Arnold Kling  

Unprovable Speculations

Capitalism without Capital... Civility Plea, Revisited...

John Brockman asked dozens of scientists and other intellectuals to state a proposition you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it. Not many of the answers deal with economics, and those that do strike me as hostile without being informative. Nonetheless, it is an interesting feature.

The answer given by physicist Leonard Susskind (scroll down after you follow the link) is worth quoting to my statistics students.


You have to read Susskind's entire piece to appreciate it.

Several interesting answers concern self-deception. For example, John R. Skoyles writes (again, scroll down after you follow the link),



Perhaps what I think of as mental illness in the way that people approach health care in fact is derived from this desire to offload decision-making to others.

Skoyles appears to be saying that people sometimes need to be told when to not feel pain. Green Bay Packer star Jerry Kramer used to joke about the healing powers of coach Vince Lombardi, but perhaps Lombardi was performing the same function as many doctors.

For Discussion. The placebo effect would seem to support Skoyles' hypothesis. What other evidence is there for and against?

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CATEGORIES: Economic Methods

COMMENTS (1 to date)
grigory writes:

Susskind might want to consult Simon Saunders then, where he comments on relative frequency (frequentist) and subjective (Bayesian) interpretations of probability and their QM relationship; perhaps bringing, at long last, warring sides together?

Zurek, by the way, also thinks he has a handle on probability, while Chaitin thinks "random truths" lie at the heart of mathematics, whereas 't Hooft may beg to differ. Negative probability on the other hand...

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