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0 pointsMichaelZuo2y ago0 comments

A reductio ad absurdum argument does not apply here because I, nor anyone else here, has ever claimed that economic theories have to satisfy all potential possibilities arbitrarily far into the future. In fact no one in this comment chain has even raised the mention of it other than you.

Have you completely lost track of the conversation? At best, it seems like an argument against the imagined thoughts made by yourself.

You can review some examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

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esarbe2y ago· 2 in thread

Well, you seem to make the argument that economic theories have to "satisfy all potential possibilities arbitrarily far into the future" because otherwise they are a "pretty dumb theory".

Or how is throwing gold into a Volcano any different from throwing the Earth into the sun, other than one being possible right now and the other maybe possible in the future? Both are pretty irrational and arbitrary actions.

MichaelZuoOP2y ago

> Or how is throwing gold into a Volcano any different from throwing the Earth into the sun, other than one being possible right now and the other maybe possible in the future?

The present day versus the far future is a very important difference, in addition to the several dozen or hundreds of orders of magnitude. Do you not understand how the normal person perceives possibilities in relation to time, or what orders of magnitude are?

Anything that is reasonably possible to do by a single individual right now, circa Sept. 2023, with normal single human adult scale resources, needs to be taken into account by any economic theories. If it's to gain credibility from the HN readerbase over the predominant theory.

If someone spending a few hours of effort could cause a theory to do the equivalent of a divide by zero then it's a dumb theory and close to zero passing readers will take it seriously.

esarbe2y ago

If you have a valid economic theory, it doesn't matter if we apply it at 50BCE or if we apply it in 3000CE. Either an economic theory is able to explain a given economic situation and make predictions, or it is not.

> Anything that is reasonably possible to do by a single individual right now

Economic theories don't usually depend on the concrete specificity. Moreover; economic theories actually often pose the question "What if this thing that was not possible before suddenly becomes viable".

> divide by zero then it's a dumb theory and close to zero passing readers will take it seriously.

That might be a bad example; regular math doesn't do divide-by-zero, but we still use it very much.

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