speculating
So why are you starting with economics?
You’re thinking of neoclassical sophistry. Austrian econ is pure logic and definitions: praxeology.
If I wanted general principles, I would choose logicians or philosophers. If I wanted to predict what people would do, I would choose statisticians.
If I wanted to do what you’re doing, which is to not only predict human behavior but have a model that was actually built around the electrical causes of choice, I would choose a big team of scientists and mathematicians with the world’s largest super computer and then give them a couple of thousand years to unlock the code translating electrical impulses to human action.
Then i would make them build a time machine to go back in time and show mises what they had done so he could nod his head and keep writing “human action”. You’re looking for a posteriori truths. Austrian economics is a priori. Nuff said.
Ok, how about this (page 48) “The manufacturer, however, would have adopted the machine only if it had either made better suits for half as much labor, or had made the same kind of suits at a smaller cost.” This appears to be making predictions about the thoughts of “the manufacturer” and he’s using this prediction of human behavior as a central part of his argument.
he’ s telling a parable.
Speculating, and perhaps poorly so (I"m not sure, because I don’t know the context of that quote). It’s not praxeologically certain that people don’t notice their rising cost of living during an inflation and only their rising nominal income.
Again, I can’t say for sure without knowing the context, but he seems to be setting up a syllogistic thought experiment using a proposed actor with a GIVEN value scale, and logically inferring the apodictic implications of having said value scale. He’s not making any prediction about any real future manufacturer.
Could you explain that in a little more detail.
By the way you can find the context of the quotes with a search - a searchable copy of the book is online here.
For a parable to be of any merit, it has to feature people who are behaving rationally. Therefore HH is making a statement about how people behave in general.
This thread is like a car crash and I am a rubber-necking highway gawker. I want to look away, but I can’t.
nice non-sequitur. there is no warrant that I can see to move you from your premise to your conclusion. try again?
For a parable to be of any merit, it has to feature people who are behaving rationally. Therefore HH is making a statement about how people behave RATIONALLY
Ok then, am I allowed to say that the hungrier people are the more effort they will make to get food?
Am I allowed to say that someone who has just eaten a huge meal will barely make any effort to get some more food while someone who hasn’t eaten for a week will make a huge effort to get some food?
these are all plausible claims.
yet they are far less plausable than when fixing the terms of your assumptive environment (“imagine a profit orientated entrepeneur etc” or in your case, “imagine someone motivated by hunger minimization”), and then reasoning from this. and then knowing that the job of using/applying the thought experiment is only half done. since the thymology of detecting who out there is such a person for you to apply your knowledge against must be done too.
Wikipedia has just failed me… you’ll have to help me out.
Thymology is a branch of history or, as Collingwood formulated it, it belongs in “the sphere of history.”[9] It deals with the mental activities of men that determine their actions. It deals with the mental processes that result in a definite kind of behavior, with the reactions of the mind to the conditions of the individual’s environment. It deals with something invisible and intangible that cannot be perceived by the methods of the natural sciences. But the natural sciences must admit that this factor must be considered as real also from their point of view, as it is a link in a chain of events that result in changes in the sphere the description of which they consider as the specific field of their studies.
Thymology is on the one hand an offshoot of introspection and on the other a precipitate of historical experience. It is what everybody learns from intercourse with his fellows. It is what a man knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires and their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts or, with historians, of a foreign milieu about which he has learned by studying special sources. If an epistemologist states that history has to be based on such knowledge as thymology, he simply expresses a truism.
While naturalistic psychology does not deal at all with the content of human thoughts, judgments, desires, and actions, the field of thymology is precisely the study of these phenomena.
When was that written? The 16th century?? You tell me off for having not read enough literature - but it seems that people here are living in medieval times when it comes to brain science. How about you do some reading!
im sorry, at this time no scientist is capable of giving you a printout plot of ‘how much you loved your mother’ over the last week and supply true evidence, that the reason you did various acts during that time was because you loved at some particular amount.
Even if science was capable of giving such a “printout”, so what?
The magnitudes would still be subjective, in that they would be unique per individual. There is no objective magnitude for loving your mother in the universe. The only usefulness of such magnitudes extracted out of the brain would be to compare them to other magnitudes in the same brains, such as loving your father. I don’t see how this has any serious implications on economic science. The values are themselves still subjective, and discovering the magnitudes inside the brain does not refute in any way the regression theorem.
I tried telling him pretty much exactly that already. I think I’m going to be done reading this thread any more.
Person A: I have read book X
Person B: Wow, that’s an old book! You have to read more! lol!
Person has read book X, therefore person has read less relevant material than person Y. ← there’s a gap in the logic there.
You claim to have a PhD in neural nets, but fail to understand simple logical implication… I’m suspicious.
Anyways, the understanding of works like HA require an understanding of some philosophy, logic, some history, some political theory, and basic economics. Without knowledge in those areas, a reader would really miss out on parts. If we want to talk about building theories on top of/or making use of AE, we should probably have a very thorough knowledge of its fundamental works. You disregard that as “too much reading” but claim to be an acredited academic. Again, I’m suspicious.