SlamDiego

“ What Wikipedia says is what a transitory plurality of the interested want it to say. ”

“ Wikipedia has far too many editors whose very concept of truth hangs upon the defense of their own egos. ”

Contents

An Inadequate Summary

Absence

Years ago, I stopped actively editing Wikipedia articles. I cannot prevent the corruption of economics articles by ad hoc coälitions of Keynesians (of various sorts) with Ricardians (of various sorts), and editing any others tends to help give the whole of the project an unwarranted appearance of legitimacy.

English!

Wikipedia editors (including, most certainly, many administrators) seem in constant war against the English language, and they talk through their hats about rules of English.

American editors are likely to insist that a structure is British English, rather than American English, and not admit that it is merely proper English. (I write this not only as an American, but as one of the opinion that British English is in a worse state than is American English, as shown, for example, by the acceptance of “orientate”.)

commas

Commas in dates, in place designations, and in the use of “junior” offset an element, almost like parentheses, so that a second comma is grammatically required to return from the offset.

The actual logic of commas seems to have escaped most editors. Attempting to reason with people about it is somewhat futile; I'll instead cite a few very relevant passages from The Chicago Manual of Style (with underscores added by me):

Dates (6.46)

In the month-day-year style of dates, the style most commonly used in the United States and hence now recommended by Chicago, commas are used both before and after the year. In the day-month-year system — sometimes awkward in regular text, though useful in material that requires many full dates — no commas are needed. Where month and year only are given, or a specific day (such as a holiday) with a year, neither system uses a comma.

States &c (6.47)

Commas are used to set off the individual elements in addresses or place-names that are run into the text. No comma appears between a street name and an abbreviation such as SW or before a postal code.

Proofs were sent to the author at 743 Olga Drive NE, Ashtabula, OH 44044, on May 2.
Waukegan, Illinois, is not far from the Wisconsin border.
The plane landed in Kampala, Uganda, that evening.

Junior” &c and “Inc.” &c (6.49 & 6.50)

Commas are no longer required around Jr. and Sr. If commas are used, however, they must appear both before and after the element. Commas never set off II, III, and such when used as part of a name.

Commas are not required around Inc., Ltd., and such as part of a company’s name. As with Jr., however, if commas are used, they must appear both before and after the element.

“libel”

It's not a peculiarly legal term.

JzG and RJC have each (on separate occasions) asserted that calling an act “libel” constitutes a legal threat, to rationalize disciplinary actions.[1][2] Let's look at the definition of “libel”:

1a. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation. b. The act of presenting such material to the public. 2. The written claims presented by a plaintiff in an action at admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court.[3]

Now, definition 2 is plainly a legal or legalistic reference, but only applies to admiralty law or to an ecclesiastical court, and it would be the complaint itself that would be called (without pejoration) a “libel”. But I have yet to see any editor threaten to present such a “libel” against another, and certainly this wasn't the use to which JzG and RJC were objecting.

That leaves definition 1a and 1b. But, plainly, one can want and have a name for the act of presenting to the public false publication that damages a person's reputation without even taking a position on whether such acts should or should not be legal. (Some people may thoughtlessly presume that libel should be illegal, making it all the more likely that they will willy-nilly infer a legal threat.) And one could certainly both name an act and believe that it should be illegal without actually threatening to bring legal action.

(In my own case, I don't believe that libel per se should be illegal. A person's reputation is the beliefs of others, which is to say that it is the thoughts of others. One does not have the right to compel others to think what one wishes about them; the property right here is of the thinker, not of the subject of the thought. So the standard intellectual foundation of laws against libel and slander is rubbish. Any trespass would have to be located in violation of some contract with persons misled, and such contracts may not exist.)

JzG has argued that, because “libel” is defined under law, it is a legal term. But, by this token, anything (including weights and measures and names of varieties of cheese) defined under law would be legal terms, and thus using them would constitute legal threats.

Centrism v. neutrality — They're logically quite distinct.

I've more than once noted a confusion of centrism with neutrality. It's important to understand that, with respect to a conceptual space,

• Centrism is a position within the conceptual space

while

• Neutrality is a position about the conceptual space.

More specifically,

• Centrism prefers a position that is reckoned to be midway between extremes.
• Neutrality holds that no position within the conceptual space is preferred (including centrism).

For any given conceptual space, centrism cannot be reconciled with neutrality, though neutrality might be in the center of some conceptual meta-space. (Neutrality about neutrality would then be a position within a meta-meta-space, &c.)

Economics

On the distinctions amongst neoclassical economics, Austrian School economics, and marginalism

The superset is marginalism; the Austrian School wasn't and never became neoclassical.

The first published appearance of the term “neoclassical” in reference to economics is in Veblen's “The Preconceptions of Economic Science”, Pt III (QJE v14 (1900)):

No attempt will here be made even to pass a verdict on the relative claims of the recognised two or three main “schools” of theory, beyond the somewhat obvious finding that, for the purpose in hand, the so-called Austrian school is scarcely distinguishable from the neo-classical, unless it be in the different distribution of emphasis.

Note that Veblen writes of a world in which the Austrian School is viewed as different from the neoclassical economists (though Veblen sees them as having shared preconceptions to which he objects).

Yet, in textbooks written by neoclassical economists (and by many anti-marginalists), neoclassical economics and marginalism are usually simply treated as the same thing, and Austrian School economics are treated as a variety of neoclassical economics.

In fact, the Austrian School is certainly marginalist. The neoclassical economists have also always been at least somewhat marginalist, albeït that for a time they walked away from marginal utility (and not all of them have reëmbraced it). But neither school subsumes the whole of marginalism.

The reason that the neoclassical school is called “neoclassical” or “neo-classical” is that, while they embraced marginal utility in the explanation of the demand curve, they explained the supply curve much as had the classical economics, in terms of objective costs whose structure was determined by physical processes. The Austrian School, meantime, saw the supply curve as a complementary demand curve, with the marginal utilities of producers determining their willingness to trade goods and services for money. The neoclassical economists utterly failed to understand this view, and mistook the Austrian School for claiming that price were simply determined by one demand curve. Hence Marshall's foolish-yet-lauded analogy of cloth being cut by both blades of scissors.

The neoclassical economist were so convinced that Marshall's synthesis had captured all of the insights of marginalism that they began to write the history of economics as if marginalism had come together with Marshall's Principles. Many eventually lost the distinction between marginalism in general and neoclassical economics in particular, and hence (since the Austrian School were plainly marginalist) began to write of the Austrian School as “neoclassical”. But the Austrian School has for the most part resisted such unfortunate confusions.

A shared, over-looked error

The typical mainstream economist misunderstands mathematics in a way that perversely complements the misunderstanding of mathematics by the typical Austrian School economist.

It's interesting to me to note that the Austrian School and the neoclassical economists share the mistaken belief that the neoclassical economists generally understand mathematics. From this belief, the neoclassical economists thought (and generally continue to think) that their (distinctive) economics, generated with bad mathematics, must be right. The Austrian School saw that the economics was wrong, and erroneously inferred that there must be something wrong with the application of mathematics per se to economics.

Averaging the Meaningless

The proposition that errors of aggregation of utility will cancel each other out presumes that utility really is very strongly cardinal, though it can only be observed as something less. But if utility isn't very strongly cardinal — and there isn't good reason to suppose that it is, even if we accept expected utility theory (which cardinalizes utility to the point that only affine transforms are equivalent) — then we are talking about averaging the meaningless. It isn't that some estimated values are too big and others too small so that they can cancel. Rather, there are no underlying values to be estimated.

(Further, if we accepted such strong cardinality, we would still have to query the expectation that errors would cancel-out. They would surely cancel-out at the limit; but the limit is reached at infinity. In real-life, there would be no reason to expect the errors to cancel-out, and little or no reason to expect the errors to even be finite.)