I took Intro Economics 101 and about a month in, realized all this talk, talk, talk, even speaking Latin ("ceteris paribus") could be avoided with a half page of partial differential equations.
In STEM fields, so much of the working knowledge is up at the cutting edge. I was just reading an account of mathematician working to get the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into Lean, a theorem proving system. Early on, he noted that he wasn't working with the clumsy old proof that captured headlines not all that long ago. Invoke 1990s nostalgia. It was the new modern proof in which all sorts of theorem proving has been captured by newer abstractions.
As you point out, though, sometimes it pays to look back at where things came from, especially when things seem stuck and new ideas could help advance. I remember a Cold War reverse engineer saying that one often had to go back to the historical record to figure out how Russian or Chinese military technology worked. For example, there had been a half dozen reasonable approaches to designing a radar system, but the US and its allies chose one while the Russians had chosen another. Reading old, classified white papers was part of the job.
P.S. I think economics has always been political in its application, but it has two flaws as a science. One is that it doesn't always make sense from an accounting point of view, so it is like a branch of physics which simply ignores things like energy conservation. The other is that old ideas tend to be refuted and discarded rather than incorporated. This may make sense politically but not scientifically. The new proof of Fermat's Last Theorem embodied the old proof in modern abstractions. It didn't just discard them.
Different from what? History has always been political. There's a reason even ancient kings kept chronicles. When I took American history in high school, our teacher taught us about historiography, the study of the history of history. We learned a lot about changing historical views of American history over its few centuries. I doubt that places with longer histories have never changed.
There are advantages to reading more modern versions as with science. There was a whole revolution in material history, measuring quantities and prices, starting in the 1960s. More recent genetic evidence can add all sorts of insights. Since history is political, it can make sense to read older versions of history to understand how political changes have altered the way the past is scene, but it pays to keep a box of salt grains handy.
I took Intro Economics 101 and about a month in, realized all this talk, talk, talk, even speaking Latin ("ceteris paribus") could be avoided with a half page of partial differential equations.
Excellent post!
Thanks for this.
In STEM fields, so much of the working knowledge is up at the cutting edge. I was just reading an account of mathematician working to get the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into Lean, a theorem proving system. Early on, he noted that he wasn't working with the clumsy old proof that captured headlines not all that long ago. Invoke 1990s nostalgia. It was the new modern proof in which all sorts of theorem proving has been captured by newer abstractions.
As you point out, though, sometimes it pays to look back at where things came from, especially when things seem stuck and new ideas could help advance. I remember a Cold War reverse engineer saying that one often had to go back to the historical record to figure out how Russian or Chinese military technology worked. For example, there had been a half dozen reasonable approaches to designing a radar system, but the US and its allies chose one while the Russians had chosen another. Reading old, classified white papers was part of the job.
P.S. I think economics has always been political in its application, but it has two flaws as a science. One is that it doesn't always make sense from an accounting point of view, so it is like a branch of physics which simply ignores things like energy conservation. The other is that old ideas tend to be refuted and discarded rather than incorporated. This may make sense politically but not scientifically. The new proof of Fermat's Last Theorem embodied the old proof in modern abstractions. It didn't just discard them.
Surely history is a bit different, no?
Different from what? History has always been political. There's a reason even ancient kings kept chronicles. When I took American history in high school, our teacher taught us about historiography, the study of the history of history. We learned a lot about changing historical views of American history over its few centuries. I doubt that places with longer histories have never changed.
There are advantages to reading more modern versions as with science. There was a whole revolution in material history, measuring quantities and prices, starting in the 1960s. More recent genetic evidence can add all sorts of insights. Since history is political, it can make sense to read older versions of history to understand how political changes have altered the way the past is scene, but it pays to keep a box of salt grains handy.