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> So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your c

> So you decide what is science and what isn't? What is your model of what a science is? As long as you can't answer that, the only thing unscientific is your comment. 1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences. Please list a set of economic truths. Any set will be good enough as long as it can make reliable predictions that can be tested in the real world. > You can use any science to wrap up political decisions. You could, but the point is not to. Or if you want to then make sure that the science is predictive. > Be more specific. Who said what? When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive but at the same time can be shown to be unpredictive which proves that it is not fit for this task. Yet economists and their political allies continue to argue that it is. Maybe it's better than simply political arguments and maybe the justification for supporting the orthodoxy is in line with that. That you're scared of the political outcome and so economics is a safer option.

taffer 7y ago
> Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.
gbacon 7y ago
The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.

taffer 7y ago

> Please list a set of economic truths. Economics is not a mathematical science, it has no underlying axioms like mathematics. Neither does biology, medicine or climate science. Do you think these are not sciences either? > When you are talking about the general facts that economics is often prescriptive... That's wrong, economics isn't prescriptive, maybe that's your basic misunderstanding. Economics is a positive science, just like biology or climate science, it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tries to understand 'if this, then that'.

gbacon 7y ago

The physicist can drop a stone with a certain mass from a tower of a particular height and can predict that the next time she drops that rock from that tower, it will take the same amount of time to hit the ground. Social science, which is most definitely science, must deal with the additional complexity of dealing with weird, quirky, fickle human beings. In a real sense, you and I are not the same people we were yesterday. Rocks and towers are much less interesting from that perspective. Some physical or hard sciences, even without people, are lousy at predicting. Meteorology is a science, and there’s a reason for the old saw that the weather man is never right. What meteorology and social sciences have in common is they study complex dynamic systems where knowing the state of the entire system at any given time is difficult or even impossible and seemingly insignificant differences in precision can produce entirely different predictions. Sometimes it is not the scale of complexity that makes a problem tough to tackle. I believe we agree that mathematics is a science, and I’ll make the modest claim that theoretical computer science is a branch of mathematics. We cannot predict in general whether an arbitrary Turing machine given a certain input will halt or run forever. Nevermind the simple question of whether a computer program will eventually terminate: Rice’s theorem tells us that in general we cannot predict whether an arbitrary program has any interesting property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem Science is more than just high school physics problems.