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horsefacts
@horsefacts.eth
In my last year of econ undergrad, I was lucky enough to join Jerry Gaus's graduate seminars. At the time I was disillusioned with economics, which had turned out to be about building cartoon models and torturing data with statistics. Most academic econ was more fiction writing than truth seeking. In his seminars I found a different vision: an economics grounded in moral philosophy and political economy, influenced by evolutionary theory, anthropology, and complex systems. It was just one method in an approach to understanding our complex evolved social order that was much more honest and no less rigorous. I think he is the teacher who most influenced me, though I didn't know it at the time. I started learning to program because I wanted to explore agent-based evolutionary models. And I found myself working years later on cryptoeconomic coordination games. I never made it back to tell him this: he passed away four years ago today. I often wonder what he would think about Ethereum.
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tldr (tim reilly)
@tldr
I had a very similar experience with Econ undergrad… kept thinking that “maybe it will get interesting when I get to advanced classes”. Same with Poli Sci. Then, being finished with those majors, I took a course called “Shakespeare” with a man named Larry Goldberg. My life has never been the same. He tells very good jokes in earnest, and one of them is the “Summer Reading List” he would give to students every semester. When I was working in business consulting after college, missing the intellectual activity of Professor Goldberg’s classes, I was waking up at 5am every morning to read through this list while my mind was still fresh.
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