It’s a forum on the Internet. And the owners of it don’t even seem to like it or care about it. I can understand the last time, as there was borderline insult of a faculty member. But I see no real issue here.
Obviously the owners of the server space can do whatever they want to an online forum but I’d say this one begins to end the day people start getting banned for anything in this thread.
Nice.
I think there is this unspoken assumption in the debate over the applicability of mathematics to economics that math is somehow “more irrefutably true” than plain language explanation of the same ideas. This is, of course, nonsense. Every mathematical expression can be translated into natural language. After all, the symbols are just shorthand for natural language statements. “The sum of three and four is seven.”
The fact is that mathematical language is strictly less powerful than natural language. That is, everything that can be proved in mathematical language can also be proved in natural language, but not the other way around. So, mathematical language is merely a specialized subset of natural language.
When we look at the concepts, mathematical concepts are based on abstract conventions that are rooted in language. Steven Pinker talks about this here (the “intuitive theory of physics” embedded in human language). So the concepts of mathematics are no more foundational than any other concepts in human language. We just have this unspoken bias in much of science that assigns some kind of foundational role to mathematical concepts that is superior to the foundations of other concepts.
And the hard-to-kill attitude that drives this is the prospect of a “closed canon” of mathematics - the idea that mathematicians might one day discover a complete and consistent mathematics that could act as the foundation for a complete and consistent theory of physics, that is, a Theory of Everything. But this hope has been dispelled since at least 1931 when Godel published his incompleteness theorems.
On every count, we see that vaunting of mathematics to some kind of foundational status is a mistake. It’s not even necessarily a sinister mistake, perhaps it is driven by the era of quantification that we are living in. But the bias towards mathematics as being more irrefutable, more solid or more foundational than other lines of inquiry is mistaken - it is simply incorrect.
Clayton -
Smiling Dave is exactly why we can’t have nice things.
Oh, you will have plenty of nice things, Student, now Bernanke is going to end the recession. He’s doing just what you want, no?
Easy SD. You don’t want another month. Just something to consider.
Read Horwitz’s article. Decide for yourself if I’m right.
If that’s the case, I wonder if Selgin is including that Mises Daily in his criticism, and claiming Danny is lying.