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What you are describing in economics - while perhaps a failure mode - is the exact opposite of what this article discusses. The critique of this article is that

What you are describing in economics - while perhaps a failure mode - is the exact opposite of what this article discusses. The critique of this article is that valid abstractions and theories are rejected due to a lack of "nuance", rather than a failure to explain and predict reality: Second is the ever more extensive expansion of some theoretical system in a way that effectively closes it o from rebuttal or disconrmation by anything in the world...It is an evasion of the demand that a theory be refutable. Your critique of some economic theories is a totally different one - that they make specific predictions which don't come true.

p4wnc6 11y ago
Yes, but as far as the economists are concerned, asking for someone to rectify CAPM with the low-volatility anomaly is just nuance. The author of this piece is saying, Let's not just throw unconstrained nuance at a theory: let's look at a holistic and sort of complexity-adjusted assessment of how well it's doing before we start asking it to behave like a Swiss Army knife, with a special mode to satisfy every empirical whim. I'm saying that this -- the argument against nuance of this type -- is used to defend otherwise flatly wrong theories. (And I misread your comment to be saying that about other fields of social science too.) In other words, when someone says, "But wait a minute, can you augment CAPM to handle the particular messy real-world case that I care about?" the response is: sorry, but we have to Occam's Razor away your request, we can't tailor it to everything. The problem is that that messy real-world case is not some bespoke, uncommon corner, but is the most up-front qualitative property of the whole theory. I guess what I'm saying is that the author says we should Occam's Razor-ify requests for nuance, yet in economics people masquerade as if they are doing legit Occam's Razoring (we can't tailor our analysis to every whim) when really they are just protecting pet theories that simply are bad. It's actually a caution against the way the OP's advice about constraining nuance can be misused and politically abused to defend models that are simply wrong.

p4wnc6 11y ago

Yes, but as far as the economists are concerned, asking for someone to rectify CAPM with the low-volatility anomaly is just nuance. The author of this piece is saying, Let's not just throw unconstrained nuance at a theory: let's look at a holistic and sort of complexity-adjusted assessment of how well it's doing before we start asking it to behave like a Swiss Army knife, with a special mode to satisfy every empirical whim. I'm saying that this -- the argument against nuance of this type -- is used to defend otherwise flatly wrong theories. (And I misread your comment to be saying that about other fields of social science too.) In other words, when someone says, "But wait a minute, can you augment CAPM to handle the particular messy real-world case that I care about?" the response is: sorry, but we have to Occam's Razor away your request, we can't tailor it to everything. The problem is that that messy real-world case is not some bespoke, uncommon corner, but is the most up-front qualitative property of the whole theory. I guess what I'm saying is that the author says we should Occam's Razor-ify requests for nuance, yet in economics people masquerade as if they are doing legit Occam's Razoring (we can't tailor our analysis to every whim) when really they are just protecting pet theories that simply are bad. It's actually a caution against the way the OP's advice about constraining nuance can be misused and politically abused to defend models that are simply wrong.