Someone on String Theory and application to Economics:


I think we have witnessed enough man made disastors to prompt us to instinctively cast doubt upon any theory that claims to unity - to reduce the chaos of human interaction inherent in the social sciences into patterns of regularity that can be expressed as verifiable laws. Think about the IMF austerity plans, their underlying models and how they wrecked half decent economies that were momentarily caught out.., the collapse of LTCM, a hedge fund with two nobel prize winning financial economists on board...

I can think of three simple reasons why grand theories and Euclidean like mathematical artifacts will continually disappoint us in the social sciences.

1. Unlike the natural sciences, we have no constant substantive phenomena, or any source of predictibilty in the changing contours of our socio-economic systems. To put it simply, gravity in Newton's apple is the same gravity today. Fifteen years ago, it was held widely that the geopolitics would 'freeze' in a bipolar system founded on nuclear deterrance, and after that came the "end of the history" thesis, and today these ideas look quaint in a widely fragmented world system..

2. Human interaction is inherently unpredictable - we have ways and means of simplifying human behaviour, 'black-boxing' it but we have neither the technology (ie 3000+ years and all we have is game theory) nor the imagination to comprehensively do so. Theories that rely on abject simplications of human behaviour can only serve as benchmarks or 'ballpark figures' that guide our judgement.

3. Theories in the social sciences are reflexive - they can be unconscious products of history, culture and interests. Dominant theories reflect certain fashions and trends which can be brutally fickle...

I've come to increasingly believe that the only way to deal with the challenges of a increasingly disjointed, yet rapidly moving global system to have a mind that can accept incoherency as the starting point, not one that seeks to eliminate it...