

The different attitudes of computer scientists and economists - edw519
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2009/09/different-attitudes-of-computer.html

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barrkel
The causal model that the writer speaks about, the one economists try to
construct, is susceptible to story-telling because such models intrinsically
rely on more than just the data for their construction, but the constructor's
intuitions about the world.

The writer's reductio ad absurdum example of predicting land value based on
size of house is illustrative. Producing predictions like "build smaller
houses in rural areas" to increase their value are only absurd because humans
have existing intuitions about why land is so expensive in urban areas. It is
a lack of data that makes the naive black box model so poor; its lack of
access to human insight.

This weakness of statistical predictive models has an exact analogue in
economic causal models, though. The intuitions being appealed to do not
necessarily need to be based on fact, observation and statistics, or they
would be amenable to predictive models too. Instead, at the margins they tend
to be politically and ideologically driven, giving "intellectual backing" to
social and political policy positions that benefit various interest groups.

