Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The author feels like he's on the opposite political side to me, and so I'm ironically sceptical of his own 'policy relevant' opinions.

Having said that, using a study done in 2022 (which we're only just out of the first quarter of) to justify basically anything, seems kind of ridiculous, and I'd like to live in a world where people just laughed that off in the same way they would if someone said an astrologer predicted their policy would be successful or if Joe Rogan was offering medical advice.

And that's before we get to the brainwave part, which seems to push this into the ridiculous.

If we really have no better research to suggest how to improve society in general or child welfare in particular, then that alone seems like a sad state of affairs. We have a whole globe full of children, more than 2 Billion of them in various different locations and societies, have we really not got any way to identify what is helpful. Are we claiming nothing at all that happens to any of those 2 Billion children makes any difference? That seems very unlikely. Or that we already do everything we know to do? This feels only marginally more plausible.

The last bullet point is something folks on both sides of the aisle should appreciate:

> Thus, we ought to be skeptical of social scientists’ ability to reliably inform public policy, and of policymakers’ ability to evaluate social-scientific research objectively, particularly when it is “policy relevant.”

Think of how much we’re debating what’s causing the current inflation we’re seeing. That’s one number in a field that’s quite amenable to quantitative analysis. I think we have pretty much zero credible scientific evidence to justify most policies involving public welfare. There’s a handful of exceptions—e.g. the tremendous work done studying the benefits of the clean air act, for example. But that was rigorous research done by the EPA over literally decades.

I think we should give poor families with kids money because that seems like the morally correct thing to do. But this sort of thing is just scientism: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

Even the air pollution literature is most likely biased: the negative effects are real, but the studies are exaggerating them. For one thing, Andrew Gelman thinks that the effects of air pollution are overestimated, and it's the one guy I'd trust when it comes to assessing quality of scientific evidence.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/04/02/why-the-ne...

He does use the word 'guess' for his belief and makes no attempt to put any kind of error bars, confidence interval or lower bounds on that, which seems a bit rhetorically weak.

He also suggests that he broadly agrees with the post he links to and that it gets a lot of ideologically motivated political pushback so this seems like the Ying to his Yang, an example of politically motivated disregard for solid science just going in the opposite direction.

His point is not that it’s a solid science, but rather that the hypothesis they are studying is actually true, which helps with not being hopelessly wrong.

> "using a study done in 2022 (which we're only just out of the first quarter of) to justify basically anything, seems kind of ridiculous"

In this case, and most others, yours is the correct reaction. But sometimes you don't have a choice but to be hasty, as with rapidly-developing situations (e.g. COVID).

"Are we claiming nothing at all that happens to any of those 2 Billion children makes any difference?" >> B12 supplementation would certainly help some and is quite cheap on a mass scale. I think it boils down to what people want to read from these kind of studies.

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