There’s a long and storied tradition of foolish people deciding that what their profession needs is for its members to try to ape what another profession does, poorly. Economics went significantly off the rails in much of the second half of the twentieth century when it started handing out Nobel Prizes to economists who put together complicated and elegant models that happened not to have any explanatory power in terms of, you know, the economy, and spit out absurd outcomes. It got back on the rails around 2008, when they recognized that the goal of economics shouldn’t be doing a mediocre imitation of what high level mathematicians and physicists do, but to explain and understand the economy.
Similarly, right wing constitutional interpretation of the last 40 or so years has become a kabuki theater of lawyers cosplaying as amateur historians, badly. Even setting aside the fact that it’s all a facade (the fact that the original public meaning of “arms” at the time of ratification of the second amendment was limited to front loading muskets and semi functional revolvers doesn’t make it into their jurisprudence), we should generally be of the view that professionals who root their practice in trying to do other professions poorly aren’t very good at their own professions.
There’s a long and storied tradition of foolish people deciding that what their profession needs is for its members to try to ape what another profession does, poorly. Economics went significantly off the rails in much of the second half of the twentieth century when it started handing out Nobel Prizes to economists who put together complicated and elegant models that happened not to have any explanatory power in terms of, you know, the economy, and spit out absurd outcomes. It got back on the rails around 2008, when they recognized that the goal of economics shouldn’t be doing a mediocre imitation of what high level mathematicians and physicists do, but to explain and understand the economy.
Similarly, right wing constitutional interpretation of the last 40 or so years has become a kabuki theater of lawyers cosplaying as amateur historians, badly. Even setting aside the fact that it’s all a facade (the fact that the original public meaning of “arms” at the time of ratification of the second amendment was limited to front loading muskets and semi functional revolvers doesn’t make it into their jurisprudence), we should generally be of the view that professionals who root their practice in trying to do other professions poorly aren’t very good at their own professions.