Posts by wiredtinker12

Honestly, those women can be such absolute vultures. Especially Kimberley Conrad—she wouldn't give Hefner the divorce he needed, so the poor guy had to find solace with those twenty-year-old twins, Shannon and her sister, just so he could finally pull off marrying 24-year-old Crystal Harris.

All this drama just gets me in the mood for some opera again—I mean, the whole situation is laid out in such a black-and-white, operatic way, it’s almost theatrical. It makes me wonder if the Commendatore might actually show up at Hefner's wedding banquet. "Don Giovanni, te co m'invitasti," you know? 😬

Man, back in the day, male womanizers actually knew how to go down to hell with their sins intact, just like they were supposed to! But now? Now they all pretend to be saints, while calling women names because they won't give them what they want... honestly, they're all just pushovers and total losers.😠😁

And if we're talking about her, people today would probably just claim she was only hanging out with that guy for his money.😳😉

Gregory Nelson6 said:Mises's core argument against trying to define economic laws through math is pretty simple: human action belongs to a fundamentally different category of phenomena than physical objects reacting to force.

The people obsessed with using mathematical models in economics just can't accept this as truth.

Mainstream economic theory focuses entirely on answering one question: "What should we do to make the community's economy better?" In this view, "abundance" is strictly limited to material things like houses, cars, or cash.

Alternative economic theory asks a different question: "What allows an individual to gain freedom and live their life exactly how they want to achieve better economic outcomes?" To this school of thought, abundance includes anything a person might find worth spending their limited resources on—whether that’s material goods (houses, cars, money) or non-material things (friendship, peace of mind, love, esotericism, metaphysics, or even a moment of nirvana).

It’s easy to see why mainstream theory tries to reduce everything to math: they believe nothing exists beyond matter, so they don't bother looking any deeper.

Alternative economic theory doesn't claim there's some mystical force governing economic relations; it just refuses to take a hardline stance on whether such a thing exists. Its role is simply to identify the patterns that emerge within the economic interactions of individuals and groups, without passing judgment on their value.

That doesn't mean human action shouldn't be subject to moral judgment; it just means that economic science isn't tasked with doing it.

But honestly, what even is the foundation of morality? For all we know, what we call "morals" might just be one long, repeated game that happened to hit an equilibrium at certain points—though there's absolutely no guarantee it won't be totally disrupted down the road by things like technological breakthroughs or shifts in society, right? In that sense, Game Theory actually goes way beyond standard economics; it acts as this unique bridge for behavioral sciences, linking them back to biology through evolutionary game theory, heading toward what Herbert Gintis calls "sociological game theory." In that framework, people aren't just these perfectly rational, selfish robots—because let's face it, that's just not how reality works. Humans are capable of altruism and all sorts of other behaviors that you simply can't explain away using nothing but pure rationality and egoism. At the start of his preface, Gintis quotes John Maynard Smith: "The mathematics and natural sciences are sterile, yet natural science without mathematics is muddled." Economics sits right in that sweet spot between the natural and social sciences, so it really ought to be the first among the social sciences to actually get a better handle on aligning theory with experimentation—because right now, the field feels like it hasn't moved much compared to how the natural sciences stood 300 years ago. Some theories align pretty well with "experimentation" (meaning the data, whatever form it takes), while others... well, others are just straight-up alchemy.

Yeah, basically you have to account for the possibility that your statistics are just plain wrong—that your sample size is garbage, your data is thin and sketchy, or you’ve messed up the entire distribution... 🙄

You can't just lean on stats alone; you've got to bring in some common sense and actual intuition. The real question is which one ends up winning out. It’s not exactly rocket science to try and prove something that’s obvious to anyone with eyes, but I think that's kind of the point—using a model to smash through the biases of "common sense" or intuition to find some fresh insight that actually lets you make a better prediction. Or, conversely, using common sense to toss a model aside because it just doesn't apply to specific, real-world conditions. So, either way, you need a bit of basic logic and a much broader perspective than what you'd find in the mathematics and natural sciences. Math isn't enough on its own. But then again, you can't go without it either, because if you do, you just fall into this "scholastic," oversimplified pattern that you're stuck in—you lose the ability to break out of it.

Why on earth would you think we can't bake uncertainty right into a mathematical model? I mean, look—the entire foundation of Quantum Theory is built on exactly those kinds of models (which is why some people just hate them, but honestly, there's nothing better). It’s just like how people make "unpredictable" decisions; certain subatomic particles act like they have a mind of their own, too, where they might decide one thing with one probability and something else entirely with another. The point is, you *can* determine those probabilities if you know the initial conditions. Even if we can't pinpoint exactly what’s going to happen, we can at least map out a bunch of possible scenarios based on that uncertainty—and assign a probability to each one—so we can build a strategy accordingly. That’s literally how things are done!

And now we’ve got this situation where the hard scientists are basically spitting on the social sciences because they aren't "exact" enough—claiming they only offer "middle-range theories," as E. Pusić used to say, rather than grand, universal ones like Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. But that doesn't mean those kinds of theories won't emerge eventually; in fact, it's impossible to reach true Artificial Intelligence without using mathematical models. If people had always thought like this: "Hey, my dear Galileo, who cares if all objects fall at the same rate due to gravity when everyone knows a rock is going to hit your head much harder than a feather," where would the natural sciences be today? Simply put, we have robust natural sciences because of that mindset, and we’ll eventually have social sciences that hold up just as well. Then we'll finally know if Keynes was an Aristotle or a Galileo—which doesn't take away from the value of an Aristotle, or even a Keynes, in the first place.