Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Noah Smith is trying to defend empiricism in economics , but when it comes to empirical facts about the history of science... well, those we can just make up to suit our purposes! And so he writes: "Our most spectacularly successful leaps of theoretical insight - Newton's Principia , Einstein's relativity stuff, Mendel's theory of inheritance - were all very closely guided by data. The general pattern was that some new measurement technology would be invented - telescopes, plant hybridization experiments, etc. - that would provide some new unexplained data. Then some smart theorists would come up with a new theoretical framework (paradigm?) to explain it, and the new framework would then also explain a bunch of other stuff besides, and so people would switch to the new theory." Now, I haven't studied the history surrounding Mendel much, so I am not going to comment on it (imagine that: choosing not to write about something because one doesn't know muc...

"The experience of transcendence, as previously defined, is a movement of the soul that may culminate in an act of transcendence. In the optimal case, as it brings to acute consciousness the relation between God and man, it will reveal the presence under God as the truth of human existence. An experience of this type would in any case be of importance to the person suffering it; but if the description were exhaustive, if the experience did not contain an additional factor, it would not be a constituent of history. The historian would have no occasion, for instance, to attach relevance to such an experience unless he were writing the biography of a person to whom it occurred--and quite probably he would never write the biography because persons plagued by such oddities would be devoid of historical interest... This additional factor that makes the experience historically relevant is the truth of order that it reveals with a obligatory force for every man. The obligatory force the ...

After just calling for empiricism in business cycle studies, I should sound a cautionary note, lest someone pop up and comment, "Have you forgotten everything you wrote in the early oughts?" Tyler Cowen links with apparent approval to a study the strikes me, at least in terms of the relevant sport with which I am familiar, as seriously misguided. Here is the quote Tyler extracts: Theoretical analyses and empirical studies have revealed that conflict escalation is more likely when individuals are more similar in resource-holding potential (RHP). Conflicts can also occur between groups, but it is unknown whether conflicts also escalate more when groups are more similar in RHP. We tested this hypothesis in humans, using data from two professional sports competitions: football (the Bundesliga, the German first division of football) and basketball (the NBA, the North American National Basketball Association). We defined RHP based on the league ranks of the teams involved in...