[Cryptography] Why don't we protect passwords properly?

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Wed Dec 25 09:35:34 EST 2013


On Dec 23, 2013, at 2:17 AM, ianG wrote:
> Hi Jerry,
> 
> fun debate [on government, regulation, markets, von Mises...],
but far afield from what this mailing list is about.  I won't continue it here, but I'll give my opinion on the meta-issue:  Economics these days can be divided into three (sometimes overlapping) subfields:  Macro, micro, and behavioral.  From what I've seen, the latter two are predictive sciences.  Macroeconomics is not.  At best, it's a descriptive science, like, say, biological taxonomy before Darwin.  The very fact that there are Austrian and Keynesian and who-knows-who-else "schools" of macroeconomics - "schools" that disagree on the basics of goals, terminology, measurements, legitimate forms of analysis, the basic interpretation of events on which enormous amounts of data have been gathered - tell me "there's no there there".  Von Mises wrote beautiful, incisive, logical analyses.  But then so did Keynes.  Hell, so did Marx.  So did Aristotle, on topics we now consider the domain of other sciences.  The fact that Aristotle could reason well didn't make his physics correct.

There's nothing wrong with descriptive sciences.  Somehow you need to gather the data and try out various classifications before you can produce good predictions.  What's wrong is claiming that you have a predictive theory and then consistently making excuses for why your ability to predict is no better than chance - which is what I see *all* the "schools" of macroeconomics doing.  What's even worse is taking the next step and insisting that existing practice, and existing results, are wrong because your reasoning shows them to be so.  All the reasoning of all the macroeconomists in the world gathered together is worth less than a single working factory.

Thanks, but I'll take my "mixed economy", and my "mixed macroeconomic principles", and the resulting "mixed results", rather than any of the "true religions".  Look at where the "true religion" of Marxism led the world....

                                                        -- Jerry



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