dilettante if all they research is economics, surely

[koganbot]

(1) Well, there can be all sorts of ways of doing economics, and different ways of doing it that you bring to it from, say, psychology or physics or sociology or political science. I don't know if sociologist Duncan Watts (iirc he started in either biology or physics) and economist Paul Krugman pay much attention to one another, but they both think about cumulative advantage and I would very much like to learn more of what they know. My point about the economics guys are that they're paying attention to each other, fairly detailed attention when necessary. "Dilettante" could be a gimmick to get them to pay attention to people like me, even if they'd have to hold my hand or hire me a tutor to get me through the math parts of their courses. I'm someone who has no concentrated expertise in any recognized "discipline" (I don't mean that as self-denigration; I think people who know about me and aren't paying attention to my ideas or asking my input on theirs are missing a whole lot; but nonetheless, I'm not the one to ask in order to get

[martinskidmore]

I have a reasonable understanding of chaos theory (but not as it relates to economics, which I imagine it does), and a special interest in the related complexity theory, particularly how it might apply to evolution, but I know almost nothing about cumulative advantage - nothing really any more useful than "the rich get richer" and similar phenomena