I agree with this. Like Scott, I sucked at math and excelled at English without any effort. At the age of thirty I decided to study physics at university. I was in a class with brilliant school leavers, top of their class in double A level math. I didn't have a fraction of their background and had forgotten what little calculus I had learned (which turned out to be an advantage.) We had a math professor who taught us calculus from scratch, as if we were looking over Newton's shoulder as he developed it to make sense of laboratory data. Together w...
Number 18 is interesting. Suppose, for example, the quest for apolitical control of interest rates leads to an AI at the head of the Federal Reserve. Given all the impressive looking equations you can find in macroeconomic papers and textbooks, I wonder how many people realise just how little science there is in that entire body of theory, and how much of it comprises philosophy and political belief, dressed up to look like hard physics, but resting on the assertions of famous "seminal papers" instead of premises or evidence.
How long before the R... (read more)