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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (141976)	8/3/2010 2:58:31 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541805

It's certainly better than making up biased stories about how people should react to incentives and disincentives, and what makes economies grow, then declaring those stories to be the gospel truth and the basis of complex public policy. Which is mostly what we hear in the "debate" out there nowadays. Sadly, few have the attention span for a complex multivariate look at anything. And people don't like degrees of uncertainty when their "stories" hold the promise of absolute truth and virtue to boot.

To: JohnM who wrote (141976)	8/3/2010 3:35:02 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541805

<<<Nicely written piece by Manzi. Anyone interested in this point of view, might be interested to know who Manzi is.>>> The fact that he has a bachelors degree in mathematics from MIT explains a lot of it. He thinks like a mathematician. Engineers, physicists, and mathematician approach things in different ways. Take this example. There is a large fire in a building and there is only one small bucket of water. The engineer naturally does the best he can by pouring the small bucket of water on the fire in what is likely a failed effort. The physicist does nothing physically to solve the problem, but is able to explain the problem in great detail. He may conjecture that the small bucket of water will not be able to do the job and may perhaps offer an equation estimating the amount of water that is needed to do the job. For a mathematician, all he has to do is to see that, in this situation, there is no solution. His job is done. Mathematics is about neatness and elegance.