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Whenever I hear discussion of whether we should defer to the judgement of scientists, I always want to ask, which field of science do you mean? In some, like p

Whenever I hear discussion of whether we should defer to the judgement of scientists, I always want to ask, which field of science do you mean? In some, like physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology, there is still much to be learned but what we have so far is pretty solid. You don't hear about the basics (matter is made of atoms, species emerge from natural selection, plate tectonics) getting overturned. Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. It is much like medicine in the era of balancing the four humours. In the meantime, we need to fund research, but not listen to any of the recommendations of the experts, until they achieve a basic level of understanding of their subject (which clearly hasn't happened yet).

kjeetgill 8y ago
I'd love to read a book on the subject. What did it take for various scientific fields to become truly mature? Are their key ways to measure how far along we are? Concrete, predictive theories would be great but I get that we're far from them in fields like nutrition short of, like, scurvy I guess? I wonder how much of this is due to the natural variation among individuals and how much is just because of ethical limits on scientific inquiry. Not that I'm advocating for human experiments but one has to wonder what we could discover.
- Cacti 8y ago
  Measurement. If you can’t measure it you can’t predict it.
rapsey 8y ago
> Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. Practically all social sciences are suspect and really have no business calling themselves sciences.
- j88439h84 8y ago
  What are your criteria?
  - ramblerman 8y ago
    I'm not OP, but Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability places a lot of the social sciences in the domain of myth vs actual science.
    - Scarblac 8y ago
      And yet, we want to know more about those subjects. We just have to make do with very limited falsifiability.
    - rwnspace 8y ago
      Good job Popper's falsifiability is flawed then; else evolution is not science.
      - ramblerman 8y ago
        > It does appear that some people think that I denied scientific character to the historical sciences, such as palaeontology, or the history of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a mistake, and I here wish to affirm that these and other historical sciences have in my opinion scientific character; their hypotheses can in many cases be tested. [Popper, 1981] Certain things like 'carbon dating' are certainly scientific, and can be falsified. Evolution itself is the best historical explanation we have, but hard to set up an experiment to disprove. I personally think 'falsifiability" is particularly useful in separating a soft 'fact' like Freud's theory of the id, and the Oedipus Complex from something like say, the theory of gravity.
        rwnspace 8y ago
        Agreed, it is useful, certainly. But it's not to be wielded without subtlety: notably in your quote the use of 'imo' and 'in many cases'. Anyway, apologies for the terseness. My gripe is just when it is used as a magic omnibullet in discussions about 'what is science?'.
mercer 8y ago
Can you elaborate on the 'pile of mud' fundamentals of economics? I've always been inclined to agree, but then I consider my biases in this regard, but also my own field, psychology, and pause. If you subdivide 'science' into various fields, psychology is definitely on much shakier grounds than has often ben assumed. But if you subdivide 'psychology', the picture isn't as clear. I'd say marketing and the broader field of persuasion/propaganda, or something like group dynamics, has a much firmer basis in reality than, say, psychopathology or evolutionary psychology. I'm very curious if people who are well-versed in economics can make similar distinctions, because I find it hard to believe it's 'all' mud.
- DougMerritt 8y ago
  People are very prejudiced against economics because economists don't predict well and have contradictory policy recommendations, but the basis of economics is quite solid. (My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effects of their dictates.) This is very similar to weather prediction, which in some geographical areas is very untrustworthy, but not because its scientific foundation is lacking. Psychology has subareas that are very rigorous and evidence based, but also major foundational areas that remain essentially speculative/opinion-based (what is mind/consciousness/free will?) Evolutionary psychology is again firmly rooted, but is most famous for its speculative and unproven areas. Marketing and persuasion/propaganda have subareas that incorporate statistics and/or psychology and/or sociology etc., but are not themselves actually sciences at all, so that's very much apples and oranges.
  - DougMerritt 8y ago
    Really, I got downvoted for something where every word was inarguably true in the sense of objective fact not opinion, and informative about half a dozen subjects? This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.
edanm 8y ago
> Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. That's incredibly dismissive of these fields. I can't speak much to nutrition, but economics is not a "pile of mud", definitely not its fundamentals. Do you have any reason to think that it is other than (kind-of-literally) mud-slinging?
tim333 8y ago
I find a lot of the problems is people seem to have a job dealing with correlation not being causation. Maybe there's a correlation between salt and heart attacks but perhaps that's because the high salt folk eat a lot of junk food and its the junk food and lifestyle that's not the problem rather than the salt. You need further evidence to figure what's going on with any certainty but you almost never see an article saying that.
trombonechamp 8y ago
The fields of nutrition and economics do have the basics worked out. But the basics aren't things like "is eating too much salt bad for you?" The basics are about nutrient metabolism and the human body is a very complicated (/complex) system. The basics don't necessarily have to be "actionable", and they don't necessarily need to say how the system comes together as a whole. For instance, in your example of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of debate about whether natural selection or neutral evolution is the primary driver behind species diversity. We know that both exist and both happen, but we don't know how they came together to create the species diversity we observe. Another aspect of this is that there are certain fields (namely economics and nutrition) where the popular press over-exaggerates every single paper as a groundbreaking discovery because it gets clicks. The media tries to present the idea that scientists as a whole have come to a brand new conclusion which should change the way everyone behaves, when in reality it's just a few people in a windowless room reporting on some observations they found and speculating on what those observations might mean.

kjeetgill 8y ago

I'd love to read a book on the subject. What did it take for various scientific fields to become truly mature? Are their key ways to measure how far along we are? Concrete, predictive theories would be great but I get that we're far from them in fields like nutrition short of, like, scurvy I guess? I wonder how much of this is due to the natural variation among individuals and how much is just because of ethical limits on scientific inquiry. Not that I'm advocating for human experiments but one has to wonder what we could discover.

Cacti 8y ago
Measurement. If you can’t measure it you can’t predict it.

rapsey 8y ago

> Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. Practically all social sciences are suspect and really have no business calling themselves sciences.

j88439h84 8y ago
What are your criteria?
- ramblerman 8y ago
  I'm not OP, but Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability places a lot of the social sciences in the domain of myth vs actual science.
  - Scarblac 8y ago
    And yet, we want to know more about those subjects. We just have to make do with very limited falsifiability.
  - rwnspace 8y ago
    Good job Popper's falsifiability is flawed then; else evolution is not science.
    - ramblerman 8y ago
      > It does appear that some people think that I denied scientific character to the historical sciences, such as palaeontology, or the history of the evolution of life on Earth. This is a mistake, and I here wish to affirm that these and other historical sciences have in my opinion scientific character; their hypotheses can in many cases be tested. [Popper, 1981] Certain things like 'carbon dating' are certainly scientific, and can be falsified. Evolution itself is the best historical explanation we have, but hard to set up an experiment to disprove. I personally think 'falsifiability" is particularly useful in separating a soft 'fact' like Freud's theory of the id, and the Oedipus Complex from something like say, the theory of gravity.
      - rwnspace 8y ago
        Agreed, it is useful, certainly. But it's not to be wielded without subtlety: notably in your quote the use of 'imo' and 'in many cases'. Anyway, apologies for the terseness. My gripe is just when it is used as a magic omnibullet in discussions about 'what is science?'.

mercer 8y ago

Can you elaborate on the 'pile of mud' fundamentals of economics? I've always been inclined to agree, but then I consider my biases in this regard, but also my own field, psychology, and pause. If you subdivide 'science' into various fields, psychology is definitely on much shakier grounds than has often ben assumed. But if you subdivide 'psychology', the picture isn't as clear. I'd say marketing and the broader field of persuasion/propaganda, or something like group dynamics, has a much firmer basis in reality than, say, psychopathology or evolutionary psychology. I'm very curious if people who are well-versed in economics can make similar distinctions, because I find it hard to believe it's 'all' mud.

DougMerritt 8y ago
People are very prejudiced against economics because economists don't predict well and have contradictory policy recommendations, but the basis of economics is quite solid. (My favorite illustration: if there were no underlying laws to economics, then dictators would just issue edicts about currency and markets which would then just plain work rather than causing havoc -- and yet dictators very much suffer side effects of their dictates.) This is very similar to weather prediction, which in some geographical areas is very untrustworthy, but not because its scientific foundation is lacking. Psychology has subareas that are very rigorous and evidence based, but also major foundational areas that remain essentially speculative/opinion-based (what is mind/consciousness/free will?) Evolutionary psychology is again firmly rooted, but is most famous for its speculative and unproven areas. Marketing and persuasion/propaganda have subareas that incorporate statistics and/or psychology and/or sociology etc., but are not themselves actually sciences at all, so that's very much apples and oranges.
- DougMerritt 8y ago
  Really, I got downvoted for something where every word was inarguably true in the sense of objective fact not opinion, and informative about half a dozen subjects? This place is as bad as reddit and slashdot. I haven't returned here very often over the years; this kind of experience makes one feel unwelcome.

edanm 8y ago

> Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. That's incredibly dismissive of these fields. I can't speak much to nutrition, but economics is not a "pile of mud", definitely not its fundamentals. Do you have any reason to think that it is other than (kind-of-literally) mud-slinging?

tim333 8y ago

I find a lot of the problems is people seem to have a job dealing with correlation not being causation. Maybe there's a correlation between salt and heart attacks but perhaps that's because the high salt folk eat a lot of junk food and its the junk food and lifestyle that's not the problem rather than the salt. You need further evidence to figure what's going on with any certainty but you almost never see an article saying that.

trombonechamp 8y ago

The fields of nutrition and economics do have the basics worked out. But the basics aren't things like "is eating too much salt bad for you?" The basics are about nutrient metabolism and the human body is a very complicated (/complex) system. The basics don't necessarily have to be "actionable", and they don't necessarily need to say how the system comes together as a whole. For instance, in your example of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of debate about whether natural selection or neutral evolution is the primary driver behind species diversity. We know that both exist and both happen, but we don't know how they came together to create the species diversity we observe. Another aspect of this is that there are certain fields (namely economics and nutrition) where the popular press over-exaggerates every single paper as a groundbreaking discovery because it gets clicks. The media tries to present the idea that scientists as a whole have come to a brand new conclusion which should change the way everyone behaves, when in reality it's just a few people in a windowless room reporting on some observations they found and speculating on what those observations might mean.