IMO most of the strong arguments for libertarianism (as a set of policies) are consequentialist ones by economists.
Do any of these economists have a consistently successful track record of prediction? Remember, this is a field where opinions of serious economists on the recent stimulus package ranged from “it won’t have any effect” to “it will make things worse” to “it doesn’t go far enough”.
Economists talking about large-scale political structures should be assumed to lack credibility until proven otherwise via actual, consistent predictive results.
EDIT: Requesting clarification on why this comment was voted down to −2. Robin has posted repeatedly on many experts’ allergies to predictions. Have I made a mistake in my conclusions here?
lesswrong is not completely there yet, but it’s steadily heading toward reddit’s “downvote to disagree”. It’s a natural consequence of reddit-style comment up/down-voting system, don’t think about it too much.
Strongly disagree about “don’t think about it too much,” but upvoted for pointing out this important problem. Everyone: upvote for useful discourse, not agreement!
“don’t think about it too much” as in “don’t think about things you cannot affect”. Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.
This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it’s smaller problem than “downvote to disagree”, but I have no strong evidence about it.
Do any of these economists have a consistently successful track record of prediction? Remember, this is a field where opinions of serious economists on the recent stimulus package ranged from “it won’t have any effect” to “it will make things worse” to “it doesn’t go far enough”.
Economists talking about large-scale political structures should be assumed to lack credibility until proven otherwise via actual, consistent predictive results.
EDIT: Requesting clarification on why this comment was voted down to −2. Robin has posted repeatedly on many experts’ allergies to predictions. Have I made a mistake in my conclusions here?
lesswrong is not completely there yet, but it’s steadily heading toward reddit’s “downvote to disagree”. It’s a natural consequence of reddit-style comment up/down-voting system, don’t think about it too much.
Strongly disagree about “don’t think about it too much,” but upvoted for pointing out this important problem. Everyone: upvote for useful discourse, not agreement!
“don’t think about it too much” as in “don’t think about things you cannot affect”. Unless you want to go and convince Eliezer to remove downvoting and leave only upvote and report links like on Hacker News.
This will leave more garbage in the comments of course, I think it’s smaller problem than “downvote to disagree”, but I have no strong evidence about it.
Unless or until we get separate voting for “agreement” vs. “quality”, as people have mentioned a few times.
Listen to Robin Hanson discuss this phenomenon on EconTalk. Starts with half-hour monologue by presenter, but I find the presenter quite interesting too.