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Every chapter is about a peer review economics journal article. It's entirely likely that it doesn't align with peoples views working in those industries, but t

by scoofy 4y ago

Every chapter is about a peer review economics journal article. It's entirely likely that it doesn't align with peoples views working in those industries, but to suggest people can just casually wave away peer reviewed economics articles as pseudoscience is really kind of ridiculous.

watwut 4y ago
Picking up a single article and making huge conclusions from it is how pseudoscience works in general. The actual science is what emerges from many articles on the same topic, oftentimes having ambiguous or opposite conclusions, when scientific consensus forms. Doubly so when you are starting with economic article and make conclusions on social science. Economics in particular are pretty bad at reading what was already written about topic they are just discovering. Peer review ensures bare minimum of formal validity. It won't check your data, nor try to reproduce the study, nothing of the sort. Peer review is a great tool, but it is not not stomp of "settled and actually captures the whole topic".
- scoofy 4y ago
  I completely agree with all of this. I just think that peer review is more than just the bare minimum for "formal validity," whatever that means. It's really the bare minimum for starting to talk about publicly understanding something. It's easy to have a pet theory, in fact, the freakonomics book is exactly a series of pet theories. The point is that these pet theories have done the bare minimum which almost no other pop science books do. Most pop sciences books are basically: "I am an authority on this subject, let me explain the world to you." Which is all fine and dandy, involves a ton of faith in that authority, but there's something unique and interesting about a book that's like "here are my papers, let's go through them one by one." Do I think all of the theories in freakonomics are correct? Of course not! At best they are wildly outdated studies, at worst they are completely wrong and harmful for people to blindly believe. But my point stands, for a pop science book, it's admirable for them to just hand you the data. It's right there. If you think there's a problem or you want to try and confirm the studies, you just can. That's how we should be doing things, and it's really not at all common. Anyone who reads a pop science book for Truth doesn't understand science. The vast majority of "settled facts" are still debatable at the highest levels of academia, even in the hard sciences.

by scoofy 4y ago

watwut 4y ago

Picking up a single article and making huge conclusions from it is how pseudoscience works in general. The actual science is what emerges from many articles on the same topic, oftentimes having ambiguous or opposite conclusions, when scientific consensus forms. Doubly so when you are starting with economic article and make conclusions on social science. Economics in particular are pretty bad at reading what was already written about topic they are just discovering. Peer review ensures bare minimum of formal validity. It won't check your data, nor try to reproduce the study, nothing of the sort. Peer review is a great tool, but it is not not stomp of "settled and actually captures the whole topic".

scoofy 4y ago
I completely agree with all of this. I just think that peer review is more than just the bare minimum for "formal validity," whatever that means. It's really the bare minimum for starting to talk about publicly understanding something. It's easy to have a pet theory, in fact, the freakonomics book is exactly a series of pet theories. The point is that these pet theories have done the bare minimum which almost no other pop science books do. Most pop sciences books are basically: "I am an authority on this subject, let me explain the world to you." Which is all fine and dandy, involves a ton of faith in that authority, but there's something unique and interesting about a book that's like "here are my papers, let's go through them one by one." Do I think all of the theories in freakonomics are correct? Of course not! At best they are wildly outdated studies, at worst they are completely wrong and harmful for people to blindly believe. But my point stands, for a pop science book, it's admirable for them to just hand you the data. It's right there. If you think there's a problem or you want to try and confirm the studies, you just can. That's how we should be doing things, and it's really not at all common. Anyone who reads a pop science book for Truth doesn't understand science. The vast majority of "settled facts" are still debatable at the highest levels of academia, even in the hard sciences.