The Instagrammer on holiday learns how to increase follower engagement by monitoring the reactions that their images receive; the delivery company keeps track of its logistics (and surveils its drivers) on the basis of the customer feedback it receives; the financial analyst scours their Bloomberg terminal for the all-important price movement. The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work.
Folk discover markets, supply, demand – soon there will be a science that explains all of this.
“The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative” says someone who has no idea what positive and negative feedback mean in control engineering, whence the jargon came.
Quite so, dearieme. The article is in LRB:
It seems there’s something about academic ‘political economists’.
I suspect that if you get a lot more negative than positive feedback you lose your job. But then I’m not a “political economist”.
I got marked down on a compulsary Job Centre training course for writing that positive feedback needs to be minimised to keep a system stable, and negative feedback was needed to control it and keep it stable.
Folk discover markets, supply, demand – soon there will be a science that explains all of this. A science you say? Science requires that when valid evidence disproves a theory that theory must be accepted as incorrect. MMT anyone?
You don’t often hear about Goldsmiths, do you? They used to run a very good course on…well… goldsmithing actually. Alas I guess sociology & political economics are more its style these days.
I’m not sure that ‘science’ is quite the right word.
Body of knowledge and a few robust assertions backed by supporting observations may be the beginnings of a science.
If it were a science – I assume you’re thinking of this ‘economics’ stuff – then even when there were multiple ways of doing something, all involved would agree on the ‘science’ of each, and they’d agree they were differing in what they wanted in terms of outcome and side effects, at least at the gross level.
In physics, you could heat your house with a wood fire in the fireplace; by burning the furniture; by importing electricity and using it to heat resistive elements; by setting off some high explosives; by starting a nuclear fission process in some equipment in the living room. All would be agreed by all to work; all would agree how they worked; some disagreements might arise because economist 1 didn’t much care for high explosives in densely populated areas (etc) and economist 2 can show that the locality is sufficiently polluted that more woodsmoke would be a Very Bad Thing. Etc etc.
It would be f*cking miraculous if a bunch of economists had such a level of agreement and such a level of understanding why they push different solutions….
A local restaurant owner only reads the positive reviews of his place on Trip Advisor.
Needless to say, the food is shyte.
” soon there will be a science that explains all of this.”
Yeah, obviousology. Of which economics is a branch. When it can make reliable predictions maybe we’ll think about calling it a science, degraded though that term is.
rhoda
IMHO, you’re not quite demanding enough. The requirement for it to be a science is that a prediction done by any economist produces the same answer; and is ‘correct’ within a quantifiable error.
Apparently, there is no body of ‘economic science’ to which all ‘economists’ adhere. So there’s a distance to go yet.
Ask any two social ‘scientists’ a question and get (at least) three different answers.