7 ms·

Your claim is also largely true for drug trials. There is also huge variability due to genetics, cultural placebo response, variations in diet among cultures, c

Your claim is also largely true for drug trials. There is also huge variability due to genetics, cultural placebo response, variations in diet among cultures, cultural or individual symptom expression, and so on. Every science faces an enormous amount of confounding variables. Doesn't mean we should stop doing drug trials, or economic trials in this case. Well designed experiments can be informative, even though care must be taken to generalize them.

notahacker 8y ago
This is very true, but it's also true that the inappropriate generalisation of this experiment seems to have started with the press release! If somebody announced a drug test that didn't look at symptoms or benchmark against placebo effects was "testing a new cure", people would rightly point out it was doing no such thing, just as an evaluation of how people in extreme poverty react to charitable handouts doesn't really tell us much about the effects of redesigning the Western welfare state on UBI principle that taxpayers really ought to subsidise wealthy early retirees and housewives on exactly the same basis they subsidise the desperately seeking work and disabled.
ksk 8y ago
>Your claim is also largely true for drug trials. There is also huge variability due to genetics, cultural placebo response, variations in diet among cultures, cultural or individual symptom expression, and so on. I work in pharma (biologicals) - though not as a scientist - and you're overstating the differences. The genetic variance of humans is within a very narrow band. The superficial differences are not relevant to the vast majority of pharmaceutical products. In any case, how our human biology reacts to pharmaceutical substances is VASTLY different from humans' economic and social interactions. You know to a very high degree of certainty how an antigen will produce an immune response much much more than how pricing your headphones at 50 dollars will get you more customers, or raising wages by 10% will give you a 20% increase in productivity. >Every science faces an enormous amount of confounding variables. I don't think (macro)economics/human psychology are sciences. Aside from my own opinion, it is certainly debatable - Unlike biology and physics which are firmly in the science camp.

notahacker 8y ago

This is very true, but it's also true that the inappropriate generalisation of this experiment seems to have started with the press release! If somebody announced a drug test that didn't look at symptoms or benchmark against placebo effects was "testing a new cure", people would rightly point out it was doing no such thing, just as an evaluation of how people in extreme poverty react to charitable handouts doesn't really tell us much about the effects of redesigning the Western welfare state on UBI principle that taxpayers really ought to subsidise wealthy early retirees and housewives on exactly the same basis they subsidise the desperately seeking work and disabled.

ksk 8y ago

>Your claim is also largely true for drug trials. There is also huge variability due to genetics, cultural placebo response, variations in diet among cultures, cultural or individual symptom expression, and so on. I work in pharma (biologicals) - though not as a scientist - and you're overstating the differences. The genetic variance of humans is within a very narrow band. The superficial differences are not relevant to the vast majority of pharmaceutical products. In any case, how our human biology reacts to pharmaceutical substances is VASTLY different from humans' economic and social interactions. You know to a very high degree of certainty how an antigen will produce an immune response much much more than how pricing your headphones at 50 dollars will get you more customers, or raising wages by 10% will give you a 20% increase in productivity. >Every science faces an enormous amount of confounding variables. I don't think (macro)economics/human psychology are sciences. Aside from my own opinion, it is certainly debatable - Unlike biology and physics which are firmly in the science camp.