> If people are going to act like people (mindful of the consequences),
> then -- one way or another, by choice or default -- people will be
> effectively assigning probabilities. Subjective probabilities, based
> on hunches or whatever, but probabilities nonetheless.
In looking for an old paper by Edwin Jaynes (the physicist, not to be confused with Julian Jaynes, the psychologist, also an extremely interesting guy), in which he argues that specifically human thinking (he calls it "plausible reasoning") is precisely abut determining probabilities, that people follow probability theory whether consciously or not. A bit like Hegel in the Logic, suggesting (with his digestion analogy) that people think dialectically whether they know it or not. Anyway, during the search I got sidetracked into reading a few papers by Jaynes on statistical mechanics. In one paper titled Foundations of Probability Theory and Statistical Mechanics, he gets into the history of science and offers his graph of how science (physics, mostly) fluctuated between dogmatism (the domination by a "paradigm") and a freer thought climate. This is his graph (peaks are bad times for scientific freedom and troughs are good):
I don't have time now to think about the connection with economic history. So I thought I could just throw this out there and see if people had any insight into that connection.