I was reading Paulius' post for today, and once again he's given me fodder for a post. (This is a good thing, because I haven't written for a while.) His article talked about The Ultimatum Game, which was an experiment in economics and human nature. Read his post if you want more information. It's okay, I'll wait.
The researchers were surprised by the results of the study, and Paulius, who is apparently much smarter and wiser than they, claims that he was shocked that they were surprised. Toward the end of the article, Paulius made a comment, saying "... it's these people who can't see these motivations and think everything works on making the most possible who run our economy..."
Ummm... I'd like to disagree on this one. In many science-based circles, research and application are completely different arms of the discipline. Researchers sit in their ivory towers, while the trench workers apply the discipline's knowledge in the field. This, of course, is an oversimplified generalization, but my point remains.
With this in mind though, researchers need to run these silly tests and experiments PRECISELY because they're removed from the trenches. And face it, some of the experiments researchers perform are pretty out there... nobody needs to spend millions to prove that water is wet or that snow is cold. If a researcher needs to run these kinds of silly experiments, then they've been away from the trenches for too long.
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"it's these people who can't see these motivations and think everything works on making the most possible who run our economy..."
My point was the people 'on the ground' who continued to trade 'mortgage backed securities' when they knew they were worthless because the mortgages they were based on would never be paid.
They knew they were just numbers...but it didn't matter because everyone trading them figured they'd already have been sold on before the whole thing came crashing down.
(PS, have you noticed our blogs have basically become just public conversations between the two of us?"
Yeah, I've started noticing the public conversation thing. But hey, at least someone is talking.
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