In orthodox economics, rationality became a straitjacket. Platonified economists ignored the fact that people might prefer to do something other than maximize their economic interests. This led to mathematical techniques such as "maximization," or "optimization," on which Paul Samuelson built much of his work. Optimization consists in finding the
mathematically optimal policy that an economic agent could pursue. For instance, what is the "optimal" quantity you should allocate to stocks? It involves complicated mathematics and thus raises a barrier to entry by non-mathematically trained scholars. I would not be the first to say that this optimization set back social science by reducing it from the intellectual and reflective discipline that it was becoming to an attempt at an "exact
science." By "exact science," I mean a second-rate engineering problem for those who want to pretend that they are in the physics department — so-called physics envy. In other words, an intellectual fraud.
Sounds like the community is not very happy, for various reasons (some valid).
If I were an arclanguage community member reading this and seeing pg's responses, I would not feel better.
The whole situation sounds like a big mess especially considering lisp's history of "community fragmentation and trivially incompatible implementations."
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan