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How can it be science if you can't follow the scientific method? It can be a field of study for sure and it can be useful too. My argument isn't that only scien
by _heimdall 1y ago
How can it be science if you can't follow the scientific method? It can be a field of study for sure and it can be useful too. My argument isn't that only scientific study is useful, I'm arguing that economics isn't scientific.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoScience doesn't require experimental designs, certainly they are incredibly helpful but they don't work for everything. Like (I grumble about this approach a lot) observational studies at a population level are certainly science, even though there's no experiments. Granted, in medicine at least they end up feeding into RCTs and controlled studies which is good, but in a lot of cases (child development is a big one) lots of hypotheses can't ethically be tested using experimental designs. We can't get sets of identical twins and raise one in a rich home and another in a poor home, holding everything else constant. Does this mean twin studies aren't science? I actually kinda agree that a lot of economics is very poor science (far too much maths on far too little data) but that's reflective of the difficulty of collecting such data rather than an indictment of the approach.