I stand by my analogy as one that shows economics wanting. If your experience with economics is that it’s vaguely comparable to engineering in terms of successful predictions about the real world, I don’t know that we inhabit the same universe.
Having personally had my life threatened by three different psychiatric drugs, that’s an analogy I can get behind.
If the golden gate bridge collapsed as often as the US economy, nobody’d drive over it.
If San Francisco allowed the golden gate bridge to be rebuilt the exact same way a few dozen times after each collapse, there’d be rioting at city hall.
Neoliberalist economic philosophy has infected american thinking to the point where politicians will sacrifice everyone for the sake of corporate wellbeing.
Good.
^this
I agree. Psychiatry can’t really make accurate predictions, and they claim objectivity for things that are not only the results of the social context they exist in, but are directly influenced by the claims of psychiatrists who claim to be studying them. The ways mental illness manifest in modern western society are by no means universal, and are influenced by the people who claim to be studying them. There’s a good book called “Crazy Like Us” that documents how many modern mental illnesses didn’t exist in most of the world, until they started getting western trained psychiatrists, who managed to infect them with our particular neuroses.
So I think that’s a great comparison, in that they are both pseudosciences that directly influence what they’re trying to study, but it’s not a comparison that’s flattering to economics.
And yet people at large still believe in magical software solutions, like blockchain guarding electronic voting and exposing illegal voters by machine learning cameras looking at their shifty eyes, even though a frigging huge number of computer scientists and software engineers shout “it does not work that way!” From the rooftop of university buildings.
I think with computers people are so blown away by what computers can do that they are inclined to think they can just do anything. For many users their phones cross the sufficiently-advanced-technology threshold and appear to simply be magic. People also seem to misunderstand that when a normal person says something is “impossible” they mean it’s very hard, but when a computer scientist or a mathematician says something is “impossible” they mean it is literally not possible.
Super Points.
I also messed up one point: the comparison doesn’t hold true, since people do get hit by software bugs all of the time, those are rarely deadly. Often they are even amusing, in a way. So you have a lot of harmless bugs and only a few deadly ones, like when an UX defect and not enough plausibility checking allows for deadly x-ray dosages.
That’s wildly different from engineering, where, at least in the perception of the general public, it’s a binary system: safe bridges and those which crash out of the blue.
Software and computers hold life in the balance a lot though. Back in the early 2000s, process size got small enough that background and cosmic radiation started affecting state registers pretty severely. We got things like acceleration registers in cars getting flipped while people drove, and plane systems going haywire. We figured out pretty quick the need for triple redundancy to make these systems reliable using a 2/3rds agrrement check.
Now we have reliable cars that don’t accelerate suddenly anymore.
Neoliberalist Economic advisors never seem interested in investigating the cause of failures and remedying them.
This is exactly what I thought of Clinton’s call for a “Manhattan Project” to let the government spy on everyone without letting anyone else spy on everyone.
The Manhattan Project was a case where almost all the specialists in the field were convinced it was theoretically possible to build a nuke, and thought it was likely that it was practical to do it, with enough resources. In other words, it was the exact opposite of the case with keeping backfired encryption secure from all except one attacker.
People who become politicians are mostly power hungry shitheads who take it as a personal affront when the simple fact that they want something bad enough isn’t enough to motivate the boffins to make it for them.
Economists take their field very seriously because at graduation, they’re given a ring made from the steel of buildings of companies that collapsed due to bad advice.
/s
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