--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> Economics cannot answer these questions because of
> its "telescopic" view of
> rationality i.e. conflating what the economists know
> from the hindsight
> with what the human actors actually know while
> making their decisions.
> However, cognitive and behavioral sciences (aka
> sociology) can be of help
> here. Sociologists have introduced notions such as
> "social construction"
> or "definition of the situation" to denote a set of
> apriori expectations
> what information is relevant and what can be safely
> ignored in an
> interaction
>[snip]
> To summarize: economics may explain how information
> can be processed to
> achieve optimal cost/benefit balance, whereas
> sociology can explain which
> bits of information enter the cost/benefit balancing
> process and which are
> excluded from it under different social
> circumstances.
In principle, economics has an answer to this -- that the decision of what information to count in the calculation can itself be made in a utility maximisation framework given the cost of acquiring a piece of information versus its marginal effect on the decision. Bayesian reasoning comes in to help you get started from a position of knowing literally nothing.
In practice, of course, the model choice problem is insurmountable for economists; although we are on a sound theoretical basis for saying that the question of who gets the drinks depends on (x, y, z, plus a load of other factors which have been ignored because they are (literally) not worth the trouble of thinking about), we are also in the slightly awkward position of having every model depend on assuming that a previous underlying model for model choice has been correctly solved (or at least, optimally solved -- often not the same thing).
The parallel between this situation and that of Steven Gould's view on reductionism vs. Justin's is what drew me to this article in the first place. In the genetic case, Justin is correct to say that the genetic determinism is not affected by the shortfall in the number of genes. However, he is correct in the same sense in which the economist is correct to say that the decision to buy rounds of drinks can be characterised as one of maximising a utility function.
It can, but the function itself is orders of combinatorial magnitude too big to ever be made explicit -- just as, under anything but a one-to-one genes-to-chracteristics mapping, we're never going to be able to identify the "gene" for shagging one's teenage graduate students.
Meanwhile, Gould is taking a position analogous to Wojtek's in that he's saying that an explanation has to explain; it has to give us a road map for choosing the right kind of model, and that with the shortfall, the analysis of gene pairs isn't going to give us such a road map for human behaviour.
It all seems immensely comforting, in a strange kind of way.
d^2
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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