5 ms·

Weather prediction is the more apt analogy here. Astrology is total bullshit, while economics and weather is an attempt to predict the chaos.

somenameforme 10mo ago
Astrology is probably far more apt than you might think, because most don't know the history of astrology. For centuries it was taught as a scholarly proper and real 'science.' Think of something like e.g. modern psychology. Various fields like social psychology have something like a 20% replication rate among top journals which means the entire field is pretty dodgy, but plenty of people keep on repeating the latest headlines, which even end up shared on here fairly frequently, and treating it like any other science. Astrology only really fell out of fashion due to a perfect storm of a bunch of different factors. The Church defacto banned aspects of it that implied external forces driving human behavior as that would contradict free will, and that happened just about the Renaissance was kicking off and all sorts of new astronomical discoveries led to no greater precision in astrological predictions, along with a more broadly skeptical shift in society, which gradually left it relegated to where it remains to this day. "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." - Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud, 1911 --- It's a great example of how what is deemed proper and scientific at one point in time is still heavily influenced by things that, in the future, will be considered 'obviously' nonsense. Even in far more modern times, it wasn't long ago that lobotomization was considered an appropriate psychological treatment. No less than JFK's sister [1] was lobotomized as a 'cure' for her irritability. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
skippyboxedhero 10mo ago
Right, but what people miss is that some people (usually not academic economists) are able to predict the economy with good levels of accuracy. It is not hard, there is a ton of data, the problem is that you have to drop your own personal interest in politics...for 99.99% of people feeling politically validated is more important than being right on the economy.
- threethirtytwo 10mo ago
  Isn't there reams of data on weather patterns too? I thought that like the weather, economic systems are fundamentally chaotic and thus demonstrably unpredictable. There's a whole field of math where we can create these mathematical models that simulate chaos and are fundamentally unpredictable. I was under the impression that Economics falls under the purview of this mathematical theory in terms of unpredictability. If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?

somenameforme 10mo ago

Astrology is probably far more apt than you might think, because most don't know the history of astrology. For centuries it was taught as a scholarly proper and real 'science.' Think of something like e.g. modern psychology. Various fields like social psychology have something like a 20% replication rate among top journals which means the entire field is pretty dodgy, but plenty of people keep on repeating the latest headlines, which even end up shared on here fairly frequently, and treating it like any other science. Astrology only really fell out of fashion due to a perfect storm of a bunch of different factors. The Church defacto banned aspects of it that implied external forces driving human behavior as that would contradict free will, and that happened just about the Renaissance was kicking off and all sorts of new astronomical discoveries led to no greater precision in astrological predictions, along with a more broadly skeptical shift in society, which gradually left it relegated to where it remains to this day. "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." - Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud, 1911 --- It's a great example of how what is deemed proper and scientific at one point in time is still heavily influenced by things that, in the future, will be considered 'obviously' nonsense. Even in far more modern times, it wasn't long ago that lobotomization was considered an appropriate psychological treatment. No less than JFK's sister [1] was lobotomized as a 'cure' for her irritability. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

skippyboxedhero 10mo ago

Right, but what people miss is that some people (usually not academic economists) are able to predict the economy with good levels of accuracy. It is not hard, there is a ton of data, the problem is that you have to drop your own personal interest in politics...for 99.99% of people feeling politically validated is more important than being right on the economy.

threethirtytwo 10mo ago
Isn't there reams of data on weather patterns too? I thought that like the weather, economic systems are fundamentally chaotic and thus demonstrably unpredictable. There's a whole field of math where we can create these mathematical models that simulate chaos and are fundamentally unpredictable. I was under the impression that Economics falls under the purview of this mathematical theory in terms of unpredictability. If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?