Re: poly: Econ, the final frontier...

From: Robin Hanson <hanson@econ.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed Jan 07 1998 - 12:46:35 PST

Perry writes:
>... AI. The topic *is* interesting, and *is*
>capable of being the subject of real breakthroughs, but with some
>small exceptions (the work the vision people were doing and some other
>work I saw) I was pretty much disgusted with what I found. ...
>The small amount of "serious" social science I got exposed to in
>school didn't seem like it qualified as science. Non-falsifiable
>hypotheses, no controls, lots of cargo cult science. ...

The following questions are *very* different:
1. What is the average quality of work and/or researchers in some field?
2. Is there enough high quality work in some field, and a way to find it
amid the crap, for the field to be worth learning more about?

My comments have been mainly addressing question #2. It is the relevant
question for most purposes.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Wed Jan 7 20:39:37 1998

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