my original formal education was in comp sci (i dropped out and later was reborn into interdisciplinary agroecology), so i came in with all of my math requirements completed, even through grad school. basically every professor and researcher i worked with on every project, i had more advanced formal math training and better fundamentals than 90% of the primary investigators and 95% of the research teams. the only ones at peer level were engineers on modeling teams.
i can say, no exaggeration, the worst math skills consistently belonged to economists. it was even a joke among them: “what do you call an accountant who is bad a mayh? an economist.”
but they loved to trot out their little model equations they used to describe relationships, but couldn’t actually be used for math. their little curves and lines along axes without values, like a playmobile car or airplane they pretend can fly by holding it aloft, moving it through space, and making engine noises.
The accounting math joke is absolutely correct. And it’s even more damning given that we accountants don’t actually do any complex math beyond what a clever 10-year-old could do.
The economists are the only “science” that runs on ceteris paribus which is fancy talk for “rotating an economy in my mind”. Even if you accept the premise of it being a science and classify it as a social science where there’s some more vibes based shit going on none of the other social sciences do this because it’s nonsense
i dropped out and later was reborn into interdisciplinary agroecology
No way, that’s awesome. I work with agroecology researchers all the time, they’re some of the coolest people I know. Never thought one you green-thumb, grass-touching wizards would be on this site.
I thought that was also the profession of that one power poster who I think has a pitbull named Sasha in a ski mask, but maybe they’re some other kind of ecologist.
I have an ambient awareness of how meaningless some of their charts and so-called models are, but do you have a good source for explaining the matter more thoroughly?
How I usually think of it:
Economics as a field in bourgeois society is really just a set of assumptions at basis, and built from these models and theories that never utilize deep skills in any other field to deepen those theories. This, because it is constantly wrestling with making the basic assumptions fit to basic models which hold up to any significant amount.
So you get napkin graphs which could really be described better as “there’s a point where efficiency decreases per piece as you produce more with a given set of conditions”. But they draw it out for some reason, and try to calculate that using basic data.
But they also constantly reevaluate the conditions and how they effect how the assumptions combine/interact (oh the means aren’t being utilized well enough, so that’s why our curve fails in many cases) without ever considering a major change to basic assumptions.
This is hard on all fields–confronting failures in basic assumptions. But other fields do it eventually because their goal is explanatory power. Economics has as a goal contributing to economic success (as measured by bourgeois) above a truth about how it objectively works so they never have to confront it
my original formal education was in comp sci (i dropped out and later was reborn into interdisciplinary agroecology), so i came in with all of my math requirements completed, even through grad school. basically every professor and researcher i worked with on every project, i had more advanced formal math training and better fundamentals than 90% of the primary investigators and 95% of the research teams. the only ones at peer level were engineers on modeling teams.
i can say, no exaggeration, the worst math skills consistently belonged to economists. it was even a joke among them: “what do you call an accountant who is bad a mayh? an economist.”
but they loved to trot out their little model equations they used to describe relationships, but couldn’t actually be used for math. their little curves and lines along axes without values, like a playmobile car or airplane they pretend can fly by holding it aloft, moving it through space, and making engine noises.
The accounting math joke is absolutely correct. And it’s even more damning given that we accountants don’t actually do any complex math beyond what a clever 10-year-old could do.
The economists are the only “science” that runs on ceteris paribus which is fancy talk for “rotating an economy in my mind”. Even if you accept the premise of it being a science and classify it as a social science where there’s some more vibes based shit going on none of the other social sciences do this because it’s nonsense
No way, that’s awesome. I work with agroecology researchers all the time, they’re some of the coolest people I know. Never thought one you green-thumb, grass-touching wizards would be on this site.
I thought that was also the profession of that one power poster who I think has a pitbull named Sasha in a ski mask, but maybe they’re some other kind of ecologist.
I have an ambient awareness of how meaningless some of their charts and so-called models are, but do you have a good source for explaining the matter more thoroughly?
How I usually think of it: Economics as a field in bourgeois society is really just a set of assumptions at basis, and built from these models and theories that never utilize deep skills in any other field to deepen those theories. This, because it is constantly wrestling with making the basic assumptions fit to basic models which hold up to any significant amount.
So you get napkin graphs which could really be described better as “there’s a point where efficiency decreases per piece as you produce more with a given set of conditions”. But they draw it out for some reason, and try to calculate that using basic data.
But they also constantly reevaluate the conditions and how they effect how the assumptions combine/interact (oh the means aren’t being utilized well enough, so that’s why our curve fails in many cases) without ever considering a major change to basic assumptions.
This is hard on all fields–confronting failures in basic assumptions. But other fields do it eventually because their goal is explanatory power. Economics has as a goal contributing to economic success (as measured by bourgeois) above a truth about how it objectively works so they never have to confront it