How to know if it's worth learning a field of knowledge?

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This discussion raises an interesting and important question: how to decide when it is worth spending time and money investigating some field of knowledge or understanding a viewpoint?

The book I recommended is only $12 or so, but I agree that the time investment is substantial. How do you know a field of knowledge has any value, without investing a lot of time learning it at which point it is too late? Personally I have wasted a lot of time learning about things that proved to have little or no value to me e.g astrology, deconstruction, literary 'theory', psychoanalysis, behaviorism, string theory, semiotics and post-structuralism . Other things like religion and gender feminism seem to be important IMHO only as social or political phenomena. Others have snippets of goodness within large piles of dross eg modern marco-economics, Austrian economics, Marxism, academic music post ~1920, sociology.

I am interested in any ideas beyond these:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ba/some_heuristics_for_evaluating_the_soundness_of/

Another set of heuristics is to ask, "Does a field allow its practitioners to:

1. Build novel things that work, or

2. Make correct and falsifiable prediction of the future, or

3. Explain the otherwise inexplicable?"

As an example, studies suggest that marriage counsellors have less skill in predicting which marriages will survive than simple regresion analyses, and do not reduce the incidence of marriage breakups. My conclusion is that they basically know nothing.

In contrast the theory of relativity satisfies all three criteria (GPS needs relativity time adjustments), predicted gravitational red shift and starlight bending, and explained the orbit of Mercury.

Psychiatiry may have some grain of truth Its practitioners seem to have no skill in making people well again other than suppressing the symptoms with drugs, have less skill in predicting the behaviour of their patients than simple regressions, but Freud's nephew seems to have had enormous success in inventing modern public relations using some of the insights of his uncle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:

Firstly please don't edit text that you quote. I've edited it back to what I
originally wrote.

My intention was to edit it back to my original satirical text, but I did not make that clear.

You can suggest that I waste some money and a lot of time reading a book, but
it's not going to happen.

Looking at your posting history and web site, and this discussion I don't see any evidence you know much about these issues or that you have any will to learn about them so I guess there is not much point continuing beyond these couple of points.

It may seem obvious that spending money on welfare payments, for example, will make people better off. But this ignores second order effects, which are often more important.

Recently the ALP introduced changes to make the supporting parent benefit less appealing. They did not do this merely because they are mean and heartless, but because they realise that encouraging people to have children who are going to live on welfare has all sorts of harmful side-effects, such as increasing the number of children who are born into deprived circumstances. Such policies are also costly for the rest of the community in financial terms and in terms of dealing with the dysfunctional and/or criminal adults who come disproportionately from such situations (these effects persist even after correcting for income).

The recognition in the US of the downsides of the welfare state has reached the point where some black commentators are arguing that Johnson's Great Society was a plot to put down the black man. Not that I agree with that, but the fact that blacks can argue this shows that people perceive a problem.

Please cite some examples of "community based cooperative solutions" that have
worked in practice.

Before the welfare state, there were many cooperative organisations such as churches, clubs, service organisations, mutual societies, and charities which helped people in need. People also saved more money as a nest egg for hard times. Families supported each other more strongly. These solutions were not perfect but neither is the welfare state. The welfare state has had a destructive effect on many of these organisations and mechanisms eg mutual societies have been mostly turned into for-profit companies (eg AMP).

Tim Josling