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The different attitudes of computer scientists and economists

• deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
• barrkel 17y ago
  The causal model that the writer speaks about, the one economists try to construct, is susceptible to story-telling because such models intrinsically rely on more than just the data for their construction, but the constructor's intuitions about the world. The writer's reductio ad absurdum example of predicting land value based on size of house is illustrative. Producing predictions like "build smaller houses in rural areas" to increase their value are only absurd because humans have existing intuitions about why land is so expensive in urban areas. It is a lack of data that makes the naive black box model so poor; its lack of access to human insight. This weakness of statistical predictive models has an exact analogue in economic causal models, though. The intuitions being appealed to do not necessarily need to be based on fact, observation and statistics, or they would be amenable to predictive models too. Instead, at the margins they tend to be politically and ideologically driven, giving "intellectual backing" to social and political policy positions that benefit various interest groups.