lbo-talk-digest V1 #4722

[Lawrence]

Carrol wrote:
"To repeat an earlier point. Later ages will look back on the 20th
century's obsession with language, symbol systems, semantics, etc. as
being even dippier than neoclassical economics. One symptom of this is
that when the obsession is challenged, it is defended in one of the
three follow"

Isn't it possible that the 20th century had an obsession with language and
symbol systems because so much remarkable progress was being made in
advancing language and the symbolic representation of ideas? These advances,
which seem so abstract, had very real industrial implications, resulting in
100s of billions of new wealth. To give just 2 examples of the progress:

1. Mathematics has improved so much in the last 90 years that Einstein's
Theory of Relativity can now be written using just one third the lines that
Einstein had to use.

2. Computer languages have improved so much that software can now have
graphical interfaces. Graphical interfaces are event driven and code to
handle those events is very complex. The software being written today, like
Windows 2000, could not possibly be written using the computer languages of
the 1960s.