By: libertarian

libertarian — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:03:46 +0000

I guess the problem with current Austrian theory is that it doesn’t connect well with the natural sciences, especially physics. The arguments seem to be valid, well though-out but still – it is not science if you are unable to predict anything specific. I personally hope that one day Austrian economics will unite with the natural sciences and diverge from the rest of social junk science. However, a quantum neuroscience of economy might well be out of the reach of the capacities of the human mind. We will have to wait for the damn robots to resolve this one… :-)

By: Snooty Physicists « Mad Man or Slave

Snooty Physicists « Mad Man or Slave — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:29:57 +0000

[...] See also Peter Klein and comment for a more thought-out reply. [...]

By: Rafe Champion

Rafe Champion — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:20:46 +0000

It is a pity that Feynman was not aware of praxeology where laws have been discovered. He might have rejected dogmatic a priorism but he should have accepted the idea of well tested laws that explain things and stand up to tests, after all his main crit of the social sciences as he saw them was lack of laws and lack of rigor in testing their theories.
“Maybe Feynman is too hard on the social sciences. It is helpful to remember that physicists restrict their predictions to model systems, otherwise they settle for explanations in principle. We can explain in principle the trajectory of leaves that fall off a tree but nobody would be expected to predict which ones will end up in the street and which will fly up on to the roof and block your gutter. Similarly in some areas of the social sciences (those that are not pure ideology and verbalism) we can predict tendencies, such as increased prices due to import restrictions, without being able to predict the size of the increase due to the many other factors that are involved in setting prices”. (from this review http://www.amazon.com/review/R8AWEOKSD2JPM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm).
Feynman had contempt for philosphers as well as social scientists and it seems that was a natural crtical rationalist, or Popperian.The scientism that Hayek subjected to criticism is a false philosophy of the natural sciences, so the critique is in a way a sustained non sequitur. It is a criticism of false ideas but not of the hypothetico-deductive approach which is equally applicable (at a meta level) to the natural and the human sciences , using the term science in the original sense of organised knowledge or systematic learning, with no mystique and misunderstanding borrowed from misperceptions about the success of physics.

Comments on: Feynman on (Quantitative Empirical) Social Science

By: libertarian

By: Snooty Physicists « Mad Man or Slave

By: Rafe Champion