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I’m a chemist, I just gave a class to students today. The main topic of the whole lesson was this: we have all these theories and methodologies, we are not going to study how they work and how to use them, let’s discuss now all the limitations they have and when they do not work.
I wish doctors would do the same.
Former chemistry student here. In chemistry, every single thing you ever do gets multiplied by a ridiculously big number. A few drops of water has 6.02*10^23 molecules in it. So even the tiniest chemical reactions are massive exercises in parallel processing, and measuring in human-scale units means you might miss by a few hexillion in either direction.
Isn’t it amazing internal combustion engines…ever work?
This is why engineers are insufferably smug.
For being trained to think within tolerances?
Engineering: We only care if it works, even if it breaks math/physics/chemistry/biology.
You can bother figuring out why. Or I might be forced to in order to iterate…
The failure rate falls within the tolerances
fucking computer science is going from on par with mathematics to worse than biology
“why do you guys do it that way”
“Look because if we don’t sacrifice the goat on Thursday the code breaks, idk what to tell you”
Math also fails sometimes, we’ve had to invent new math along the way because math is always correct only in the given constraints of how we currently understand math. If those constraints are challenged math evolves.
Example, imaginary numbers weren’t a thing for a good while and some stuff didn’t work correctly. All math stands upon 1+1=2, we don’t know if that always holds true, for now we asume it.
There are no correct axioms. You can change the axioms as you wish and make your own math2.0. And you will be able to apply it to things that follow thoose axioms but finding such things that follow them is the only hard part. We define 1+1=2 and that is true because we define it that way. If it does not hold true in any physical or something then it is that you are applying a correct math for a system which doesnt work with that math(i.e, you are the problem for assuming the same axiom is true for the real system)
Example, imaginary numbers weren’t a thing for a good while and some stuff didn’t work correctly
And here’s Lewis Carroll to regale us with a tale that absolutely won’t be misunderstood and taken at face value by later generations about how foolish these silly mathematicians are with their wonky numbers.
In fact, the entire foundation of math – its system of axioms – has had to be fixed due to contradictions existing in previous iterations. The most well known perhaps being Russell’s paradox in naive set theory: “Let X be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does X contain itself?”
In fact, there have been many paradoxes that had to be resolved by the set theory we use today.
Axioms serve as a starting point.
Meanwhile the mathematicians who got a bit too close Philosophy are still arguing about which logic to use and if a proof by contradiction is even a proof at all.
Exactly.
HERE’S A THEOREM: IF IT’S PROVEN, IT’S TRUE EVERYWHERE, FOREVER
But at the same time, even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.
Worse: If the chosen axioms are contradictory, then the theorem is effectively worthless.
And it is impossible to know whether axioms are consistent. You can only prove that they are not.
But that’s math. And its proof is math. And that proof is true everywhere forever.
I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments. Eventually, other fields advance enough to do away with many philosophical arguments, like whether matter is infinitely divisible or whether the physical brain or some metaphysical spirit determines our actions.
Since this is a question that math hasn’t advanced enough to answer, we can have a philosophical argument about whether other fields will eventually advance enough to get rid of all philosophical arguments.
I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments.
Wait do you think Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel weren’t making philosophical arguments?
They are clearly mathematical. Starting with definitions and axioms and deriving from there using mathematical statements.
Economics: Our findings are just as rigorous as these other sciences we swear!
I once called economics a pseudoscience in a reddit comment and some libertarian-capitalist type got suuuper butthurt about it.
He said I don’t understand the word pseudoscience. I said, “no I understand it just fine. You don’t understand economics.”
His only response was to call that a “no, you” argument. Dunning-Kruger on full display.
Basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.
I wish the Scientific Method didn’t have “Method” in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.
Science is “method agnostic”, a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories and methods that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress.
Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary “method resets” that come periodically in any scientific discipline.
Chemistry can admit that atoms aren’t tiny planets with electons orbiting like moons because Chemistry didn’t start as the pursuit to find evidence for atoms being like solarsystems and flesh out the theory that atoms are like solarsystems.
Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.
Alchemy is a great analog here to compare Economics too. Alchemists in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to turn things to gold did interact with and in some ways advance chemistry, but alchemy could never divest itself from its own pre-existing beliefs and methods as chemistry discovered more and more of the universe and began to accurately predict more and more of it.
If alchemy was capable discarding old methods to pursue understanding phenomena more lucidly and precisely chemistry would probably be called “alchemy” in english nowadays and alchemy would be called “pseudo-alchemy”.
Economics equates to alchemy they express a desire of a system of methods, axioms and explanations to produce a certain end goal and it forms fatal shackles to the follies of the past.
Any time I’ve attempted to argue for alternative economic paradigms (not just alternative economic systems, but actually rethinking the fundamental assumptions and theories by which we study and attempt to understand economic systems and phenomena), lazy thinkers hit me with the “nuh uh, that’s not what [classical economic theory] says! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It’s a thoughtless appeal to authority lacking any substance. The word for that is “dogma.”
I think a major casualty of the war on science funded primarily by fossil fuel interests has been that the kneejerk pro-science response has become a lazy appeal to authority.
People say “99% of scientists all agree listen to them you are not worthy of having an opinion on this!” and while it is arguably true lol, it also sends a message undermining to the interests of science.
Science is the practice of skepticism not of finding facts and crusading under their banner in a materialist campaign of conquest. Facts are rather the inevitable residue of science after science has subjected theories to extended and diverse torturuous inquisition.
I wish people defended science by saying it isn’t a set of Correct Facts but a system of Skepticism that has thoroughly examined a shared body of knowledge and that you should assume that if the more fantastic sounding theories contained within that arena of “skeptical melee” haven’t been dismantled that you can probably trust that they are real, as fantastic as they sound.
This when you shorten it sounds like an appeal to authority where the scientists are given undue authority but it is not the same thing. What matters is the environment of genuine skepticism that scientific theories and “facts” are subjected to in order to establish their validity that matters.
Ugh, yes, when I was in university I had the audacity to attempt to have original thoughts, and everyone was like “Nuh uh, no one has ever said that anywhere in the source material.”
But it’s like “Someone said A, another person said B, and a third person said C. I’m just putting those together in a new way and telling you ABC.” But they’re like “None of the sources say ABC.” So I’m like “Look at the world around you, and you can clearly see that ABC.” And they’re like “that’s just anecdotal, not a peer-reviewed double-blind study.”
I called it academic gatekeeping. I also said it’s gaslighting ourselves into ignoring reality. They didn’t like either of those things. They seemed to think I was some flat earth anti-vaxxer (I’m not).
Modern academia has become downright anti-intellectual and extremely averse to divergent or non-conforming outlooks. It’s kinda sad.
I like the term Scientific filter. Theories get endlessly filtered though experimentation untill we get purer and purer truth.
What definition of pseudoscience would capture economics without capturing medicine, ecology, or meteorology?
Everyone’s just using models here, and the way we incorporate statistical observations to define the limits of the models’ scope, and refine the models over time, or reject the models entirely, applies to economists, meteorologists, seismologists, and many branches of actual human medicine.
Popper would define pseudoscience as predictions that can’t be falsified, but surely that can’t apply to the idea of the weatherman predicting rain and being wrong, right?
Kuhn came along and argued that science is about solving problems within paradigms, and sometimes rejecting paradigms in scientific revolutions (geocentrism vs heliocentrism, Newtonian physics versus Einstein’s relativity), but it wasn’t a particularly robust test for separating out pseudoscience.
Lakatos categorized things further at explaining how model-breaking observations could be handled within the structure of how science performs its work (limiting the scope of the model, expanding the complexity of the model to fit the new observations, proposing specific exception handlers), but also observed the difference between the hard core of a discipline, in which attempts at refutation were not tolerated, and auxiliary hypotheses where the scientists were free to test their ideas for falsifiability.
But when you use these ideas to try to understand how science works, I don’t think economics really stands out as less scientific than cancer research or climatology or other statistically driven scientific disciplines.
To quote the order commenter here, basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.
In what way? And how does that differ from how medicine measures pain?
There are several physical autonomic responses that demonstrate feeling pain that can be measured objectively.
It’s not just faces on a numbered chart
Namely, the scientific method relies on inductive reasoning and foundational economics relies heavily on deductive reasoning.
The difference isn’t the data itself, it’s what they do with it. Medicine takes subjective, self-reported pain scales and plugs them directly into rigorous, double-blind, randomized controlled trials where they isolate variables to test a strictly falsifiable hypothesis.
Foundational economics, on the other hand, takes subjective concepts like “utility” or “rational self-interest” and uses them as unfalsifiable, deductive assumptions to guess how massive, open systems work.
Basically, you can put a new painkiller in a placebo-controlled trial to scientifically prove if it reduces that subjective pain, but you can’t put a macroeconomy in a petri dish to run a controlled, repeatable experiment on supply and demand.
This difference invites a lot of woo.
Plenty of medical science doesn’t lend itself well to double blind studies. In vivo infection models can’t ethically be tested with double blind studies, and can only be observed. Lots of medicine advances through observational studies, too, like almost anything relating to nutrition or lifestyle or trauma. There’s no double blind study on how survivable car accidents are.
Plus double blind studies themselves don’t necessarily have any kind of explanatory power (see the entire field of anesthesia where we know how much of each anesthetic it generally takes to put people under, but we don’t know the underlying mechanism it uses to make people go under). Or, for that matter, Tylenol (whose mechanism of action remains a mystery).
That’s just it, though. Outliers are treated fundamentally differently between them, they are treated as bugs in economics, but as features in medicine.
If a “universal” drug fails for a specific group, medicine views that outlier as a falsification that proves the rule is incomplete. They use the exception to fix the theory.
Foundational economics does the opposite: it treats axioms like “rational actors” as holy scripture, so when people don’t behave like the math says they should, the economists just dismiss them as “irrational” and keep the model exactly the same.
Even if we don’t know the mechanism behind Tylenol, we can still falsify whether or not it works. You can’t falsify a “rational actor” because the moment someone does something weird, you just move the goalposts. Medicine is trying to map the territory; foundational economics insists the map is right and the territory is just acting up. It’s barely based in reality.
A weatherman predicting rain has made a falsifiable prediction, how does that relate to Popper?
how does that relate to Popper?
When a weatherman’s prediction is falsified, the model itself is not disproven. The fact that the practitioners of that discipline stick with it even when a prediction is falsified starts to look like the pseudoscience side of Popper’s falsifiability criterion.
hahah same for psychology
Do they claim that though? Neo-liberal economists often adopt praxeology openly, and the other ones are mostly deluding themselves.
Economics: the law is true as long as people believe it’s true.
Kind of like fairies, when you think about it
Or Orks!
Alternatively, with capitalism giving all the power to the richest: “The law is true because I’ll hurt you if you try to defend yourself and I have plenty of class traitors to help me.”
Physics: oh, and if you look close enough, it’s actually all probability too.
Except the physicists and the chemists would both argue that everything is all about probability
Quantum physics: everything literally is probabilities.
I think chemists would use the word “averages” but basically yeah.
Archaeology rifles through the pockets of other disciplines and takes what it wants
Psychology furiously staring from the corner but afraid to speak lest it be made to sit at the folding table with Astrology and Tarot readings.
They’re sharing a table with economics.
Social sciences: Mayhaps, but only for very specific conditions once in time
The author’s barely disguised
fetishpreconceived notionThere are 3 positions. Mayhaps, yes, and no.
Yes and no hate each other, but for some reason they hate mayhaps more
Bisexual problems.
Geology: laughs in multiple working hypotheses.
They’re too busy licking rocks.
Ontology - Fuck you, buddy
