I doubt economics is what he was thinking of but damn this fits.
EDIT: The mouseover text may be relevant.
Now that I come to think of it, I known of no physicist who is/was sympathetic to free exchange. Such a shame.
Except for free exchange of virtual particles… har har.
Clayton -
Azure, I could not agree with you more - being around economists all the time (I’m getting a PhD in econ. don’t hate 
), this is the attitude I see. You have a complicated equation? sure, model it, add something to control for the “complucations you just thought of” and voila’ - the results you wanted. Physicists, are quite the opposite - they are notoriously picky on being able to properly control for EVERYTHING, not random complications they “just thought of”.
Interesting you say that, the few I do know, do favour free market. Also, try going on Slashdot.org - the community there primarily consists of Physicists, Mathematicians and Computer Scientists - you know, geeks :-), and they do have a strong free market / libertarian stance. Certainly not as radical as what I often see here at Mises.org, but it’s there. I read somewhere recently, that computer scientists are often libertarian because of their highly analytical thought process they tend to develop (they often have to predict errors that may happen, either from the system or the user; they have to predict options that the program should take to optimize the efficiency etc). I doubt physicists are that different.
Slashdot’s a pretty diverse crowd, however the majority is made up of what I like to call “colibertarians.” They value freedom and human rights, but believe the state to be the creators of these things. This is why they support Net Neutrality, Antitrust, and have an absolute hatred of the financial markets.
I remember reading a poster there who supported financial regulations, and he said something that just about wraps up the whole deal. “It makes our market freer.”
And God forbid you get them started on a futurist topic! I’ve seen quite a few kooky descriptions on the future of interplanetary diplomacy come out of there.
As a physics graduate, I must confess the stereotype portrayed by this cartoon does have something to it. It’s incredibly entertaining for me reading the notes I made when I first started reading Human Action. Mises really snapped me out of my positivist slumber…
I’m a physics undergraduate and I’m not quite sure about the image of physicists in the cartoon. It’ right that many physicists are not liberal, let alone libertarian, but I think that can be because of the way research is mainly funded. But about the image, I am still not sure what the author really means. Could anyone here give an example? Though I have to confess that I am critical of every methodology and yes, I see massive abuse of mathematical formulae, especially of Taylor’s theorem.
A shining example is the origins of “sociology.” Especially Comte’s laughable vision of “Social Physics.”
What’s wrong with finding patterns in group behavior?
It is his complete disregard for the complexities of societies. He, like the physicist in the comic, took a complex thing and assumed it could be modeled after something far more simple.
I thought logic generally applies to microsocial situations like they do in macrosocial ones?
Wow how would a physicist ever say that. Rule #1 in science is you don’t just make up dummy variables to get better fits of data. That’s for engineers…
But that is how every science works. Our models are always less complex than what we are modeling.
Models can surely represent complicated data. As Gregory Chaitin explains, “In sections V and VI of the Discours de métaphysique, Leibniz discusses the crucial question of how we can distinguish a world in which science applies from one in which it does not. Imagine, he says, that someone has splattered a piece of paper with ink spots determining in this manner a finite set of points on the page. Nevertheless, Leibniz observes, there will always be a mathematical equation that passes through this finite set of points. Indeed, many good ways to do this are now known. For example, what is called Lagrangian interpolation will do.”
My emphasis is on the over-simplification. You aren’t going to get very far in physics if you assume a nuclear reactor can be modeled as a rock.
An interesting reply in the “official” discussion thread for this comic:
"This comic would have been (1) funnier and (2) truer if he’d used ‘economists’ instead of ‘physicists’.
I mean, really, have you seen an economist at the ASSA meetings? There’s a reason they don’t let us go near the sociology panels…
There’s even a term for it – ‘economic imperialism’ – to describe how Becker, Levitt, et al basically took over the fields of demography, political science and sociology."
Also in that thread a non-positivist econ guy actually showed up and elicited a jerk-response:
Cal Engime wrote:
The problem with economics is that economists try to apply empirical methods from the natural sciences to the study of agents with free will acting under ever-changing conditions which cannot be subjected to experiment.Historical experience can be useful in guiding our thoughts, but the legitimate source of economic theory is a priorireasoning, and such theory can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment.
Oh look, it’s an “Austrian”! So you want to use a priori arguments, relying on dubious assumptions about universal psychology, to predict the behavior of “agents with free will acting under ever-changing conditions”–and you consider this more legitimate, more useful, & less unreliable than repeated empirical observation & extensive historical analysis.
Yeah, a priori, you’re wrong. If the “Austrian” belief that history is an unreliable guide were true, there would be no use to macro-economics at all. But then, considering “Austrians’” propensity for misapplying micro-economics to macro problems, I suppose that’s what they think.
I don’t browse the xkcd forums myself, so nice find. As for mister positivist, as usual it’s obvious he’s not working off of any actual austrian argument but rather his own characterization. How sad.
http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2010/09/im-sure-we-can-all-think-up-examples.html
Daniel Kuehn uses the cartoon to lambast Austrian economics.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Chaitin’s work but the philosophical conclusions he draws regarding his work are the opposite of the modernist project to “mathematize everything”. Basically, Chaitin has shown that there can be no Theory of Everything or “ultimate model”, if you will, of mathematics. And since we can instantiate a universal Turing machine in the physical universe*, the fact that there is no ToE of mathematics immediately implies that there can be no ToE of physics, either. If any science is a candidate for having a theory of everything, it is physics. So, if even physics cannot have a theory of everything, then this is all the more the case for all other sciences.
We can also make an even more powerful argument regarding the impossibility of human brains exhaustively explaining the behavior of human brains based on Algorithmic Information Theory (Chaitin’s field), if we take the human brain to be a Turing machine (I think there are many good reasons to think of the human brain as a Turing machine). Basically, in layman’s terms, it is impossible for a system of complexity X to find the ultimate theory of any other system of complexity greater than or equal to X. Since my brain has complexity X, it cannot find its own ultimate theory or the ultimate theory of any other brain of equal or greater complexity. The same applies to groups of human brains, though the argument gets a little trickier.
Clayton -
*Or, another way to put it, is that we can instantiate ever-larger approximations to a UTM. Mathematically, this is actually a series of linear-bounded automaton (LBA) but I think the philosophical point stands.