Yes, economics after von Neumann very much turned into a game of “don’t believe in anything you can’t already comparatively quantify”. It is supremely frustrating.
I disagree that this is a problem that Tyler Cowen has, and IMO, the main issue here is that Tyler Cowen doesn’t really seem to believe that increasing the supply of workers increases GDP, especially if you can make them very cheaply and easily, in a way that is inconsistent with other beliefs, which makes me think motivated reasoning is going on here.
Economic models like the Solow-Swan model do have an implication that if the population increases, especially if the population can increase very rapidly due to copying something, then GDP can rise really rapidly on an superexponential trajectory.
You just inspired me to go listen myself. Maybe we should all take a node out of that branch. Unfortunately physics has suffered similar issues.
Physics’s main issue is that the free tap of data in the 20th century wasn’t unlimited, and now that we have completed the standard model, a lot of the theories that predicted new stuff hasn’t shown up yet.
Yet it still has made progress. For example, while supersymmetry might still be true about our universe, it cannot solve the hierarchy problem, and thus at least 1 of the constants is way more unnatural to us than people predicted, and also we have hints that dark energy is getting weaker, and might eventually weaken so much it falls to 0 or a negative number.
Two, the EPR paradox is resolvable in modern physics by allowing non-locality in entanglement, but having a no-communication theorem that prevents exploiting it to break special relativity.
I didn’t say he wasn’t overrated. I said he was capable of physics.
Did you read the linked post? Bohm, Aharonov, and Bell misunderstood EPR. Bohm’s and Aharonov’s formulation of the thought experiment is easier to “solve” but does not actually address EPR’s concern, which is that mutual non-commutation of x-, y-, and z-spin implies hidden variables must not be superfluous. Again, EPR were fine with mutual non-commutation, and fine with entanglement. What they were pointing out was that the two postulates don’t make sense in each other’s presence.
I disagree that this is a problem that Tyler Cowen has, and IMO, the main issue here is that Tyler Cowen doesn’t really seem to believe that increasing the supply of workers increases GDP, especially if you can make them very cheaply and easily, in a way that is inconsistent with other beliefs, which makes me think motivated reasoning is going on here.
Economic models like the Solow-Swan model do have an implication that if the population increases, especially if the population can increase very rapidly due to copying something, then GDP can rise really rapidly on an superexponential trajectory.
Physics’s main issue is that the free tap of data in the 20th century wasn’t unlimited, and now that we have completed the standard model, a lot of the theories that predicted new stuff hasn’t shown up yet.
Yet it still has made progress. For example, while supersymmetry might still be true about our universe, it cannot solve the hierarchy problem, and thus at least 1 of the constants is way more unnatural to us than people predicted, and also we have hints that dark energy is getting weaker, and might eventually weaken so much it falls to 0 or a negative number.
Cowen, like Hanson, discounts large qualitative societal shifts from AI that lack corresponding contemporary measurables.
Einstein was not an experimentalist, yet was perfectly capable of physics; his successors have largely not touched his unfinished work, and not for lack of data.
While it is interesting at first glance, some caveats are called for here.
One, Einstein’s achievements were sort of overrated, see these comments for details:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSBCw94DsxLgDat6r/interpreting-yudkowsky-on-deep-vs-shallow-knowledge#6HPjxMvTnP9JeibXZ
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSBCw94DsxLgDat6r/interpreting-yudkowsky-on-deep-vs-shallow-knowledge#icmCewLmXnxgtmANP
Two, the EPR paradox is resolvable in modern physics by allowing non-locality in entanglement, but having a no-communication theorem that prevents exploiting it to break special relativity.
I didn’t say he wasn’t overrated. I said he was capable of physics.
Did you read the linked post? Bohm, Aharonov, and Bell misunderstood EPR. Bohm’s and Aharonov’s formulation of the thought experiment is easier to “solve” but does not actually address EPR’s concern, which is that mutual non-commutation of x-, y-, and z-spin implies hidden variables must not be superfluous. Again, EPR were fine with mutual non-commutation, and fine with entanglement. What they were pointing out was that the two postulates don’t make sense in each other’s presence.