It’s not called econ 101 because it’s the only material you need.
Engaging with previous work on the subject is just like any other way of being less wrong—if you’re already convinced you’re right, it feels like a tedious box to be checked with no chance of influencing your conclusions. Yes, there is some signalling value to me, but the signalling has value precisely because I assign high probability that there is relevant, important prior work here. (EDIT: where “here” largely means the monetary policy bits, though I would still be positively signalled by some reference-dropping on the cultural stuff).
This seems somewhat reasonable, but there are some caveats here:
If the field contains a bunch of errors (like psychology), then citing work in the field is likely to add more noise than signal, unless you have good filtering criteria. At some level of badness, you are not much worse off searching through the Library of Babel than the literature. The LessWrong sequences sometimes cited social science findings (e.g. the Robbers Cave Experiment) that are in serious doubt due to the replication crisis, e.g. the Robbers Cave Experiment was basically p-hacked. They would have been better off just referring to common-sense social intuitions.
Among academic fields, IMO economics is on the worse end. There are a bunch of common barely-justified assumptions (e.g. that GDP is good, unemployment is bad, and people use something like CDT) that, while they could be true, are actually counterintuitive on a first-principles analysis. On the outside view, you would expect lots of disinformation in a field as highly political as economics. I basically don’t trust things I read in economics papers except (a) things I can check myself, (b) reports of basic facts about the world (e.g. that some country’s oil exports increased in some time period), and (c) math results that I would expect peer review to catch errors in. (I’m not saying there isn’t good literature out there, just that you have to do your own reasoning to check which of it is any good; see He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune).
That said, I think this particular post largely overlaps with Modern Monetary Theory, and would have benefited by noting this similarity. (I doubt that this would have actually changed the post’s conclusions, though)
There are a bunch of common barely-justified assumptions (e.g. that GDP is good, unemployment is bad, and people use something like CDT) that, while they could be true, are actually counterintuitive on a first-principles analysis.
Oskar Morgenstern (who, with John von Neumann, formulated the VNM utility theorem) is a good source for this sort of thing. (See “Does GNP Measure Growth and Welfare?” [PDF], The Limits of Economics, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations.)
It’s not called econ 101 because it’s the only material you need.
Engaging with previous work on the subject is just like any other way of being less wrong—if you’re already convinced you’re right, it feels like a tedious box to be checked with no chance of influencing your conclusions. Yes, there is some signalling value to me, but the signalling has value precisely because I assign high probability that there is relevant, important prior work here. (EDIT: where “here” largely means the monetary policy bits, though I would still be positively signalled by some reference-dropping on the cultural stuff).
This seems somewhat reasonable, but there are some caveats here:
If the field contains a bunch of errors (like psychology), then citing work in the field is likely to add more noise than signal, unless you have good filtering criteria. At some level of badness, you are not much worse off searching through the Library of Babel than the literature. The LessWrong sequences sometimes cited social science findings (e.g. the Robbers Cave Experiment) that are in serious doubt due to the replication crisis, e.g. the Robbers Cave Experiment was basically p-hacked. They would have been better off just referring to common-sense social intuitions.
Among academic fields, IMO economics is on the worse end. There are a bunch of common barely-justified assumptions (e.g. that GDP is good, unemployment is bad, and people use something like CDT) that, while they could be true, are actually counterintuitive on a first-principles analysis. On the outside view, you would expect lots of disinformation in a field as highly political as economics. I basically don’t trust things I read in economics papers except (a) things I can check myself, (b) reports of basic facts about the world (e.g. that some country’s oil exports increased in some time period), and (c) math results that I would expect peer review to catch errors in. (I’m not saying there isn’t good literature out there, just that you have to do your own reasoning to check which of it is any good; see He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune).
That said, I think this particular post largely overlaps with Modern Monetary Theory, and would have benefited by noting this similarity. (I doubt that this would have actually changed the post’s conclusions, though)
Oskar Morgenstern (who, with John von Neumann, formulated the VNM utility theorem) is a good source for this sort of thing. (See “Does GNP Measure Growth and Welfare?” [PDF], The Limits of Economics, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations.)