It doesn't mean economics can't be scientific, only that, e.g., the act of measuring can't be separated from the measurand. Sound familiar? Of course, the solu

It doesn't mean economics can't be scientific, only that, e.g., the act of measuring can't be separated from the measurand. Sound familiar? Of course, the solution is pretty trivial now: commit the predictions to a blockchain or third party under seal, encrypted, whatever, and reveal it later. Or start applying quantum mechanical descriptions to economics. This paper and discussion are sort of interesting because there's been analogous debates about ergodicity assumptions in psychology modeling growing over the last couple of decades. They started in the 90s and have become prominent topics of discussion in the last decade or so. Almost no one really believes ergodicity assumptions truly hold anymore in those discussions. The catch is that neither necessarily does stationarity. That is, in the Nature Physics paper cited, something like the left side of Equation 1, although defineable, is not really estimable (because any function of time will change over time), so the right side, although not strictly equal to the left, becomes just as good of an estimate in many cases (because a system at one point in time practically speaking becomes a different system at a different point in time). The problem isn't in the expectations, it's in the uncertainties around those expectations -- or at least, in understanding when the uncertainty about the long-term time average of f is great enough that using the [cross-sectional] expectation value of f is better in some sense. Put another way, are there times when it makes sense to predict your future self better by looking to other persons, or are you always better off treating your situation as unique? The discussions in the paper are generally about different types of issues, but they dovetail and coincide in certain ways. I'd have to reread the paper cited in the piece to get a better grasp on how. I'm not disagreeing with it; I think it's interesting, but wonder if it's falling into the trap itself is criticizing others for at some level.