Because people don’t understand that science is built on experimentation, they don’t understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment. This is how you get articles with headlines saying “Study Proves X” one day and “Study Proves the Opposite of X” the next day, each illustrated with stock photography of someone in a lab coat. That gets a lot of people to think that “science” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, since so many studies seem to contradict each other.
This is how you get people asserting that “science” commands this or that public policy decision, even though with very few exceptions, almost none of the policy options we as a polity have have been tested through experiment (or can be).
I agree with this. I think it applies to macroeconomics and also to climate “science.”
Note that the origins of the progressive movement were based on the exact opposite view, which is that public policy could and should be based on something called social science.
Read the whole thing, so that you can reach these sentences:
the reason it took us so long to invent it and the reason we still haven’t quite understood what it is 500 years later is it is very hard to be scientific. Not because science is “expensive” but because it requires a fundamental epistemic humility, and humility is the hardest thing to wring out of the bombastic animals we are.
The idea of Science shouldn’t be restricted to those venues in which one can perform a replicable controlled experiment. There are cases in which such experimentation is either impossible or when the technological capacity to perform such experiments comes long after the realization of the critical insights they are designed to confirm.
The best example is probably the history of the advance of knowledge in Astronomy and Physical Cosmology, but there are plenty of others. In these cases, there was little choice but to act as a mere, passive spectator and make a large number of careful observations and try to construct mathematical models of the underlying dynamics based on the recognition of strong statistical patterns.
Now, we can certainly easily distinguish these special cases from the general problem of studying human social behavior on the basis of many major distinctions (e.g. the dynamics are assumed to be unchanging). But Gobry should have told us when mere observation and looking for patterns works and when it doesn’t, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
He might have, for example, talked about the intractability of some complex problems due to issues of over-determination (or what Manzi calls ‘causal density’), or he might have mentioned the importance of testability and the existence of falsifiable predictions.
If you are always able to make exculpatory excuses and salvage your theory and declare victory of your policy in the face of failure by claiming that some hypothetical counterfactual would have been even worse, no matter what happens in the real world, then your field is probably diverging from reality on a number of important matters. Any resemblance to Macroeconomics is purely intentional.
I’d be in favor of excluding Astronomy and Physical Cosmology from Science, as well.
I’m not saying that those things aren’t interesting to study or that insights can’t be gained from such study, but I would limit Science to those things that use the Scientific Method.
Almost everyone agrees that things like Political Sciences aren’t really Sciences, but these cases where men where white lab coats and use latin are allowed in because they seem so similar to the “Hard” Sciences.
I think think great progress of Science has been advanced through the Scientific Method and these other areas of study like to tag along for the funding and prestige.
Note that Astronomy and Cosmology are constantly updating their theories as well, but not through falsification from experiments, just based on a new theory that seems to be attractive. No different than Psychology, Economics or even Political Science, really.
I’m quite sympathetic.
Everyone wants to say that their favorite area is a science, and few university deans are going to exactly argue with their professors on such a point. That doesn’t mean the rest of us have to go along with it.
Instead of saying science tells us little, I prefer to define science more narrowly. Thus, I don’t think of macroecon, climate change, and most of psychology as being very scientific.
Behaviorism is scientific, though, and some aspects of price theory are scientific. These sub-areas support repeatable experiments that have established some important results. These sub-areas support highly reliable prediction-making.
Part of why these different areas get lumped together is an insider-outsider problem. Insiders are good at finding the best of the best among their fellow insiders. However, they are no good at all at evaluating their area of knowledge as a whole. It requires an outsider for that, and shame on anyone who says outsiders are not allowed to question, for example, a complete lack of predictive power in a given field.
You shouldn’t have to be an expert on tarot reading before you can question the whole field. It should be the same way for macro and for climate change.
I’m sure someone like Popper has said it better than me, but wrangling over the definition of Science seems like a pitfall. What many are missing is epistemology — by which I mean “how, in what sense, and to what extent do we actually know what we think we know”. Mathematics and logic have the soundest epistemology. Where philosophy is logical, and where readers understand the role and limits of premises (or axioms in math), philosophy may join the exclusive club. These are purely intellectual realms where logical thought can deduce what must be the case given starting premises or axioms.
As we seek to understand the world around us, we develop Natural Philosophy aka physics — and the conception of Science as we understand it today. Central to physics is empiricism and experimentation. Scientific methodology aka “the scientific method” develops over time to strengthen epistemology in a persuasive manner. However, while there is great reason to believe that mathematics, logics, and philosophy are timeless and universal, we are not so sure about physics, though we simply hold this position as a premise.
Physics begets chemistry begets biology. I would argue that these realms are “messier” in each descendent generation: the count of moving parts and variables in questions we would like to answer approaches and exceeds a critical mass that our mental faculties and external tools can handle, while elements of chaos and randomness confound repeatable and falsifiable predictions. We can simplify and reduce the questions in order that we may answer them, but the answers tend to be unsatisfying and inapplicable. Furthermore, this reduction is a large source of epistemological and methodological concern — how subjective are such decisions, how defensible, and is this where art and science meet?
We are now in the realm of consensus, judgment, and persuasion. Wrong ideas are not obviously or provably so. At least we are still in the realm of mechanics, where the entities we study have no volition of their own and obey rules perfectly (where we have discovered the proper formulation of the rule) unless confounded by chaos or randomness. Where confounded, we may rely on statistics to yield solid answers epistemologically, but the questions are much more limited and less satisfying.
Once volition, sentience, or Misesian action enters the picture, we are in an entirely new realm. Experiments are fundamentally unable to be repeated (let alone replicated) because of the impossibility of maintaining the starting condition across iterations. We devise clever workarounds, ever narrower questions, and rely more and more upon consensus and persuasion in order to maintain the veneer of empirical science and bolster (falsely) our epistemological position.
Here is where Mises breaks from the empirical science tradition and returns to logic. Human Action achieves epistemological strength in exchange for a much narrower scope of concern and weakness in defending its validity and verifiability in the real world.
I’ve gone off tangent a bit, but my point is that we really care about epistemology, and Science has become a sort of shibboleth trump card that everyone is desperate to hold. Are there non-empirical sciences? It’s a question of definition. Does empiricism have disappointing limits? Absolutely. Is empiricism the gold standard for epistemology? Absolutely not.
Social science contains one of the most thoroughly scientifically tested propositions in science.
And yet public policy continues, widely and often, to act as if the law of supply and demand were not so…