Maybe it’s because you physicists have only one label, “science.” No physicist is going to stress to the public that some significant claim of theirs is speculative. It’s only after a claim has fallen into disrepute that a physicist will come out and spin it in a negative light. Up until that point, it’s spun in total confidence.

And good reasons aren’t good enough to blur the distinction between speculation and science. So, yeah, it’s your and your colleagues fault.

That’s the beauty of math, isn’t, compared to physics? In math they have words like conjecture, that they use liberally. Mathematicians don’t get away with nothing, no matter what good reasons they have to believe some conjecture is true.

We phyisicsts talk about crazy things all the time–extra dimensions, black holes, quark confinement, wavefunction collapse, conservations of momentum, the Earth moving around the Sun.

I am trying to make sense of this statement. Are physicists talking about a crazy thing such as “the Earth moving around the sun?” I just don’t understand if this is a revisionist history trying to make Coperniucus a physicist or if modern Doctors of Philosophy who call themselves physicists are still debating if the earth moved around the sun? Strange.

But the claim that “extra dimensions” is an “hypothesis that we’re driven to by the constrains put upon by the data” is simply a lie. I hope that Sean will correct this error.

Way too much economic analysis, as far as I can tell, involves taking a multivariate data set, never plotting it, running it through a regression with a generic linear combination of variables, and announcing that the correlation coefficients show how some factor “explains” some fraction of the variation. Sort of the opposite of “plot data as you take it” and cautioning that a curve is only a “guide to the eye” or that a formula is purely “phenomenological.” I’d like to see econometric analysis done on some data from classic physics experiments. How about trying to understand a transistor from an econometric analysis of I-V data? Then design an amplifier based on the economic model, and see how it sounds..

Edward Tufte has written a very nice analysis of a particular piece of Economists’ reasoning.

Zippy and Physics

Anyway, when one sees how the Fed manipulates interest rates, e.g., raising them when the economy reaches “full employment” with an unemployment rate of around 4%; how workers’ wages are considered to be inflationary but corporate profits are not – despite productivity increases, and how glibly the Fed ignores asset inflation, first with the stock market during the late 90s and then with the housing market subsequently, then one quite unapologetically can say, screw this, the system is not run for the good of the country, but for the good of those who have power; and right now the constituents of the Democrats have power. One cannot be the only part of the democracy that is not shouting “me, me, me, me” and looking out for the general interest. Either everyone looks out for everyone; or else, let the competition of the various factions decide which “me” gets its way.

The data is notoriously difficult to pin down on this and many other economic problems. Its quite easy to find cases where a raise in the minimum wage had no effect on the unemployment rate (and negligable inflationary pressure), and viceversa. Then productivity enters the equation and so forth. Etc etc. It gets detailed and complex rapidly, which is why I defer my opinion to the experts and the extensive peer reviewed literature on the subject. Its their call not mine, and frankly I like it that way.

I do think that a better example would have been “free trade improves economies” which people will still argue about