> The granularity of the "correctness" is the major difference here and you're asking the author to be ok with an extremely rough success criteria when they are proposing a mathematically perfect success criteria.
All I'm saying is that there are easier and clearer ways of presenting the same thing that could be done in a sentence and make the "reason why" obvious. No need to introduce gadgets and go on and on for 30 pages about "exponential time" (is the author talking about the exponential time hypothesis? Or is this P vs. NP?) among other things. There's also some additional crossed wires about "needing to try all cases" or something, that doesn't make any sense. No SAT solver/TSP solver/MILP solver, etc., does this. Anyone who is at all familiar with this topic would not make such statements, and certainly not, in the way you mention, a "mathematically perfect" criterion that "is proven wrong." So which is it? Is the author being cavalier about the literature? Or do they simply not understand the basics?
Additionally, they're not proving anything wrong. This is, like what I mentioned before, similar to bashing people for saying "Nash-equilibria are PPAD-hard (and communication hard) so Nash-equilibrium as a concept is bad because it's computationally difficult." (In fact, I'd say it's even less interesting than this, because at least the latter is a nontrivial result; not a one-line argument that we can embed arbitrarily complex things into the market.)
> Rationalism has not been shown to provide a pathway to a general epistemology.
This is "rational" as in "rational agent" (utility-maximizing, or an agent that makes at least Pareto-optimal choices, or who plays to Nash or correlated equilibria) not "rationalists" as in people who apply rationalism as an epistemology. Applied broadly, "rational agents" could solve halting-hard problems by making an obvious game where an agent who solves such a problem gets a million dollars, since such agents are often assumed to have unbounded computational power. (In particular, nothing about the agent's computational power is often assumed.)
> Fundamentally the author is making a really good case for the idea that oblique or poorly specified/constructed goal and measurement criteria (eg. EMH) should not be assumed as a competent goal vectoring mechanism for society.
Not really, no. For one, EMH says nothing about exact solutions (this would require a much more careful argument with a different type of reduction), and two, in the same way as before, putting EMH on a pedestal (like putting Nash equilibria on a pedestal, or agent rationality, etc.) leads to absurd results. My point is that (a) this is well-known and (b) you can make much simpler examples (like the ones above) that don't appear to be as "clever" but prove the same (nearly-obvious) point.
>"Nash-equilibria are PPAD-hard (and communication hard) so Nash-equilibrium as a concept is bad because it's computationally difficult."
I think that's a perfectly cromulent position actually. It's a great example where the theory doesn't help when you're working with real non-homo economicus agents, and I would argue hurts if you assume that people behave (or should) behave according to those concepts.
>This is "rational" as in "rational agent" (utility-maximizing, or an agent that makes at least Pareto-optimal choices, or who plays to Nash or correlated equilibria)
...even worse. Go find me one of these perfect information people. I suppose you could collapse the stated preference and revealed preference superposition into observed preference to solve the equation.
Sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand your position at all.
My point is that, like EMH, none of these are pretending to be the "be all end all solution to all models" and it's obviously silly to pretend otherwise? So it seems you're agreeing with me?
Maybe you and I agree that EMH shouldn't be considered god's truth, but macroeconomists who inform policymakers and asset pricing theory sure as hell do. Trust the market, market clearing etc... all come out of the philosophy.
I think that's the whole crux of the paper - the people informing how we structure our economy shouldn't consider EMH doctrine.
All I'm saying is that there are easier and clearer ways of presenting the same thing that could be done in a sentence and make the "reason why" obvious. No need to introduce gadgets and go on and on for 30 pages about "exponential time" (is the author talking about the exponential time hypothesis? Or is this P vs. NP?) among other things. There's also some additional crossed wires about "needing to try all cases" or something, that doesn't make any sense. No SAT solver/TSP solver/MILP solver, etc., does this. Anyone who is at all familiar with this topic would not make such statements, and certainly not, in the way you mention, a "mathematically perfect" criterion that "is proven wrong." So which is it? Is the author being cavalier about the literature? Or do they simply not understand the basics?
Additionally, they're not proving anything wrong. This is, like what I mentioned before, similar to bashing people for saying "Nash-equilibria are PPAD-hard (and communication hard) so Nash-equilibrium as a concept is bad because it's computationally difficult." (In fact, I'd say it's even less interesting than this, because at least the latter is a nontrivial result; not a one-line argument that we can embed arbitrarily complex things into the market.)
> Rationalism has not been shown to provide a pathway to a general epistemology.
This is "rational" as in "rational agent" (utility-maximizing, or an agent that makes at least Pareto-optimal choices, or who plays to Nash or correlated equilibria) not "rationalists" as in people who apply rationalism as an epistemology. Applied broadly, "rational agents" could solve halting-hard problems by making an obvious game where an agent who solves such a problem gets a million dollars, since such agents are often assumed to have unbounded computational power. (In particular, nothing about the agent's computational power is often assumed.)
> Fundamentally the author is making a really good case for the idea that oblique or poorly specified/constructed goal and measurement criteria (eg. EMH) should not be assumed as a competent goal vectoring mechanism for society.
Not really, no. For one, EMH says nothing about exact solutions (this would require a much more careful argument with a different type of reduction), and two, in the same way as before, putting EMH on a pedestal (like putting Nash equilibria on a pedestal, or agent rationality, etc.) leads to absurd results. My point is that (a) this is well-known and (b) you can make much simpler examples (like the ones above) that don't appear to be as "clever" but prove the same (nearly-obvious) point.