I don’t usually add this, but writing this, because this person seems to be setting themselves up for a bit of a public figure role in EA, and mentions credentials a bit:
Some of the content in previous comments and this comment isn’t a great update in regards to those goals above and I would tap the brakes here. In this comment, it’s not the general take in the content itself (negative takes on economics are fine and good ones are informative) but the intellectual depth/probably quality of the context of these specific ideas (“Rational Man hypothesis, rapid convergence on Nash equilibrium play in complex games, importance of positional goods in advanced market economies, continuity in rates of economic growth”) patterns matches not great.
Hi Charles, you seem to be putting a lot of weight on a short, quick note that I made as a comment on a comment on an EA Forum post, based on my personal experiences in an Econ department (I wasn’t ‘mentioning credentials’, I was offering observations based on experience).
(You also included some fairly vague criticisms of my previous posts and comments that could be construed as rather ad hominem.)
You are correct that there are many subfields within Econ, some of which challenge standard models, and that Econ has some virtues that other social sciences often don’t have. Fair enough.
The question remains: why is Econ largely ignoring the likely future impact of AI on the economy (apart from some specific issues such as automation and technological unemployment), and treating most of the economy as likely to carry on more or less as it is today?
Matt and I offered some suggestions based on what we see as a few intellectual biases and blind spots in Econ. Do you have any other suggestions?
I don’t usually add this, but writing this, because this person seems to be setting themselves up for a bit of a public figure role in EA, and mentions credentials a bit:
Some of the content in previous comments and this comment isn’t a great update in regards to those goals above and I would tap the brakes here. In this comment, it’s not the general take in the content itself (negative takes on economics are fine and good ones are informative) but the intellectual depth/probably quality of the context of these specific ideas (“Rational Man hypothesis, rapid convergence on Nash equilibrium play in complex games, importance of positional goods in advanced market economies, continuity in rates of economic growth”) patterns matches not great.
Hi Charles, you seem to be putting a lot of weight on a short, quick note that I made as a comment on a comment on an EA Forum post, based on my personal experiences in an Econ department (I wasn’t ‘mentioning credentials’, I was offering observations based on experience).
(You also included some fairly vague criticisms of my previous posts and comments that could be construed as rather ad hominem.)
You are correct that there are many subfields within Econ, some of which challenge standard models, and that Econ has some virtues that other social sciences often don’t have. Fair enough.
The question remains: why is Econ largely ignoring the likely future impact of AI on the economy (apart from some specific issues such as automation and technological unemployment), and treating most of the economy as likely to carry on more or less as it is today?
Matt and I offered some suggestions based on what we see as a few intellectual biases and blind spots in Econ. Do you have any other suggestions?