This vignette comes from an article I recently saw in Balloon Juice.
The guy in the
office next to me taught a course in financial math last fall, so at
least a few times a week, I’d hear him say “rational market” to
one of his students. A friend of mine teaches the course sometimes
and told me once that he doesn’t like teaching it because he
doesn’t believe the rational market hypothesis, so I asked the guy
in the office if he believed in the rational market hypothesis. He
said “yes, I think you have to, otherwise none of our mathematical
models have predictive value.”
The author could have been Dostoevsky
himself, and the title the author uses - I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man - probably is from Dostoevsky.
The description is immediately
recognizable. Every one knows it's true and it's so abysmal that
everyone can just act as if it weren't true and get away with it.
My first thought was of the amounts of
money the students and their families pay teachers to do this. My
second thought was of the damage such academics and their professions
do to a society that relies on their expertise. It's simply beyond
horror.
I just happen to be reading a classic book, E. A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, that recounts the history of what I have sometimes called the billiard ball theory of human life that enshrines the Newtonian sciences of the motions of physical bodies and mathematics. The Incomparable Newton and his acolytes were so astonishingly brilliant and successful in what they did that scholars are still trying to apply their assumptions and methods to everything, including human life.
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