Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
Feb 3 5 tweets 2 min read
Here is how Romer reacts to a perfectly reasonable point in response to his latest blog post. In a community that values truth and intellectual integrity, he would immediately lose all credibility after that, but instead many economists are *praising* him for it. ImageImageImage
The saddest thing about this is not even what it reveals about the state of economics, which is far from the worst field in that respect, it's how willing Romer and so many others are to debase themselves by jettisoning truth and intellectual honesty for ideological reasons.
Indeed, this isn't just intellectual corruption, it's *moral* corruption. Romer knows perfectly well that it's a good point, but he is a coward and a fraud, so he prefers to side-step the issue and reply with abuse to flatter the prevailing opinion among his peers.
Plato's view that people who do evil things are harming themselves just as much as others is often mocked, but this is the sort of things that make me think it still has a grain of truth, because I have to believe that deep down Romer knows that he is a piece of shit.
I see academics engage in that kind of behavior on a regular basis and I honestly don't know how they can look at themselves in a mirror after that. Openly denying something you know to be true seems to be one of the worse forms of self-debasement I can imagine. It's very sad.

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More from @phl43

Feb 3
Currently being further radicalized against science by economists gushing over this post, and pretending that these graphs convincingly show a strong effect of personal insecurity on black patenting, instead of making it clear that it's probably just noise. ImageImage
I don't even get what the story is supposed to be here: the graph shows that black patenting was highest when lynching against blacks was highest and stayed low after lynching violence receded, so what the fuck do people think it shows?
Sure, you can tell a story in which once anti-black violence has peaked around 1900, it had a large effect on black patenting that persisted long after lynching became much rarer, but this hardly seems to be the most obvious interpretation of the data.
Read 15 tweets
Jan 29
Why do I have the distinct impression that most of what therapists do is tell their patients that their insane worldview is not in fact insane?
I was kind of joking but also kind of being serious here. In theory, it could be very useful to see a therapist because he could help you see that your perception of the world is wrong, which can be hard for your friends and loved ones to do because it puts them in a hard spot.
But everyone I'm close to who is seeing a therapist seems to have their worldview validated by him/her, even though I personally think the worldview in question is deeply mistaken and a big part of why they are miserable, so that doesn't seem very good.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 28
As I have argued before (cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…), this kind of chart is totally fake, because the methods used to estimate the basic reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2's variants are unreliable, but it's worth pointing out that basically everything else on that chart is fake. 1/n
We don't really know what the basic reproduction number of a virus is, and in fact the question doesn't even make sense, because the basic reproduction number of a virus is not an intrinsic property but depends on the context such as population density, culture, etc. 2/n
For instance, take measles, which is often presented as the most transmissible infectious disease with a R0 of 15 as in the chart above. But where does that number come from? 3/n
Read 13 tweets
Jan 25
I agree that, since Ukraine's accession to NATO is not imminent, it wouldn't make sense for Russia to start a war over it now. 1/n
But the fact is that Russia has *not* started a war over it yet and this line of reasoning is precisely what makes me think that it won't and that it just wants the US to believe that it *might* to force Washington to take its security concerns seriously. 2/n
Insofar as this has forced the US to the negotiation table to discuss those concerns for the first time in a very long time, you could say that it has worked, but what is unclear to me is what concrete advantages Russia is expecting from the process. 3/n
Read 7 tweets
Jan 24
It's funny a lot of people attack affirmative action on the ground that Asians are discriminated against by elite universities, but never because Whites are, even though the data show that — at least for non-legacy applicants — both claims are true. edition.cnn.com/2022/01/24/pol…
If you point that out, I'm sure people will come up with all sorts of justifications, but they'll just be ad hoc justifications. The actual reason is that, among educated people, it's socially acceptable to complain that Asians are discriminated against but not that Whites are 🤷‍♂️
Personally, I have come to embrace the view that, in a multicultural society, a measure of affirmative action is probably desirable. You may agree or disagree with that view, but at least it's honest.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 18
This is very interesting and important, but I think another likely effect of technological change is that, *even within cohorts*, it has probably increased heterogeneity in media consumption, because it has given people a much wider range of media to act on their preferences.
It also confirms my prior that young people are in fact terrible.
Maybe the lockdowns will turn out to have been a worthwhile but ultimately doomed last ditch effort to rid the earth of this despicable race: young people.
Read 4 tweets

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