Apathy is more harmful than ignorance

This is just a quick thought or note here, it is not so much about finance or economics, as it is about epistemology.

In finance and economics, there are a lot of different viewpoints and ideas. There seems to be a good deal of emphasis on "getting the correct answer", that is, if you are able to correctly answer a question from a technical perspective, then that is seen as socially valuable and commendable.

Well, my experience discussing finance and economics has led me to a different perspective, than when I first started. Being technically correct is indeed nice and encouraging, but it is no substitute for being proactive and basically just caring about what happens. I would rather have someone on my side who is wrong, but who cares and is open to new ideas and correction, than someone who gets every answer correct, but can't be bothered with other people.

I'm afraid that my attitude has been gradually shifting towards the latter: to apathy and nihilism, almost like an overcorrection of responsibility.

If you try tackle big problems, sometimes this bites you in the ass. You may not have the time or resources to do everything you want, and there is a tendency to overcorrect with apathy and passivity.

I think perspective and priorities are important. For me, I have had to dial back my ambitions to model the mathematics of MMT and "post monetary" ideas. After all, this is currently just a free time project that I want to turn into something more. So instead of creating novel mathematical models of new ideas, I have instead shifted focus to describing the mathematics of common well understood ideas, with nothing novel, except the approach to teaching them and the format for delivery.

Working within common ground, just seems like a better application of my time and energy, so helping describe how duration works, or modeling time series of interest mathematically, have been efforts I have been working on.

The focus is not on being correct with new ideas, but being proactive in having conversations and finding common ground. Expect to see more of this in the future.

A lot of this stuff I hope to publish to my codepen profile: https://codepen.io/math3737