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Honest question: what standards of evidence do people have for concluding causation (in physical systems)?
by CoastalCoder 3y ago
Honest question: what standards of evidence do people have for concluding causation (in physical systems)?
- fooker 3y agoExperiemnts that try to fix or eliminate other variables. This is usually not possible for economics and other social sciences.
- vladms 3y agoI think the gold standard is experimenting for physical systems. Then you can control for whatever you want. For medicine it would be double blind study (select participants, split them in 2 groups, then you know the groups are the same, give one group the medicine, give the other group placebo). And then we get to social sciences - like economics - very hard to make an experiment. You can't just play with the interest rate to write a paper...
- vkou 3y agoYes, it's difficult to run macroeconomic experiments. The question still stands. What degree of evidence is sufficient to not be off-hand-dismissed with 'Correlation does not imply causation'?
- ttyprintk 3y agoSince inferring causality is hard, we look for counterexamples that disprove it. Hence the reliance on randomization and the null hypothesis. A counterexample in social sciences might be that the corresponding relationship is found across methodologies and cultures. This turns a question of causal inference into questioning the power of overturning longitudinal data. Statisticians differ about the philosophy on that.
- ttyprintk 3y agoI agree it depends on the domain. “Successful randomization” might be a more helpful term than “gold standard” here because in this domain the amount of covariance with gold prices is embedded into some people’s arguments.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackerlight 3y agoIn social sciences: natural experiments. In medical sciences: interventions.