When you say you “prefer to assume”, [what] do you mean?
4
I mean that making assumptions as I suggest leads to a much more satisfactory model of the issues being discussed here. I don’t claim my viewpoint is closer to reality (though the lack of an omniscient Omega certainly ought to give me a few points for style in that contest!). I claim that my viewpoint leads to a more useful model—it makes better predictions, is more computationally tractable, is more suggestive of ways to improve human institutions, etc. All of the things you want a model to do for you.
And I’m pretty sure that the people who first invented it were driven by modeling motivations, rather than experiment. Mathematical techniques already exist to solve maximization problems. The first field which really looked at the issues in a systematic way was microeconomics—and this kind of model is the kind of thing that would occur to an economist. It all fits together into a pretty picture; most of the unrealistic aspects don’t matter all that much in practice; bottom line is that it is the kind of model that gets you tenure if you are an Anglo-American econ professor.
Really and truly, the motivation was almost certainly not “Is this the way it really works?”. Rather it was, “What is a simple picture that captures the main features of the truth, where “main” means the aspects that I can, in principle, quantify?”
When you say you “prefer to assume”, do you mean:
you want to believe?
your prior generally favors such? What evidence would persuade you to change your mind?
you arrived at this belief through evidence? What evidence persuaded you?
none of the above? Please elaborate.
not even 4 is right—my question is wrong? Please elaborate.
4
I mean that making assumptions as I suggest leads to a much more satisfactory model of the issues being discussed here. I don’t claim my viewpoint is closer to reality (though the lack of an omniscient Omega certainly ought to give me a few points for style in that contest!). I claim that my viewpoint leads to a more useful model—it makes better predictions, is more computationally tractable, is more suggestive of ways to improve human institutions, etc. All of the things you want a model to do for you.
But how did you come to locate this particular model in hypothesis-space? Surely some combination of 2 and 3?
I read it in a book. It is quite standard.
And I’m pretty sure that the people who first invented it were driven by modeling motivations, rather than experiment. Mathematical techniques already exist to solve maximization problems. The first field which really looked at the issues in a systematic way was microeconomics—and this kind of model is the kind of thing that would occur to an economist. It all fits together into a pretty picture; most of the unrealistic aspects don’t matter all that much in practice; bottom line is that it is the kind of model that gets you tenure if you are an Anglo-American econ professor.
Really and truly, the motivation was almost certainly not “Is this the way it really works?”. Rather it was, “What is a simple picture that captures the main features of the truth, where “main” means the aspects that I can, in principle, quantify?”