

Megan McArdle: Finding What You're Looking For  - cwan
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/09/finding-what-youre-looking-for/62531/

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Gogmagog
She is saying,

Economics is not a hard science. People often try to use it as a hard science
to "prove" something in the social realm. Those people are using economics as
a pseudo-science.

She has made the case before(in other stories) that Economics is more like
psychology than physics. While psychology can give useful information, guide
treatment, and affect outcomes, it will never be able to "prove" anything
about any person.

~~~
cal5k
Actually, the problem with economics is that it is _not enough_ like
psychology. Psychologists generally perform experiments before concocting
theories (or at least they conduct them to confirm or invalidate them),
whereas economists generally concoct theories and attempt to fit those
theories to data that has _not_ been acquired through experimentation.

~~~
Gogmagog
Economics experiments always seem to tell you exactly how Graduate students in
an Ivy-league Econ 503 class would behave in any situation. :P

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hristov
Why do people keep putting up Megan Mcardle articles in here? I mean what in
the world is noteworthy about this "article"? This is just a rather lazy blog
post a little bit of which is a rehash of well known truisms and most of which
is a block quote from another blog post.

~~~
Gogmagog
90% of all blog posts are lazy. 99% of all comments are lazy too.

~~~
mquander
That's right. The purpose of news aggregators is to filter them out.

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jtbigwoo
Huh?

So rather than confirm economic theories by using statistical correlations to
economic growth or general well-being we should...um...not "hijack economics."
Or something.

What's the point of indicting pseudo-science and confirmation bias? Is she
saying that economics is a pseudo-science and should not be taken seriously?
Or did we decide that the existence of confirmation bias invalidated all
scientific inquiry? Should economists give up on back-testing theories and go
back to proposing what ought to happen when perfectly rational consumers meet
perfectly rational producers?

~~~
Symmetry
I think your post is actually an excellent example of the thing being warned
against. If you say "Doing X will maximize growth" that is perfectly
scientific, but if you say "Doing X will maximize growth and therefore science
says we must do X" is not, because the audience might give some weighting to
things besides maximizing growth, changing the outcome. After all "an ought
cannot be derived from as is" and people claiming to do so deserve to be
criticized.

And if all you've got is a statistical correlation without any good causal
reasoning it always pays to remember Goodhart's law.

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MaysonL
I think McArdle deserved the nomination Brad deLong gave her:
<http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/stupidest-woman.html>

