nednobbins

@nednobbins@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of. They won’t say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.

  Two of my favorites:

  1. Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that’s the only way we can get the math to work.

  2. Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don’t have transit preferences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's barely a science.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Economists’ math is as good as anyone else’.

  The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So much...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Kurt Gödel wrote a whole paper on it.

  He used math to show that all statements, in any language, can be expressed as math statements. He then proved that it’s impossible to create any cpnsistent set of math statements that completely describes everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨true love is rare⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.

  Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it works it works⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  <puts on nerd hat> Normal people rarely see the above image. When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
  If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
  If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.

  An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember the past⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hear if you stay for one more spin it takes you to goatse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember the past⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The term was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 in, “the Selfish Gene”.

  The main problem with that definition of the word is that it’s really hard to use. It requires both the speaker and the listener to be comfortable with the fungibility of data and code.