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One reason the scientific method does not work on economics is that markets are anti-inductive[1]. If you can establish a regular pattern in their behavior, ma

• JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  I'm not sure this is such a strong attack on the scientific method. First, there's much more to economics than predicting the stock market - a proper understanding of demand curves is useful even if everyone else has it as well. In fact, I'm not sure that predicting the stock market has more to do with mathematics than with mass psychology. That said, I do agree that properties of the stock market, once widely known, tend to be arbitraged away. From the article: > There was a time when the Dow systematically tended to drop on Friday and rise on Monday, and once this was noticed and published, the effect went away. However, that doesn't mean that the scientific method cannot produce true conclusions - it's just that those don't tend to stay true. lesswrong has much more impressive criticisms of the scientific method, IMHO. (The main one being that, while the scientific method will hopefully prevent you from endlessly clinging to a wrong hypothesis, it won't tell you how to find good hypotheses.)