Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by morita2342 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

morita2342

[flagged]

View on HN

Right, a pseudoscience and here we have someone who won doing exclusively empirical work.

Not sure how you match those two but keep at it

Plenty of people do empirical work in pseudoscience...

There has been substantial amount of empirical work on remote seeing and telepathy, including some that "prove" them to be true.

Doing a legitimate experiment on remote seeing for instance is by definition science, just like doing experiments trying to prove luminiferous ether were science back in the 19th century. Science is a methodology, not facts and something doesn't become science just because your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.

Right, the question is whether the hypothesis or theory is falsifiable, regardless of the subject matter. Economic theories are falisifable; we can see pretty clearly how much the theoretical models deviate from observation.

So many claims I see published across many fields fall apart with even minor scrutiny. What makes economics special?

A bit too far for me but it is unfair that economics gets one but the other fields neglected by Nobel don't.

It’s a practical example of how economics is unique among sciences in that it’s a marketing discipline as well.

Nobel didn’t give us a prize? That’s just a problem to be solved with money and social engineering, like so many aspects of economics.

Nothing unique there. Physics does a lot of marketing, too (including claiming economics as part of physics at times).

String Theory has revolutionary results coming any decade now, just you wait!

What aspects of the economic studies makes it a pseudoscience? Highly empirical, sure, but so does modern machine learning.

economists proudly ignore real world data. They care about their models, even when they are obviously wrong.

Milton Friedman said "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have 'assumptions' that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions."

This is a projection. Economics has done better to improve reproducibility of research over several decades than any other social science.

To me the "economics is not real science" people is much like the "evolution is just a theory" crowd. When you don't like the results, it is comforting to find a way to not believe it.

I have a pretty serious physics education, and in my older days I find Economics to be the most fascinating science. It makes much of society understandable in ays tha were not possible before.

That said, the sub field of Macro Economics is a very difficult field for several reasons, and it may be impossible to get very far on it. But that is only one branch on that tree.

I confess to being one of those people who doesn't believe Darwinian evolution explains the origin of species (let alone the origin of life). Of course, I see myself as taking an entirely empirical and scientific perspective, but I do understand that those who approach the question with a blind faith in a materialist worldview (and buy into a "materialism of the gaps" perspective) will not be able to accept any empirical evidence or scientific argument that contradicts their presuppositions.

Most of econ is still by far more scientific than sociology, psychology, other various humanities and maybe even climate science.

Okay, a Swedish institute once a year awards less money than an average startup gets at a Series A. Is it really such a disgrace compared to what’s actually going on in academia every day?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com