Methodology¶

I was born iconoclastic; my original instincts when confronted with a consensus of opinion was to decide it was wrong. However, at some point in recent times I decided that the direction of human learning was accumulative, and that the way to make progress was to see what the best of human knowledge has produced thus far and see about how to revise, extend, or refine it. Because the world is very very complex, and we need all the help we can get.

Terry is sprung from an egg on a mountaintop, forged in the fiery birth of econophysics; he holds that the only radical, and therefore worthwhile, progress to be made in human learning is created by noble savages who, ignorant of the ossified conventions of a field, boldly seize upon the truth.

This is leading to some tension. My inclination is toward “moon shot” approaches: What large and expanding research projects can I contribute to? Whereas Terry thinks more in terms of a lone Einstein, whose relativity overthrows Newtonian physics. Which fundamental assumptions can a researcher rewrite to alter a field from the ground up?

I’m sympathetic to the latter viewpoint. If nothing else, it’s more fun to think of yourself as a bold unconventional outsider and frankly, I suspect it takes less work. (Really. Getting to know a discipline well is hard, and in particular requires you to learn a new vocabulary and the details of all the dead ends and false turns it has taken.) If it is additionally a genuinely viable strategy to ignore both the accumulated wisdom and the accumulated stupidity of a whole field, then I am delighted.

However, if the strategy is viable for some very clever people, is it viable specifically for me? The fact is that I am very clever, but there are many very clever people out there. Specifically, I ain’t Einstein, and additionally, if Albert had had as little time as to work on his differential geometry skills as I have to work on mine, he would not have had the baseline knowledge to pursue general relativity.

Additionally, there is the problem of respectful collaboration across disciplines. Enough knowledge to be dangerous seems, well, dangerous. The noble savage in his proud isolation might not have got the memo that power-law hunts are over; the holy innocent might also be wholly innocent of the fact that reducing a creative economic process to a spin-glass model is not a substantive improvement upon a DSGE model of same. The postgraduate physicist who thinks he can rebuild economics with half-baked bricks discarded from last decade’s nonlinear dynamics constructions will get demolished, with just cause, by the siege machines of the older, more cunning economists from the safety of their well-founded towers. In other words, if you think what someone has said is wrong, it’s helpful to know what they said when putting that point.

On the other hand, maybe that’s based on an idealisation of how human progress works that is whole divorced from the practicality of academia. Do I really want to get published in, for example, an economics journal? Looking at the performance criteria for workers Australian universities, in fact, that is the last thing I want, as publishing across disciplines doesn’t count toward my performance goals. If I am a rational actor interested in interdisciplinary research, I wish to benefit from the parochial nature of disciplines by publishing attacks against straw-men in journal run by those who don’t know a field well enough to know that’s what I’m doing is duplicitous or at least unoriginal.

On the other hand, there is not zero benefit to being an outsider.

Speaking of straw-men, I am surely creating one here in my characterisation of Terry’s argument - indeed, outsider iconoclasm versus insider incrementalism is a matter of degree. The question is - how do you calibrate these degrees in a system as rarified, incommensurable and, ideally, unrepeatable, as trying to introduce disruptive innovation into modern social science?

There might be a paper in that, y’know?