Comments | paulhope: Critical Review Seminar, apology

paulhope

Critical Review Seminar, apology

Jul 20, 2005 18:00

Ok, this is one and a half of the things I told myself I'd do.

First,
Q: What is this Critical Review thing I keep talking about? (For those who haven't picked it up from context)

A: I'm not sure. My understanding is that the Critical Review is a classical liberal/libertarian political journal (not to be confused with Brown's student-written ( Read more... )

community, retrospective, jeffrey friedman, rent control, critical review

Comments 18

ode_to_tapirs July 21 2005, 03:43:26 UTC

I can't tell when shit's flying. I usually just think people are trying to be funny.
And name calling's a sure indication of friendly intentions!

ode_to_tapirs July 21 2005, 04:21:11 UTC

PLUS "hands on experience"...clearly a dangerous phrase

polishcyclist July 21 2005, 09:36:12 UTC

Yeah, maybe I'm misconstrueing the tone of comments, but I don't think that people are in a huff. See no shit flying. Sharp elbows, maybe, but not much more than that. I think. Anyway, I'm going to craft a response soon (have to copy txt onto laptop, run away from ecafe, type response, come back to ecafe, copy response...saving pennies).

paulhope July 21 2005, 13:54:57 UTC

Hmm. It looks like I'm just too...damn...sensitive...*cries*

anonymous July 21 2005, 21:33:34 UTC

“claims of mathematical certainty with respect to social phenomena”(seb ( ... )

I still disagree... paulhope July 26 2005, 04:01:08 UTC

When I wrote this, I didn't mean to imply that you were coming to the defense of a particular policy and were taking mathematics as its justification--we are in agreement on most of these issues, I think. My problem is with saying that anything about the real world (i.e., outside of formalism) can be known with mathematical certainty.

So I think that it's provable--mathematically certain--that within the formal system of mathematics and with functions and variables labeled as they are in microeconomics that the variable called utility decreases when the variable called price is fixed below the point where the functions called supply and demand are equal, etc., etc.

But I think the mathematical certainty breaks down immediately once you attempt to use this as a model of real thing. Like prices, as they actually exist in the marketplace, for example. At this point you're necessarily fitting a formal model onto an unformal reality and even if the correspondence were perfect, it would not be known to be a perfect with mathematical ( ... )