The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
LasersHurt:The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so maleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
Talondel:LasersHurt: The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so malleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
And it can be, using the right diseases or conditioning you can get a person to believe just about anything. If you want proof just look in the politics tab.
LasersHurt:The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
Talondel:LasersHurt: The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so maleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
"humans interact with each other in predictable ways" != "set "laws""
To couch this in the false mantle of a "law" is to falsely assume a completely deterministic, inevitable, homogenous and universal set of relations. We can of course look at the way people interact in this particular context and explore trends, but to attribute those interactions to an underlying "law" really oversimplifies those interactions.
Theaetetus:LasersHurt: The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
MONIAC begs to differ.
The MONIAC machine actually makes his point. It was only a computer model, no different from any other computer models that economists use today.
Damnhippyfreak:"humans interact with each other in predictable ways" != "set "laws""
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
Talondel:Damnhippyfreak: "humans interact with each other in predictable ways" != "set "laws""
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
The difference is that subatomic particles are not intelligent beings who are looking at the system they are involved in and trying to tinker with it.
Trying to predict what's going to happen in the stock market, or any market, is going to probably be impossible, due to the fact that the people involved in making the markets move up and down are all studying the overall situation and are all trying to predict what everyone else will do so they can do it first.
If you create a cool new model of markets that no one has thought of before which predicts what markets will do, everyone involved finds out about it and tries to apply the model, and the model stops working.
More of the usual pseudo-scientific dribble, people building careers out of silly literal application of what are amusing parallels but nothing more.
This is no more sensible than people who think information theory or thermodynamic laws can be applied to biology because some processes look a but like physical processes if you squint in a poor light.
LasersHurt:The laws of thermodynamics, by and large, cannot be changed. The laws of an economy are completely fabricated, and can and should be altered whenever it suits the greater good.
You're confusing the social structures of an economy (the specific forms of which, yes, are accidents of evolutionary history) with the underlying laws that govern them (which are macroscopic manifestations of the underlying microscopic principles, usually expressed in stochastic form).
Talondel:I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Well, despite the basic foundation....
...at lower levels of purity, too many hand-waving English majors creep in like cockroaches.
Talondel:Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No.
Errr... actually, the point of TFA (and XKCD above) is in part to suggest that the underlying laws of social sciences such as economics are manifestations of the laws of physics.
So let me see if I got this, the government is the compressor that prints the money into the condenser, the excess dollars are radiated out and consumed by the ambient citizen. the dollars then leave the condenser and travel to the evaporator via the liquidation line.They then hit the special interest valve and using the heat generated by the average worker, boil into a gas and are evaporated.The water dripping out of the condensate drain is sweat and tears. Whatever money is left is returned to the compressor via the sucsometaxes line. viola!
gaspode:This is no more sensible than people who think information theory or thermodynamic laws can be applied to biology
More exactly, biology is an application of thermodynamic laws.
"Natural selection for least action", Kaila and Annila (doi:10.1098/rspa.2008.0178) "Minimal self-replicating systems", Robertson et al (doi:10.1039/a803602k) "Prevolutionary dynamics and the origin of evolution", Nowak and Ohtsuki (doi:10.1073/pnas.0806714105) "Prelife catalysts and replicators", Nowak and Ohtsuki (doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1136) "Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme", Lincoln and Joyce (doi:10.1126/science.1167856) "A hierarchical model for evolution of 23S ribosomal RNA", Bokov and Steinberg (doi:10.1038/nature07749)
Talondel:Damnhippyfreak: "humans interact with each other in predictable ways" != "set "laws""
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
Hm. Maybe you missed the bulk of my criticism:
Damnhippyfreak:To couch this in the false mantle of a "law" is to falsely assume a completely deterministic, inevitable, homogenous and universal set of relations.
Of course we can talk about the trends and the underlying causes for patterns, but to ascribe those trends, to again, a deterministic, inevitable, homogenous, and universal set of "laws" is to oversimplify things. People are not particles - we can explore trends and the reasons for them, but to state those reasons are somehow unmutable, universal "laws" hides a huge amount of assumptions.
If there's a lesson to be learnt from the observation that "economics and the social sciences are largely the same", it's that the social sciences have largely moved away from purely structural, deterministic views. I strongly urge you to apply the actual insights derived from those disciplines to what you are claiming.
Not bad, but not as powerful as my own formulation of macroeconomics as a being similar General Relativity. Loosely put, markets tell actors how to move, and actors tell markets how to curve.
Formulating the right Ricci tensor is trickier than in GR because a given market generally has many more dimensions than the (3,1) of Riemannian spacetime, but after that it's just a matter or calculation.
/I have a wonderful proof of this, but it's too long to fit in this slashie.
beelzebubba76:Josiah Willard Gibbs is a vastly under-appreciated genius. His contributions to thermodynamics cannot be over-emphasized.
/Also, a shout out to Osborne Reynolds. //Great men, all.
Gibbs got his spot in my thermodynamics course.
czetie:Not bad, but not as powerful as my own formulation of macroeconomics as a being similar General Relativity. Loosely put, markets tell actors how to move, and actors tell markets how to curve.
Formulating the right Ricci tensor is trickier than in GR because a given market generally has many more dimensions than the (3,1) of Riemannian spacetime, but after that it's just a matter or calculation.
/I have a wonderful proof of this, but it's too long to fit in this slashie.
Now I have hilarious images of a Ricci tensor attacking an economist.
/I guess Christoffel symbols represent each company ;)
LasersHurt
2009-11-02 12:45:31 PM
Abdullah The Destroyer
2009-11-02 12:48:55 PM
Talondel
2009-11-02 12:55:53 PM
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so maleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
beelzebubba76
2009-11-02 12:59:20 PM
/Also, a shout out to Osborne Reynolds.
//Great men, all.
Thisbymaster
2009-11-02 01:02:22 PM
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so malleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
And it can be, using the right diseases or conditioning you can get a person to believe just about anything. If you want proof just look in the politics tab.
Theaetetus
2009-11-02 01:06:59 PM
MONIAC begs to differ.
ptelg
2009-11-02 01:11:53 PM
/Interesting.
//Guess I'll have to pursue my physics degree as well.
Damnhippyfreak
2009-11-02 01:16:24 PM
Economics is nothing more or less than the study of human interactions. To say that there are no set "laws" or economics is to deny that humans interact with each other in predictable ways. To imply that economic laws can simply be reshaped into whatever else you want them to be is to imply that human nature itself is so maleable that it can be reshaped into whatever you want.
"humans interact with each other in predictable ways" != "set "laws""
To couch this in the false mantle of a "law" is to falsely assume a completely deterministic, inevitable, homogenous and universal set of relations. We can of course look at the way people interact in this particular context and explore trends, but to attribute those interactions to an underlying "law" really oversimplifies those interactions.
OnmyojiOmn
2009-11-02 01:17:28 PM
SpikesCafe
2009-11-02 01:28:22 PM
GilRuiz1
2009-11-02 01:29:07 PM
MONIAC begs to differ.
The MONIAC machine actually makes his point. It was only a computer model, no different from any other computer models that economists use today.
GilRuiz1
2009-11-02 01:30:30 PM
Talondel
2009-11-02 01:37:55 PM
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
Fano
2009-11-02 02:14:02 PM
2chris2
2009-11-02 02:24:23 PM
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
The difference is that subatomic particles are not intelligent beings who are looking at the system they are involved in and trying to tinker with it.
Trying to predict what's going to happen in the stock market, or any market, is going to probably be impossible, due to the fact that the people involved in making the markets move up and down are all studying the overall situation and are all trying to predict what everyone else will do so they can do it first.
If you create a cool new model of markets that no one has thought of before which predicts what markets will do, everyone involved finds out about it and tries to apply the model, and the model stops working.
nicoffeine
2009-11-02 02:24:47 PM
How to make electricity - $198 shocking new homeowner's kit has Power Co execs red in the face - www.Power4Home.com
Free Energy - How to Build a Magnetic Power Generator & Get Free Electricity. - FreeEnergy-FreeElectricity.com
Laws of thermodynamics? Not in my internets!
gaspode
2009-11-02 02:25:29 PM
This is no more sensible than people who think information theory or thermodynamic laws can be applied to biology because some processes look a but like physical processes if you squint in a poor light.
abb3w
2009-11-02 02:33:30 PM
You're confusing the social structures of an economy (the specific forms of which, yes, are accidents of evolutionary history) with the underlying laws that govern them (which are macroscopic manifestations of the underlying microscopic principles, usually expressed in stochastic form).
Talondel: I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Well, despite the basic foundation....
...at lower levels of purity, too many hand-waving English majors creep in like cockroaches.
Talondel: Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No.
Errr... actually, the point of TFA (and XKCD above) is in part to suggest that the underlying laws of social sciences such as economics are manifestations of the laws of physics.
DPSturm
2009-11-02 02:34:12 PM
abb3w
2009-11-02 02:39:56 PM
More exactly, biology is an application of thermodynamic laws.
"Natural selection for least action", Kaila and Annila (doi:10.1098/rspa.2008.0178)
"Minimal self-replicating systems", Robertson et al (doi:10.1039/a803602k)
"Prevolutionary dynamics and the origin of evolution", Nowak and Ohtsuki (doi:10.1073/pnas.0806714105)
"Prelife catalysts and replicators", Nowak and Ohtsuki (doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1136)
"Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme", Lincoln and Joyce (doi:10.1126/science.1167856)
"A hierarchical model for evolution of 23S ribosomal RNA", Bokov and Steinberg (doi:10.1038/nature07749)
abb3w
2009-11-02 02:41:43 PM
No, you don't. You're confusing money flow and energy flow; much like confusing money with utility, but worse.
Damnhippyfreak
2009-11-02 02:45:50 PM
I don't understand why some people have a hard time accepting that the "soft" sciences produce deterministic results in much the same way that the hard sciences do.
Subatomic particles interact with each other in predictable ways. Yet despite this we cannot predict how any one subatomic particle will act with any reliability (we even have a "law" that notes this). Still, we understand the interactions between particles well enough that we can say with a great deal of confidence and accuracy how large numbers of those particles with intereact with each other over time.
For example, we cannot predict with any reliability when any one radioactive isotope will decay. However, if you get a mole of that isotope together we can tell you almost exactly how long it will take for half of them to decay.
Economics and the social sciences are largely the same. Economics cannot predict how any one person will act. It can however predict how groups of people will react with a great deal of accuracy. Enough accuracy that people can and do make decsions based on those economic "laws" without have to understand the underlying interactions between each individual person.
Are economic laws and a physical laws the same? No. Are they analagous enough for a discussion of their similarities to be useful? Yes.
Hm. Maybe you missed the bulk of my criticism:
Damnhippyfreak: To couch this in the false mantle of a "law" is to falsely assume a completely deterministic, inevitable, homogenous and universal set of relations.
Of course we can talk about the trends and the underlying causes for patterns, but to ascribe those trends, to again, a deterministic, inevitable, homogenous, and universal set of "laws" is to oversimplify things. People are not particles - we can explore trends and the reasons for them, but to state those reasons are somehow unmutable, universal "laws" hides a huge amount of assumptions.
If there's a lesson to be learnt from the observation that "economics and the social sciences are largely the same", it's that the social sciences have largely moved away from purely structural, deterministic views. I strongly urge you to apply the actual insights derived from those disciplines to what you are claiming.
Dinjiin
2009-11-02 02:47:15 PM
czetie
2009-11-02 02:51:49 PM
Formulating the right Ricci tensor is trickier than in GR because a given market generally has many more dimensions than the (3,1) of Riemannian spacetime, but after that it's just a matter or calculation.
/I have a wonderful proof of this, but it's too long to fit in this slashie.
Canadian Canuck
2009-11-02 03:01:10 PM
/Also, a shout out to Osborne Reynolds.
//Great men, all.
Gibbs got his spot in my thermodynamics course.
czetie: Not bad, but not as powerful as my own formulation of macroeconomics as a being similar General Relativity. Loosely put, markets tell actors how to move, and actors tell markets how to curve.
Formulating the right Ricci tensor is trickier than in GR because a given market generally has many more dimensions than the (3,1) of Riemannian spacetime, but after that it's just a matter or calculation.
/I have a wonderful proof of this, but it's too long to fit in this slashie.
Now I have hilarious images of a Ricci tensor attacking an economist.
/I guess Christoffel symbols represent each company ;)