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OneWingedDevil
Aug 27, 2012

Mystic Mongol posted:

You see this a lot in real world simulations of human behavior, too. Especially economic ones... the researchers can't see how their own biases creep into their work, and wind up saying that the models are correct, but the people failing to match those models are behaving irrationally.
I'm always amused when I hear about "rational actors" in economics. It reminds of all those "frictionless surface" problems you work in physics. Are they useful for teaching you things that apply in the real world? Yes! Would taking them as the whole truth cause you to model scenarios incorrectly, much less when you tried to extrapolate other systems from them? Absolutely!

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