A Time to be Wonkish, and a Time to Put Away Wonkish Things (comment on Paul Krugman: A Dark Age of macroeconomics (wonkish)

Paul Krugmen points out - quite reasonably - the solipsism of drawing any conclusion from the correlation of two things that are the same by definition (see Paul Krugman's A Dark Age of Macroeconomics - Wonkish). For example, I always wondered about a study that showed a remarkable - possibly too remarkable - correlation between body weight and sense of balance. Well, we know exactly how to measure weight, but "sense of balance"? Evidently the experimenters had created some kind of sense-of-balance-o-meter. Now the idea that overweight people have a harder time staying balanced is intuitive, OK, but knowing something about how complex things are measured, I wondered whether the the balance-o-meter what little more than a Rube Goldberg-ish measurement of weight, with some informational impurities that made it vary enough to keep the correlation line from being perfectly straight (a tell-tale sign). So I relegated the study to the category of "not sure it means anything". Only by mastering the meaning of measuring "sense of balance" could I have decided whether the study meant anything or not.

This reminds me a bit of people being mesmerized by graphs of X vs Y where we don't know what either of them mean, but the experts provides something intuitive that he claims is an analogy and we nod out heads.

Well, Prof. Krugman, if pulling some profound "fact" out of the magician's hat of an accounting identity (his phrase), seems like a rich source of nonsense, consider the sort of creation ex nihilo some very smart people indeed - people I know who belong to Mensa (a bad sign in my opinion) have swallowed. Ayn Rand puts at the root of her supposedly deep "objectivist epistemology" the identity "Existence exists" (c.f. John Galt's interminable speech in Atlas Shrugs, or Ayn Rand's book called Objectivist Epistemology.

To fight such speciously derived paradigms on their own ground (or what seems to the believers to be their ground) is a losing battle.

Instead, I think we need to propose alternate ways of looking at things that can be understood by people without a college degree.

[and just how are we supposed to do that, you may wonder]