Notices by phiofx (phiofx@hachyderm.io), page 7

@datarama @codinghorror
would it be totally waco to think that it has to do with the cowboy films legacy?

@VTech yeah, why not. Once the application is refactored to use such a calculation API I suppose it is not such a big deal to support multiple languages.

@mwt

Based on that alone it's easy to see how huge blind spots of the mainstream economics can be. Not just what is studied, but how it is studied is influenced by ideological bent of people involved.

2/3

@FantasticalEconomics @phiofx @phil_stevens @GeofCox @504DR @lienrag @gerrymcgovern

@mwt @jackofalltrades @FantasticalEconomics @phil_stevens @GeofCox @504DR @lienrag @gerrymcgovern

once I asked a fairly senior economist if there is a set of economic facts that all economists agree on. he mumbled something about supply/demand but conceded there isn't that much

Imho restoring trust in the economics profession would benefit if one could objectively tag the level of confidence in various propositions. Addressing the "Market for Economic Theory Lemons" problem if you wish :-)

@mwt

I think what plagued "economics as science" from early on is that it is too relevant for power structures to leave it alone

i) it identifies potent policy levers. those must be controlled

ii) in contrast with pretty much everything else in the universe, modifying economic structures is fairly easy.

E.g., you wake up one morning and everybody is happily minting "trillions of bitcoin value"

@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @phil_stevens @GeofCox @504DR @lienrag @gerrymcgovern

Microsoft increasingly integrates #python into #excel which is a smart move (for them). In the spirit of "you no longer own anything", it works via a cloud API.

Ofcourse every modern #linux box comes with python pre-installed and if #libreoffice had their act together python would be deeply integrated already a decade ago, turning it into a premier #opensource #datascience GUI

Spreadsheet based python GUI's will also displace some #jupyternotebook use (linear flow not optimal for all tasks).

We are born utterly helpless and dependent, we die helpless and dependent, but for a glorious moment in between we can hold arbitrary opinions about our own role and importance versus the role and importance of society.

@johncarlosbaez so far gravitational wave detection and black hole astrophysics do not seem to change our (broad brush) views on gravity and cosmology. Is there a chance that LISA will actually shake things up a bit (or a lot)?

Aka, our civilization collapsed, but for a brief moment our silly putty brains reflected the true nature of the Universe...

@avhuffelen hopelijk komt er ooit ook een open source linkedin alternatief

@phil_stevens @FantasticalEconomics @GeofCox @504DR @lienrag @gerrymcgovern

yes. and if economics *really* aimed to emulate physics it would have at least token recognition that any and all economic behavior takes place in a limited biosphere and is deeply intertwinned with its energetic and biological cycles.

Economics as we know it is a thing apart. In modern terms a AI hallucination of sorts, but created by a human brain collective that needed certain answers - and found them.

@FantasticalEconomics @phil_stevens @GeofCox @504DR @lienrag @gerrymcgovern

It seems important to split out the "good parts" of economics. In this respect I find the anti-math streak a bit silly. Its not mathematical economics that is the problem, it is how it is used to effectively justify what is desired: "if I imagine so-and-so agents then this 'behavior' is optimal".

E.g. econometrics is closer to being useful but even there are incredible biases about *what* is being measured

@lienrag

"The lives of our ancestors are often romanticized. Many think they lived in balance with nature, unlike modern society... But when we look at the evidence of human impacts over millennia, it’s hard to see how this was true."

"Extinction timings closely match the timing of human arrival. The timing of megafauna extinctions was not consistent across the world; instead ... coincided closely with the arrival of humans on each continent."

@gerrymcgovern

https://ourworldindata.org/quaternary-megafauna-extinction#:~:text=10%2C000%20to%2050%2C000%20years%20ago,the%20key%20driver%20of%20this.&text=Humans%20have%20had%20such%20a,%E2%80%9D%20means%20%E2%80%9Chuman%E2%80%9D).

@paninid @FantasticalEconomics there is in principle nothing wrong with emulating a successful field and physics has been dramatically, some think even unexpectedly, successful in explaining stuff.

But you can't pick and choose which elements of the scientific entreprise you will apply. Starting the isolation, as much as possible, of the observer's biases about the observable.

Economics is still, by-and-large, the sophistry of justifying existing social order using arcane mathematics.

@DannyMekic

For some time I have been wondering how come it is primarily in Europe where one notices a feeble but still real resistance to the slide into digital surveillance dystopia.

I have distilled it to two core factors:

1) old fashioned nationalism, humoring ossified corporate classes that seek state protection from disruption

2) still present memories of past horrors (wars, dictatorships) that destroyed this very continent. This incentivises civic society

@laxla this shouldn't happen if you implement on the server side according to the pattern described here https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#source-property (so servers that respect the protocol will play along, propagate the "source" bit of the Activity along with the rest etc.). What seems non-trivial is to get your desired list of clients properly use that extra material or at least have a workable fallback. So it would not be "defederation" but it might amount to the same from a user perspective if they don't see it.

@laxla is it a good idea to complicate what types of markup activitypub servers are expected to understand? (unless it expands capabilities in a non-trivial way). Anything that can be roundtriped without information loss using, e.g., pandoc can probably be handled more flexibly on the client side?

@ollibaba @danilo yeah, I found their arguments cool headed and more useful in guiding action than low information, emotional or ideology driven echo-chambers.

The current #LLM/AI phenomenon is very bad news because it points out how dazed and confused and incompetent society continues to be in internalizing the new digital reality.

People will in due course apply all known and future algorithms to all data, with varying utility.

The existential question is who does it, why and to whom.

@oligneisti why should I talk to a librarian, or a publisher or a retailer, or a taxi driver, or a hotelier, or a doctor, or a banker...

I am simply looking at the outcomes. Or rather the pervasive missing-in-action by vast domains.

Whether you like it or not the enshitification of online life is also due to the serious failings of these actors.

Millennia of know-how has not translated into updated digital services. This has been taken advantage of. Nature doesnt like a vacuum.

@oligneisti librarians are just one of the many professions that have failed us by not realising we are now truly living in the digital age.

Digital illiterates, they ceded the keys of the kingdom to whomever knew how to program a web app, no matter morality and ulterior motives.

Some people think that the whole "disruption" narrative is venture capitalist vapor. Its not.

And there is worse to come as more ossified enclaves like the medical and financial guilds get taken over by marketeers.

@adrianhon the fanboy consumerism so prevalent currently in the US would be charmingly parochial if it wasn't so dangerously contagious.

When large pools of people in a leading (wealthy, educated) country adopt certain ways and lifestyles this has profound implications elsewhere (it defines what "good" looks like).

E.g., long before #bigtech and the US love affair with #surveillancecapitalism people copied urban development and mobility patterns, with disastrous and still unpaid bills.