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The man behind the sphere, Freeman Dyson, is dead at 96:
Freeman Dyson, a physicist whose interests often took him to the edge of science fiction, has died at the age of 96. Dyson is probably best known for his idea of eponymous spheres that would allow civilizations to capture all the energy radiating off a star. But his contributions ranged from fundamental physics to the practicalities of using nuclear weapons for war and peace. And he remained intellectually active into his 90s, although he wandered into the wrong side of science when it came to climate change.
Degrees? Who needs 'em?
It's difficult to find anything that summarizes a career so broad, but a sense of his intellectual energy comes from his educational history. Dyson was a graduate student in physics when he managed to unify two competing ideas about quantum electrodynamics, placing an entire field on a solid theoretical foundation. Rather than writing that up as his thesis, he simply moved on to other interests. He didn't get a doctorate until the honorary ones started arriving later in his career. His contributions were considered so important that he kept getting faculty jobs regardless.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:07AM (22 children)
That the effects will be bad is an economic conclusion anyway, not a scientific one. Economics is not science. At most, Dyson was on "the wrong side of" current economic thinking. Not that it's known which side is right and which one wrong until the future happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 29 2020, @10:34AM (1 child)
> Not that it's known which side is right and which one wrong until the future happens.
Although history does prove socialism was wrong. But apart from that we don't know which is right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @08:00AM
Poor Norwegians and Swedes, huh? *eyeroll*
You sound like a foolish USA'ian, conflating centrally planned authoritarian communism with socialism.
Anyways.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @04:09AM (9 children)
Why not? My view is that economics rather has the same problems that climatology has right now for the same reasons - massive conflicts of interest because there's a lot of money at stake.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:53AM (8 children)
Economics is too dependent on human behavior, which is always changing. It's basically group psychology for how people relate to money and work. That's why the economics Nobel Prize is not a real one, and sponsored by some bank.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:58PM (7 children)
Sorry, you're not even wrong. First, it can be applied to completely non-human systems like carrion feeding or pollination, or to systems that are technically human, but have no human actors directly in the system like high frequency trading.
Second, even when we apply it to human systems with human behavior, it's not about the behavior, it's about the function of economic systems (like their ability to distribute resources), and the dynamics of the system (like what behaviors are rewarded or the system's propensity for breaking down) - both which are objective features of the system and hence, something that can be targeted by scientific study. Human behavior is just the present preferences and quirks of the actors in the system. It doesn't matter to the economics of the system what the behavior happens to be. Even when those behaviors lead to large scale dysfunctions like market crashes, the dynanmics are still part of the standard economics of the system.
Except when it's not, of course.
Just like the Nobel Prizes for Literature and Peace?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @12:59AM (6 children)
What fundamental results has economics given us? That Nobel Prize is closer to the peace and literature ones than the scientific Prizes. That it exists at all is an attempt to give academic gravitas to the subject. The marketing does not impress serious people.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @03:45AM (4 children)
Supply and demand, markets, TANSTAAFL, betting and speculation infrastructure, and macroeconomic measures of a society's economy come to mind.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @04:19AM (3 children)
"supply and demand" is just counting. Trivialities are insights now? The rest is mumbo-jumbo. Markets have existed for thousands of years. There is little innovation.
Compare the enormous technological progress produced by real science to the never-ending political bickering produced by the "soft sciences" like economics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @04:36AM (2 children)
One can say the same about any science and be just as wrong. Supply and demand is an important observation about the dynamics of trade.
Only if you aren't paying attention. High frequency trading, for a glaring counterexample, is far from those ancient markets.
Political bickering like the greatest improvement in the human condition ever?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @04:46AM (1 child)
Supply and demand is trivial compared to Maxwell's equations or DNA or the periodic table.
High frequency trading is the same thing as normal trading but faster and with computers. It's like during the dot-com boom when things were called great because they used the internet.
Those improvements you see are not because some economist had a good idea. They are organic developments.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @05:14AM
Those phenomena you just mentioned are trivial in comparison to human behavior. Does that make them not science now?
Just like nuclear war is the same thing as normal war, but faster? One enormous difference is the "with computers". Where's the human behavior excuse now for de-scientizing economics? Another is that it's so fast now that relativistic effects like light speed constraints come into place. If they speed the trading up much more (say about two to three more order of magnitude than current state of the art), then the market will have to be physically located on a single chip.
Except, of course, when they are. The Black-Scholes-Merton model [wikipedia.org] (which incidentally is comparable in complexity with the Maxwell equations or the Periodic Table) and the variety of pricing/valuation techniques for derivative securities are all due to three economists having a good idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 02 2020, @04:30AM
Of course, that's false. Look [nobelprize.org] at what the prizes are awarded for:
Notice how the problem described in the Economic Sciences prize is solving a problem using the scientific approach, just like it is for Physics, Chemistry, or Physiology or Medicine. It's not a discovery unlike most of the present year's other scientific prizes, but it is solving a problem like the Chemistry example. The Literature prize is for a work of human experience. The Peace Prize is for mitigating an ongoing conflict between countries.
It's tiresome to get these weird pseudoscience criticisms - even if the field of economics really were strictly a study of human behavior as you claim (which it is not), you still have the matter that human behavior, contrary to assertion, can be scientifically characterized just like any other observable phenomena in the universe.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:07AM (9 children)
Economics is an area where science is sometimes crowded out of academia in favour of something politically correct.
What fields are immune, however? There's even a politically correct physics, though it hasn't caught on very widely yet, /Fortuna gratias/.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @08:42AM (8 children)
A quote from Dyson:
According to that view, science seeks fundamental truths. I disagree with the "why" question, but that's a separate issue.
Economics depends on ever-changing human behavior. Such a subject, which is built on shifting sands, will never deliver fundamental truths. It is not enough to apply the scientific method to call what you're doing science.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:33PM (7 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:28PM (6 children)
Ethology can be science, sure. Am I wandering into a trap here?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2020, @05:59PM (5 children)
Are humans not animals?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:28PM (4 children)
Humans are animals, but much of human behavior goes beyond animal instincts. To call someone an animal is to attribute unusual primal behavior to them. There are unchanging instincts, but once those are modulated by higher brain function which depends on culture, everything is in flux.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 02 2020, @05:10AM (3 children)
It is simply to classify them correctly.
Animal-Mammal-Primate-Ape-Hominid.
Human behavior is just one subset of animal behavior.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @05:44AM (2 children)
I disagree, but this is probably a dead end.
My other point, with khallow above could be summarized as:. Humans would be doing just as well today if economics didn't exist as an academic discipline. Maybe even better. Unless you dislike technology, the same can't be said for real sciences like physics, biology / medicine, or chemistry. That speaks to a fundamental difference.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 02 2020, @02:35PM (1 child)
https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday March 02 2020, @08:41PM
I studied a few semesters of economics long ago, and don't need that lesson.I'm writing the academic subject off, because its contribution to humanity is not discernible. Yet, its contribution to political noise is easy to detect.