tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post611445559914852994..comments2024-03-27T21:43:02.451-04:00Comments on NEW SAVANNA: Are We Busted, Irrevocably?Bill Benzonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-83934650946808809522010-08-01T22:36:12.097-04:002010-08-01T22:36:12.097-04:00His thing on Tychism is what I'm thinking of. ...His thing on Tychism is what I'm thinking of. It's popular style and not profound but he was moving in a new direction. There were lots of evolutionary philosophers but they tended strongly toward theories of stages and laws of evolution, whereas Pierce described real uncertainty and irreversible time.John Emersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12058849885222086640noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-25571653864399654732010-08-01T21:57:04.728-04:002010-08-01T21:57:04.728-04:00Never quite saw what the deal was with Pierce. I t...Never quite saw what the deal was with Pierce. I took a run at his semiotics stuff and decided that the level of detail exceeded the depth of insight by a large enough margin that plowing through that stuff was a losing game.Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-69463398501391381302010-08-01T21:44:56.677-04:002010-08-01T21:44:56.677-04:00Linguistics' relevance to AI and machine trans...<i>Linguistics' relevance to AI and machine translation is presumably a positive influence, since things have to work.</i><br /><br />And lots of stuff seems to work best without (hard cores) linguistics. Computational linguistics is a discipline unto itself, and came into being to solve a practical problem for the DOD, how to translate Russian documents into English. That was back in the Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-9767035586808137972010-08-01T21:20:40.379-04:002010-08-01T21:20:40.379-04:00Evolutionary social science was proposed by Thorst...Evolutionary social science was proposed by Thorstein Veblen, and Charles Sanders Pierce developed an evolutionary metaphysics. Aroun 1940-50 a lot of people (Whitehead, Popper, Hayek) were working on emergence and contingency, but they were overwhelm by formalizers and systematizers aiming at perfect ahistorical truths.John Emersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12058849885222086640noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-36578268386374477032010-08-01T21:16:16.423-04:002010-08-01T21:16:16.423-04:00Only one level of institutionalization in that cas...Only one level of institutionalization in that case, the profession itself. What's at stake is being an actual working linguist as opposed to someone in another field with a linguistics degree. <br /><br />Linguistics' relevance to AI and machine translation is presumably a positive influence, since things have to work. I'd suspect there's some tension between the AI people and John Emersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12058849885222086640noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-79784086081588792522010-08-01T16:45:53.775-04:002010-08-01T16:45:53.775-04:00Economics is a hard case, and, as you say, powerfu...Economics is a hard case, and, as you say, powerful people have strong interests in keeping it subordinated to this or that ideology. But who, with money and power, gives a crap about linguistics, for example?Bill Benzonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08360044945265178991noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-1441784736744182542010-08-01T12:14:42.638-04:002010-08-01T12:14:42.638-04:00As far as I can understand, economists know the di...As far as I can understand, economists know the dirty little secret but don't want to let it out. It certainly knocks a big hole in the public pretensions of economists and their claims to authority. It doesn't mean that econ is worthless, just that it's inconsistent and incomplete and cannot be counted on to give unique answers to questions, and effectively an art or craft rather John Emersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12058849885222086640noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6535481649727720492.post-61694468635247357512010-08-01T11:28:46.143-04:002010-08-01T11:28:46.143-04:00"One of the dirty secrets of economics is tha..."One of the dirty secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as “economic theory.” There is simply no set of bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate real-world economic outcomes. We should bear in mind this constraint on economic knowledge as the global drive for fiscal austerity shifts into top gear." <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07John Emersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12058849885222086640noreply@blogger.com