"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph." - Shirley Temple

***

Me: I consider views without prejudice as to who they come from. Yes, even ***... [I don't] label all who disagree with me or who have critical thoughts as enemies.

Someone: it's a rare talent of yours really

***

In Utrecht, it is compulsory to do either Economic Methodology or History of Economic Thought an an elective. I guess they want their students to know what they are doing, instead of us, who only do the maths.

[Addendum: We do actually have such a module here, but I don't think it's been offered recently, and I doubt many people do it since it restricts one's options for Honours year modules.

MFM in the comments:

"I am often slightly disconcerted by the way in which econ majors at the U of C seem to be nothing more than applied mathematicians who are nevertheless inferior to actual math majors."

Me: I haven't done any electives, but I hear there's less maths than the core modules
so we actually have to know what we're doing

Friend at U of C: fuckit
my elective is hard math.]


Economic Methodology

Contents
The course is about the methodology used by economists in their attempt to build up a body of reliable knowledge. Methodology, or philosophy of science as it is often called, deals with questions about the nature of reality (ontology), the way we acquire information (epistemology) and the way we structure this information into bodies of knowledge (methodology in the narrow sense of the term).

Now the students have been confronted with many theories of different kind for almost three years, it is time to look back and critically ask a number of questions about the quality of the acquired knowledge. The mission of this course is focused on answering the following questions:
• Why does philosophy matter?
• What are the main approaches in the philosophy of social science?
• What are the principal philosophical approaches applied to economics?
• In which way did economists deal with their problems so far?

Learning objectives
At the end of the course the student is able to:
• identify methodological foundations of economic theories;
• critically analyse economic texts;
• deliver comments from a methodological point of view.

***

The Coral Content Distribution Network - A comment on Tomorrow.sg gave me the idea that it could be used to bypass net censorship. Ooh.

Japanese Comedy The N word family - I suspect it's a satire on how so many Americans get so ridiculously outraged about people calling the Japanese "Japs" due to guilt about World War II racism, when they themselves don't care; many blacks call each other "nigger", yet many white Americans consider that extremely offensive because of their guilt about slavery and segregation.

News from Ma-laysia - Draw of durians may be waning these days - "A survey by an International Islamic University of Malaysia academic found a majority of respondents eating less durians last year than the year before."
Wth. I also want to conduct this sort of study.