Is there any way to set up a classroom (or an educational system) so that these students would get the right answer? Alternatively, is it even desirable?
If you teach students to think this way, you're saying "The world is governed by comprehensible scientific laws -- which is irrelevant, because people are constantly screwing with you." This experiment might be useful in a physics class for lawyers (who would probably catch on) or conspiracy theorists (who would, at least, have more entertaining hypotheses).
A compromise might be for the teacher t... (read more)
On the other hand, each new argument might reduce the implicit quality of the arguers. Imagine a succession of wilder excuses, rather than a series of increasingly damning data, and you could justify the hawkish Freedonian's view.
Perhaps the way to avoid both of these strategies is to address new evidence in batches. First, you and the hawks add up all your arguments. Then you state them, and consider. A week later, you both state all the new evidence that's come to light since, address how it affects your interpretation of the old data, etc.
You don't want... (read more)
One fascinating thing about Enron is that they found a way to corrupt their own standards. They were huge fans of marking assets to market -- which could have averted both savings and loan crises, kept Executive Life from collapsing, averted the Japanese banking crisis, etc. On top of that, they loved incentive-based compensation.
This all fell apart when some Enron traders became the market: if you get paid based on prices, and you set prices, the rest of the Enron story is inevitable.
Games have trouble satisfying creative urges -- to the extent that they do, they're just a medium for classic creativity, rather than a time-wasting game. It's no accident that lots of programming talent is being expended on a more dynamic version of Second Life, and I can certainly see game-like (or at least hyper-competitive )features in Wikipedia -- which is a lot like a version of trivial pursuit that happens to output an encyclopedia). It's true that as games get more compelling, they'll turn into evolutionary dead ends -- but I strongly suspect that ... (read more)
BJK is on to something: the non-emergent description of a market crash is something like "IF the Fed is raising rates and the economy is slowing down and investors are too leveraged and ... ... ... then the market will crash," while the emergence theory might define investor behavior and note that it will result in periodic booms and crashes, without special rules to govern either. That's the essence of emergence: simple universal rules rather than complex specific rules.
It might feel like junk science because it crosses disciplinary borders, but that doesn't make it invalid.