I haven’t given that article a close read, but on a quick look through it I find it basically not at all compelling.
It looks like it’s the genre of ‘this part of reality is surprisingly detailed, therefore be paranoid/nihilistic/cynical about it’.
This genre of article is saying: there’s this concept that you’ve been using, which you’ve been treating as a clean abstraction without really thinking much about where it can from, but if you look at where it comes from, there is a bunch of messy detail & judgments calls.
And that much, often, is true. But it’s written with an air of suspicion, or with explicit claims that therefore it’s all just a bunch of made-up nonsense. Which does not follow.
Numbers that involve judgment calls aren’t in general fake/nonsense/bullshit. I regularly use subjective probabilities, Fermi estimates, etc., and I imagine that you do too.
If you want, you can have the takeaway from this sort of article: “that’s right, I’ve been using this concept without really understanding the messy detail behind it. Do I care enough about this to want to understand where it comes from?”
If so, then you can go try to learn about it, using the processes that you usually use to learn about things. Try to find writing by economists explaining where inflation numbers and “real GDP” numbers come from, or some narrower question that you could dig into enough so that you have a . Have a conversation with Claude about it. Make a google doc where you think through what you would do if it was up to you to come up with number for “real GDP”, or to do whatever tasks people do when they rely on “real GDP” numbers. Etc.
This post of yours looks like it’s kinda trying to do some of that, although the things that you’d want to learn about might not fit into a lesswrong comment, and I don’t know if you’ll find anyone who is sufficiently well-informed about real GDP calculations and willing to spend the time to leave a detailed comment for you to get a good object-level answer here. And it reads like you’ve already maybe 70% bought in to the mood & the narratives of the post you’ve linked, which is not something that I’d recommend with this genre of post before you’ve tried to learn about it elsewhere. Maybe you can come back to this post afterwards and consider its reasoning after you have more grounding in the topic, but relying on this person’s judgment & narratives about some topic just because he’s the one who pointed out to you that it is surprisingly detailed seems like bad process.
To get a little more object-level: One thing that’s missing from the article (and your takeaways from it) is that most of the judgment calls that the economists who come up with “real GDP” numbers make are at the process level, of what procedures to use to assign a number to real GDP for a country for a particular year, given the various complications. When trying to answer a question like “what was US GDP in 1946“ they have limited degrees of freedom because they’re mostly just relying on the processes that they’ve decided to apply to answering that sort of question for all countries & years. Which is pretty different from “BEA economists eye-balling a bunch of factors and coming up with a number that “seems right””, even if both involve judgment calls.
I haven’t given that article a close read, but on a quick look through it I find it basically not at all compelling.
It looks like it’s the genre of ‘this part of reality is surprisingly detailed, therefore be paranoid/nihilistic/cynical about it’.
This genre of article is saying: there’s this concept that you’ve been using, which you’ve been treating as a clean abstraction without really thinking much about where it can from, but if you look at where it comes from, there is a bunch of messy detail & judgments calls.
And that much, often, is true. But it’s written with an air of suspicion, or with explicit claims that therefore it’s all just a bunch of made-up nonsense. Which does not follow.
Numbers that involve judgment calls aren’t in general fake/nonsense/bullshit. I regularly use subjective probabilities, Fermi estimates, etc., and I imagine that you do too.
If you want, you can have the takeaway from this sort of article: “that’s right, I’ve been using this concept without really understanding the messy detail behind it. Do I care enough about this to want to understand where it comes from?”
If so, then you can go try to learn about it, using the processes that you usually use to learn about things. Try to find writing by economists explaining where inflation numbers and “real GDP” numbers come from, or some narrower question that you could dig into enough so that you have a . Have a conversation with Claude about it. Make a google doc where you think through what you would do if it was up to you to come up with number for “real GDP”, or to do whatever tasks people do when they rely on “real GDP” numbers. Etc.
This post of yours looks like it’s kinda trying to do some of that, although the things that you’d want to learn about might not fit into a lesswrong comment, and I don’t know if you’ll find anyone who is sufficiently well-informed about real GDP calculations and willing to spend the time to leave a detailed comment for you to get a good object-level answer here. And it reads like you’ve already maybe 70% bought in to the mood & the narratives of the post you’ve linked, which is not something that I’d recommend with this genre of post before you’ve tried to learn about it elsewhere. Maybe you can come back to this post afterwards and consider its reasoning after you have more grounding in the topic, but relying on this person’s judgment & narratives about some topic just because he’s the one who pointed out to you that it is surprisingly detailed seems like bad process.
To get a little more object-level: One thing that’s missing from the article (and your takeaways from it) is that most of the judgment calls that the economists who come up with “real GDP” numbers make are at the process level, of what procedures to use to assign a number to real GDP for a country for a particular year, given the various complications. When trying to answer a question like “what was US GDP in 1946“ they have limited degrees of freedom because they’re mostly just relying on the processes that they’ve decided to apply to answering that sort of question for all countries & years. Which is pretty different from “BEA economists eye-balling a bunch of factors and coming up with a number that “seems right””, even if both involve judgment calls.