Re: poly: Modeling Economic Singularities

Robin Hanson writes:
> Perry M. writes:
> >Robin Hanson writes:
> >> jump in 10 years. Since there are other intelligent people who also find
> >> this claim incredible, I want to seem some careful analysis in support
> >
> >That reminds me. Still haven't seen youre empirical evidence for the
> >predictive power of your economic model...
>
> I asked only for any sort of careful analysis.

I wasn't asking for careful analysis -- just an experiment.

> Perry, since you persist, imagine that you claimed to someone that there's
> a pretty good chance that a nuclear spaceship like Orion would have worked,
> sending large crews of people to Mars and Venus by 1968 at only a fraction
> of the cost of the Apollo program. You point them to the program's
> engineering design analyses. They respond that they are not at all
> satisfied, and want to see the original data justifying all the equations
> used in the anaysis, including equations describing momentum conservation,
> nuclear blast wave pressure, bomb blast mass relations, blast ablasion of
> plates, cosmic ray shielding, vibration/stress analysis, the actual
> distances to Mars and Venus, and the density of the interplanetary medium.

Actually, I wasn't asking for any such equivalent even before, but
never mind that.

I've stopped asking you for any detailed justifications, Robin. I
asked for a nice, simple empirical study performed to try to assess
the accuracy of your model. Not even for the study itself -- just a
pointer to it.

The method of science says that when you have a hypothesis, you should
be able to demonstrate its validity by experimentation. Well, just
show me an experiment. No need for any justifications at all -- we'll
treat your equations as a black box handed down from heaven. All I
want is one experiment. Surely if your theory is good you've tested
it, have you not?

> Perry, I have responded to specific questions by yourself and
> others,

No, Robin, you haven't. I asked whether you had any experimental data
verifying the accuracy of your model, and you've ignored the
request.

> will continue to respond to focused questions.

This seemed pretty focused to me.

If its correct, you should be able to conduct an experiment to try to
falsify the hypothesis. Show us the experiment.

Perry
Received on Thu Apr 30 22:26:57 1998