4 ms·

All theories are abstract, that's the whole point of a theory. Without abstraction there's only observation and no reasoning. That's why I'm highly sceptical

by lottin 11y ago

All theories are abstract, that's the whole point of a theory. Without abstraction there's only observation and no reasoning. That's why I'm highly sceptical of the claim that it is possible to understand something simply by "letting the data speak" without "committing to a theory".

sklogic 11y ago
> Without abstraction there's only observation and no reasoning This is what the real science is. Observation and only observation. Reasoning is secondary and unimportant.
- amelius 11y ago
  Not true. With reasoning, one can develop a model, and this model can be tested against reality by observations, thus closing the circle. Mere observations give no interesting and no useful results. Basically, you'll end up with an ever-growing list of facts.
  - sklogic 11y ago
    But all the reasoning should always be a direct consequence of the data. Not the other way around. Science, essentially, is nothing but a process of extracting information (as in the algorithmic information theory, not in Shannon sense) from the data. Reasoning is just a tool, one of the ways of representing this information.
    - amelius 11y ago
      > But all the reasoning should always be a direct consequence of the data. Not the other way around. In order to test a model, it is useful to collect new data.
    - warrenpj 11y ago
      I think it works both ways. Theories help us decide what to observe, or where to look and what we're looking at. Observation is useful to develop a theory (induction, or "educated guessing"). However, having a theory guides us towards newer, often subtler observations as we attempt to falsify it. Karl Popper called this the theory-ladeness of observation [1] [1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
      - sklogic 11y ago
        > Theories help us decide what to observe, or where to look and what we're looking at. Of course. But it's merely some heuristics helping to cut down the search space, not an inherent, fundamental property of the universe.
    - CWuestefeld 11y ago
      The OP makes a fundamental error: Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed The error is the assumption that facts are, well, facts. In real life, it's not nearly so black-and-white. Remember back in high school physics, when we did experiments with Newtonian physics, but our answers never quite worked with the theory - not just because of Einstein, but mostly because of (a) measurement error and (b) we were (knowingly or not) assuming point-masses on frictionless planes, etc. As long as we were willing to write off our errors against those two sources, we could never discover that Newton's theories were incomplete, and we needed relativity to explain differences. We only got to that conclusion via models. The way that you choose to measure fundamentally drives what your measurements are. And you can only decide what and how to measure if you start off with some model of the world.
      - sklogic 11y ago
        Of course, this process of extraction of information from a data is lossy, almost never lossless (in some purely classification sciences it may be discrete and lossless, but it's a totally different story). Data is not perfect, and the required precision is always finite. Once you take it into account, you can think of the entire process of scientific discovery as a mechanical, dumb data compression. So, the corrected wording for that paragraph should be the following: Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true as long as their numeric predictions conform to all of the experimental facts within this theory supposed range, up to this theory supposed precision. And a theory falsified by a new set of facts does not become immediately "false". It just get its range cut down to that range of facts where it is still giving an acceptable prediction precision. Back to physics analogy, the phlogiston theory is still correct and true, as long as it is applied within the range of the phenomenological thermodynamics. But this does not happen in the classic economics - all those crazy theories are coming from the depths of an insane mind, not from any particular set of facts. They never had any specific range where they were known to be applicable. Therefore, phlogiston is science, and economic theory is not.
        11y ago
- masklinn 11y ago
  > This is what the real science is. Observation and only observation. Reasoning is secondary and unimportant. "Observation and only observation" is how you build an inchoate collection of useless factoids, it's not how you do science. Observations are a very important part of the scientific method and you have to be either rooted or anchored in it, but it's only one part of science, and it's by no means the most important product of it. Observations are seeds (from which patterns are recognised and hypotheses formed) and filters (data gathered to test the predictive power of hypotheses).
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > collection of useless factoids We call it phenomenology. The very base of any proper science. The rest is just a mechanical work of eliminating the noise from this data. Science should never produce any knowledge which is not found in the original data (either passive observations or controlled experiments - does not really matter). The scientific method is all about techniques of extracting the most compact representation (i.e., the information) hidden inside this massive data sets. It turns out that the axiomatic theories are very common and compact representations for many areas of science, but not necessarily the universal representation.
    - Shorel 11y ago
      Call it what you want. What you disregard as 'just a mechanical work' is nothing of the sort. It has required all the ingenuity of the greatest genius in history to get modern science out of the data, and any future advances will require even greater insights. If anything, the data gathering is the 'mechanical work' part of science.
      - sklogic 11y ago
        Being "mechanical" does not mean anything "easy". It's hard, nearly impossible, simply because the most formal definition of this process boils down to an exhaustive search in a huge (but finite) morphological box. That's why we need the greatest minds that are able to find suitable search heuristics. But yet, this process does not produce any new knowledge on its own. All the knowledge is there, in the data. Waiting to be extracted.
- lottin 11y ago
  No. Science requires induction or deduction (or both) which are 2 forms of reasoning.
ThePhysicist 11y ago
I don't say that having abstract theories is bad, after all one of the most successful theories in Physics, general relativity, was formulated without much data or even experimental hints to work with. The difference is that this theory was later put to scrutiny by performing experiments and by observing natural phenomena (e.g. light bending by gravity), which have failed to falsify the theory so far. So what I'm saying is that a theory that cannot be falsified experimentally is not very useful. The real danger here is that these theories -most of which are supported by no or very slim experimental evidence- are used by governments to formulate economic policies, which in turn affect the life of millions or billions of people. For me, this is a bit like developing an "idealized" theory of nuclear physics and then trying to build a nuclear power-plant based on it. I, personally, would not want to live near one of these ;)
- lottin 11y ago
  I don't disagree, I was criticising the idea stated in the article that one can understand the economy without using theoretical models.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  In your nuclear power example, the counterfactual is don't build the power plant. Suppose governments did not formulate economic policies with these imperfect models. What would they do instead?
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I wonder to what extent politicians formulate policies based on models or make high level policies based on ideology or perceived voter preferences and then select the economic models to justify what they have already decided. Edit: this isn't a comment about economics but how economics is used in a political context.
  - ThePhysicist 11y ago
    Of course they will have to take some decision even if they don't have a solid theory to back it up, but the problem today is that many governments try to make reality fit their idealized theories while it should be the other way around. I understand your point though, the lack of quantitative understanding of societal phenomena -on a national as well as international level- is a huge problem.

by lottin 11y ago

sklogic 11y ago

> Without abstraction there's only observation and no reasoning This is what the real science is. Observation and only observation. Reasoning is secondary and unimportant.

amelius 11y ago
Not true. With reasoning, one can develop a model, and this model can be tested against reality by observations, thus closing the circle. Mere observations give no interesting and no useful results. Basically, you'll end up with an ever-growing list of facts.
- sklogic 11y ago
  But all the reasoning should always be a direct consequence of the data. Not the other way around. Science, essentially, is nothing but a process of extracting information (as in the algorithmic information theory, not in Shannon sense) from the data. Reasoning is just a tool, one of the ways of representing this information.
  - amelius 11y ago
    > But all the reasoning should always be a direct consequence of the data. Not the other way around. In order to test a model, it is useful to collect new data.
  - warrenpj 11y ago
    I think it works both ways. Theories help us decide what to observe, or where to look and what we're looking at. Observation is useful to develop a theory (induction, or "educated guessing"). However, having a theory guides us towards newer, often subtler observations as we attempt to falsify it. Karl Popper called this the theory-ladeness of observation [1] [1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
    - sklogic 11y ago
      > Theories help us decide what to observe, or where to look and what we're looking at. Of course. But it's merely some heuristics helping to cut down the search space, not an inherent, fundamental property of the universe.
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
    The OP makes a fundamental error: Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed The error is the assumption that facts are, well, facts. In real life, it's not nearly so black-and-white. Remember back in high school physics, when we did experiments with Newtonian physics, but our answers never quite worked with the theory - not just because of Einstein, but mostly because of (a) measurement error and (b) we were (knowingly or not) assuming point-masses on frictionless planes, etc. As long as we were willing to write off our errors against those two sources, we could never discover that Newton's theories were incomplete, and we needed relativity to explain differences. We only got to that conclusion via models. The way that you choose to measure fundamentally drives what your measurements are. And you can only decide what and how to measure if you start off with some model of the world.
    - sklogic 11y ago
      Of course, this process of extraction of information from a data is lossy, almost never lossless (in some purely classification sciences it may be discrete and lossless, but it's a totally different story). Data is not perfect, and the required precision is always finite. Once you take it into account, you can think of the entire process of scientific discovery as a mechanical, dumb data compression. So, the corrected wording for that paragraph should be the following: Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true as long as their numeric predictions conform to all of the experimental facts within this theory supposed range, up to this theory supposed precision. And a theory falsified by a new set of facts does not become immediately "false". It just get its range cut down to that range of facts where it is still giving an acceptable prediction precision. Back to physics analogy, the phlogiston theory is still correct and true, as long as it is applied within the range of the phenomenological thermodynamics. But this does not happen in the classic economics - all those crazy theories are coming from the depths of an insane mind, not from any particular set of facts. They never had any specific range where they were known to be applicable. Therefore, phlogiston is science, and economic theory is not.
      - 11y ago
masklinn 11y ago
> This is what the real science is. Observation and only observation. Reasoning is secondary and unimportant. "Observation and only observation" is how you build an inchoate collection of useless factoids, it's not how you do science. Observations are a very important part of the scientific method and you have to be either rooted or anchored in it, but it's only one part of science, and it's by no means the most important product of it. Observations are seeds (from which patterns are recognised and hypotheses formed) and filters (data gathered to test the predictive power of hypotheses).
- sklogic 11y ago
  > collection of useless factoids We call it phenomenology. The very base of any proper science. The rest is just a mechanical work of eliminating the noise from this data. Science should never produce any knowledge which is not found in the original data (either passive observations or controlled experiments - does not really matter). The scientific method is all about techniques of extracting the most compact representation (i.e., the information) hidden inside this massive data sets. It turns out that the axiomatic theories are very common and compact representations for many areas of science, but not necessarily the universal representation.
  - Shorel 11y ago
    Call it what you want. What you disregard as 'just a mechanical work' is nothing of the sort. It has required all the ingenuity of the greatest genius in history to get modern science out of the data, and any future advances will require even greater insights. If anything, the data gathering is the 'mechanical work' part of science.
    - sklogic 11y ago
      Being "mechanical" does not mean anything "easy". It's hard, nearly impossible, simply because the most formal definition of this process boils down to an exhaustive search in a huge (but finite) morphological box. That's why we need the greatest minds that are able to find suitable search heuristics. But yet, this process does not produce any new knowledge on its own. All the knowledge is there, in the data. Waiting to be extracted.
lottin 11y ago
No. Science requires induction or deduction (or both) which are 2 forms of reasoning.

ThePhysicist 11y ago

I don't say that having abstract theories is bad, after all one of the most successful theories in Physics, general relativity, was formulated without much data or even experimental hints to work with. The difference is that this theory was later put to scrutiny by performing experiments and by observing natural phenomena (e.g. light bending by gravity), which have failed to falsify the theory so far. So what I'm saying is that a theory that cannot be falsified experimentally is not very useful. The real danger here is that these theories -most of which are supported by no or very slim experimental evidence- are used by governments to formulate economic policies, which in turn affect the life of millions or billions of people. For me, this is a bit like developing an "idealized" theory of nuclear physics and then trying to build a nuclear power-plant based on it. I, personally, would not want to live near one of these ;)

lottin 11y ago
I don't disagree, I was criticising the idea stated in the article that one can understand the economy without using theoretical models.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
In your nuclear power example, the counterfactual is don't build the power plant. Suppose governments did not formulate economic policies with these imperfect models. What would they do instead?
- arethuza 11y ago
  I wonder to what extent politicians formulate policies based on models or make high level policies based on ideology or perceived voter preferences and then select the economic models to justify what they have already decided. Edit: this isn't a comment about economics but how economics is used in a political context.
- ThePhysicist 11y ago
  Of course they will have to take some decision even if they don't have a solid theory to back it up, but the problem today is that many governments try to make reality fit their idealized theories while it should be the other way around. I understand your point though, the lack of quantitative understanding of societal phenomena -on a national as well as international level- is a huge problem.