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Indeed! This principle enables a civilization to discover all important things they need, on their own, in a reasonable speed. Having said that, I see two area
by vog 10y ago
Indeed! This principle enables a civilization to discover all important things they need, on their own, in a reasonable speed.
Having said that, I see two areas in science where we have serious issues.
1) In some sciences, strict application of scientific method is not possible in large scale, due to unhealthy influence from the outside.
The classic example from the middle age is the research on astronomy and physics being suppressed and/or heavily influenced by the church and political leaders.
Today, one of the best examples is research on economy. That is heavily influenced (and sometimes even paid) by various types of financially strong bodies. This leads to heavily biased results. Also, suddenly results become acceptable even though they are based on almost comically far-fetched assumptions.
2) In some sciences, the scientific method cannot be applied in all rigor, due to the nature of the topic of research.
For example, complex psychological tests cannot be done with a huge amount of people, because you won't find enough people doing so volutarily. Also, you can't simply repeat an experiment on the same human being, because are are influenced from and learned from the previous experiment, so will react differently than an "unused" human being.
- hueving 10y agoEconomics falls under the second category quite a bit as well. In particular its hard to reason about impacts of individual policies on any kind of real complex economy because there are so many confounding variables. And it's not like you can conduct experiments because time travel isn't possible and no two economies are even similar, let alone the same.
- vog 10y agoI agree that the empirical part of economics is hard, but manageable in modern times [1]. However, the real problem is that even the theory has so many flaws, yet it is used as if it was evidence, which is why I think the real problem is 1). [1] Some very popular multi-player games have a quite advanced economy, where the individual actions of each participant are recorded and can be analyzed. While this is not "real", it gives more detailed information about human economic interaction than all the mass surveillance in the "real word" right now. Also, the game developers have god-like powers in the virtual world, so they can run controlled experiments,. As far as I know, they already do so. And and if something goes really wrong, they still have the ultima ratio to reset everything to the state of a few hours or days ago. Or, they can re-interpret the last actions of the players in a more appropriate way. That may still make some players unhappy, but won't crash a real economy.