Nutrition (on the “evils” of fats vs carbs), macroeconomics (on the causes of recessions), cultural anthropology (on the causes of economic inequality), and Women Studies (on the causes of the male / female wage gap).
The academic landmines for IQ contain antimatter, as Larry Summers found out.
I’m pretty sure nutrition is a bad example of this, but I won’t get into why, since I was already planning on making my next post about nutrition.
I’m not sure about cultural anthropology or women’s studies. I don’t know enough about those fields.
On macro—my impression is there’s more disagreement among economists about macro than about other things? So if macro is an issue where economists don’t really know what they’re talking about, it supports the heuristic that lack of agreement among experts indicates they don’t know what’s really going on. But OTOH my impression is also that economists do actually know stuff about recessions.
I think this is an extremely bad example. Macro-econ contains some models that are partially predictive and an extensive literature on when to use which hypothesis, and then a few crank theories that simply reject empiricism altogether. The fact that academically ancient or crankish theories are popular among the political class or among blog commentators simply does not mean that the academic study of macroeconomics, when done properly, has nothing accurate and applicable to say about recessions.
Just because I don’t know the macroeconomic literature doesn’t mean I can’t be rational enough to distinguish between the actual literature and the popular misconceptions.
Nutrition (on the “evils” of fats vs carbs), macroeconomics (on the causes of recessions), cultural anthropology (on the causes of economic inequality), and Women Studies (on the causes of the male / female wage gap).
The academic landmines for IQ contain antimatter, as Larry Summers found out.
I’m pretty sure nutrition is a bad example of this, but I won’t get into why, since I was already planning on making my next post about nutrition.
I’m not sure about cultural anthropology or women’s studies. I don’t know enough about those fields.
On macro—my impression is there’s more disagreement among economists about macro than about other things? So if macro is an issue where economists don’t really know what they’re talking about, it supports the heuristic that lack of agreement among experts indicates they don’t know what’s really going on. But OTOH my impression is also that economists do actually know stuff about recessions.
I think this is an extremely bad example. Macro-econ contains some models that are partially predictive and an extensive literature on when to use which hypothesis, and then a few crank theories that simply reject empiricism altogether. The fact that academically ancient or crankish theories are popular among the political class or among blog commentators simply does not mean that the academic study of macroeconomics, when done properly, has nothing accurate and applicable to say about recessions.
Just because I don’t know the macroeconomic literature doesn’t mean I can’t be rational enough to distinguish between the actual literature and the popular misconceptions.