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"The commonwealth was not yet lost in Tiberius's days, but it was already doomed and Rome knew it. The fundamental trouble could not be cured. In Italy, labor could not support life..." - Vladimir Simkhovitch, "Rome's Fall Reconsidered"
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Saturday, May 18, 2024
Argument from authority
From Wikipedia:
Scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority as authority has no place in science. Carl Sagan wrote of arguments from authority: "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." Conversely, it has been argued that science is fundamentally dependent on arguments from authority to progress as "they allow science to avoid forever revisiting the same ground".
One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923, when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made, that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956, scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority, despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23. Even textbooks with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24 based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.
This seemingly established number generated confirmation bias among researchers, and "most cytologists, expecting to detect Painter's number, virtually always did so". Painter's "influence was so great that many scientists preferred to believe his count over the actual evidence", and scientists who obtained the accurate number modified or discarded their data to agree with Painter's count.
Economics is a minefield of Theophilus
Painters. By comparison, the 30-odd years of Painter's dominance in zoology was a golden age.
Sunday, May 5, 2024
The "fall of Rome" begins with Caesar
What our economy needs is Solon and the Great Debt Forgiveness. What our world is getting is Caesar and the Grand Political Reorganization. Rather than turning from financialization we turn toward it.
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I'm not a fan of "diagrams" in economics, but sometimes... This is a screen capture of slide 36 from a SlideShare presentatio...
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Bosch season five air date: 18 April. Ten episodes. Four days later, six of the transcripts were already available. A few days later, the ...
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JW Mason : "... in retrospect it is clear that we should have been talking about big new public spending programs to boost demand.&quo...
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First, this summary of an observation made in 1850, from the Liberty Fund : Frédéric Bastiat, while pondering the nature of war, concluded ...
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In the Google News this morning, "The Fed may have saved the economy by hiking rates for 18 months—and may have guaranteed crisis for...