
Human intelligence and the environment (2010) - chestervonwinch
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20100930.htm
======
nisa
"This all happened under the impact of a kind of fanatic religious ideology
called economics -- and that's not a joke -- based on hypotheses that have no
theoretical grounds and no empirical support but are very attractive because
you can prove theorems if you adopt them: the efficient market hypothesis,
rational expectations hypothesis, and so on. The spread of these ideologies,
which is very attractive to concentrated wealth and privilege, hence their
success, was epitomized in Alan Greenspan, who at least had the decency to say
it was all wrong when it collapsed. I don't think there has ever been a
collapse of an intellectual edifice comparable to this, maybe, in history, at
least I can't remember one."

This is something we need to talk about. It's true. The german
"Ordaliberalism" is at work in the greek debt crisis at this moment. I'm sure
there is some superficial mathematics at work to prove the ideology. But where
is the criticism?

So Ask HN: Where is the macroeconomics rooted in scientific principles and
empiricism? I'm sure it's there but policy makers don't look like they see it.
Everyone is talking about big-data... where are the papers that prove or
disprove economic theories? We have the data. Let's be scientific and kick out
ideology like all did with the "Deutsche Physik[1]" \- it's time for it.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik)

~~~
icanhackit
If we could plot the life of a dollar or credit we could create a science of
money. Could something like the blockchain offer the opportunity to build a
solid theory of money by mapping transactions? I imagine the blockchain, as it
is now, is a bit of a mutant given transactions are limited to select goods
and services, however if it was widely adopted as a transactional ledger by
banks we could better understand how money flows.

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deciplex
It's interesting to think that very probably during the lives of many of the
people on HN, we're going to see some pretty massive geo-engineering projects
on a global scale. Probably 2040-2050 or thereabouts, once the basic fact of
climate change is utterly undeniable to even the loudest idiots.

A decade or so after that we should have our verdict whether intelligence is
truly a lethal mutation, or not. Of course it's still only a sample size of
one - Mayr's argument has little to do with the Drake equation.

------
myth_buster
The following comment is quite thought provoking and stayed with me for quite
a while:

    
    
      intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation
    

Video snippet:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBqPiSpgVA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzBqPiSpgVA)

~~~
hellbanner
Marine biologist explores this in the sci-fi Blindsight, suggesting that self-
awareness is an evolutionary hiccup that in the long-run wastes resources that
could be spent towards building a better species. See: ants, for example.

