164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality – Sean Carroll
The presumption of the premise: that all behavioral sciences out to be inter-integrated and discoverable, an admirable goal, if unattainable. Here, at least in the podcast, Gintis cherry picks from 5 or 10 disciplines, to come up with a thrust towards a TOE, theory of everything. For me, the world is messy. Archimedes claimed that if he found a fixed point, he could move the world. The desire for an all-inclusive theory that takes in all human affairs at every level is at least a 7,000 year old endeavor. These slippery sciences, psychology, economics, sociology, etc. are alive and changing in interrelation to the culture they are elucidated in. They are messy for good reason. They have inherent ambiguities the way cosmology has upper and lower bounds of knowing. compelling story tellers often impose a priori reasoning while claiming empirical data.
OK. For me, then, I did not come across the fundamental axioms and concrete and clearly falsifiable established dictums in his own presentation that he faults all the other disciplines for not having. Perhaps there is more, that I didn’t see. Please direct me to something useful/fundamental. Too broad a topic for the podcast? A few anecdotal game theory ideas, one offs in anthropology show a rash reductionism not palatable to science. The real geniuses in his broad field are highly remunerated, and working the monopolized arena of the internet. I must be missing the bulk of it.
