Re:An Infinite Regress. Of Dumb: More Reflections on “Market...
by mikeash on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @09:29AM
(#9217709)
You seem to have completely missed my (and Asimov's) point about how there are degrees of wrongness.
Newtonian mechanics may not be 100% accurate but it's extremely accurate for a wide range of real-world, useful scenarios, to the extent that any discrepancy with reality is often beyond what can be measured. For example, the Pioneer Anomaly was a discrepancy of a few thousand kilometers in distance, over a total distance of more than a billion kilometers. This was still enough to prompt a lot of investigation, and the problem was finally solved by properly accounting for photon pressure from thermal emissions from the spacecraft itself. This is a discrepancy on the order of parts per million that could not only be detected but was considered extremely significant.
I get the impression that economists, on the other hand, are ecstatic if their theories are within even 1% of reality. That's a whole different class of wrongness.
Newtonian mechanics may not be 100% accurate but it's extremely accurate for a wide range of real-world, useful scenarios, to the extent that any discrepancy with reality is often beyond what can be measured. For example, the Pioneer Anomaly was a discrepancy of a few thousand kilometers in distance, over a total distance of more than a billion kilometers. This was still enough to prompt a lot of investigation, and the problem was finally solved by properly accounting for photon pressure from thermal emissions from the spacecraft itself. This is a discrepancy on the order of parts per million that could not only be detected but was considered extremely significant.
I get the impression that economists, on the other hand, are ecstatic if their theories are within even 1% of reality. That's a whole different class of wrongness.