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This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

economist.com

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Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#91

Post by billfruit »

samvher wrote: post #78
billfruit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in general skeptical that statistical experiments will give use much insight into complex behavior. I think building theoritical models is the better approach to study complex systems, since then we will can explain why a certain behaviour shall manifest. Do astrophysicists use controlled trials to study the universe?

Those models aren't worth much if you don't test them, so these efforts will have to go hand in hand. The way it tends to go now is RCT -> try to explain findings by hypothesizing about mechanisms -> think about an RCT that can test this hypothesis -> repeat. It's a slow and expensive process and not always successful, but I would say that it's progress.

I would say testing is a small part of building models: building models should essentially be driven by theory, not by experiments.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#93

Post by billfruit »

grandmczeb wrote: post #87
billfruit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am somewhat bothered about the reverse scenario. For example e-cigarettes, some people are eager to quote statistical data on it, but I feel we should be able to state if e-cigarettes are harmful or not from a purely theoritical standpoint, an explanation on how it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and say it is harmful or not. We didn't send the man to the Moon on the basis of statistical experiments,…

The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimental work, but probably not in our lifetime.

Knowledgeable medical scientists should be able to explain the effects of vaping as a physiological process, axiomatically. Are we saying our medical scientists do not want to attempt that?

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#94

Post by raxxorrax »

billfruit wrote: post #67
jerf wrote: post #21

These critics should spend some time speaking to the medical research community. These aren't new questions. It kinda reveals the deep underlying assumptions; "of course we can know the results of these interventions in advance, so we must base our ethics on that"... ok, but if you already know the effects, why are you testing them? You're testing them because you don't know. Unfortunately, there's no royal road to s…

I am somewhat bothered about the reverse scenario. For example e-cigarettes, some people are eager to quote statistical data on it, but I feel we should be able to state if e-cigarettes are harmful or not from a purely theoritical standpoint, an explanation on how it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and say it is harmful or not. We didn't send the man to the Moon on the basis of statistical experiments,…

Theoretically I would agree. Medical science mostly just tried it in clinical studies. Of paramount important though is that the patient makes the decision to take the risk. This is were economics is lacking in my opinion.

But even if you are sure you got the model right, you still need a long time study to prove it. The current discussion on e-cigs are mostly about informing people that they are taking a risk because there are unanswered questions.

Putting a man on the moon was a lot of risk and there were many unknowns and I am sure the pilots knew that very well. Gladly, they still did it.

> experimental psychology

had precisely the problem that their patients often didn't really have a choice in that matter. So I think the field deserves its place. They might need to shed a lot of hubris before they can be taken seriously again. I wouldn't put economics on that level, but they often seem to gravitate to similar mistakes.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#95

Post by SiempreViernes »

billfruit wrote: post #62
notafraudster wrote: post #5

Esther Duflo is the most obviously deserving Nobel Prize in Economics pick in decades. Major substantive contributions to development economics coupled with being absolutely the vanguard of the credibility revolution. The article seems to motivate criticism of RCTs in only the barest manner: "what of external validity?" No shit, Sherlock, which is why the credibility revolution also argues for frequent and cross-cont…

I am in general skeptical that statistical experiments will give use much insight into complex behavior. I think building theoritical models is the better approach to study complex systems, since then we will can explain why a certain behaviour shall manifest. Do astrophysicists use controlled trials to study the universe?

Uh, have you heard about Astronomy at all? Admittedly it's purely observational measurements, but you'd need a very poor philosophy of science to deny that the careful measurement of radiation is not an experiment.

As for trials, the universe itself has provided billions upon billions of different objects to perform measurements on.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#96

Post by matt4077 »

billfruit wrote: post #93
grandmczeb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimental work, but probably not in our lifetime.

Knowledgeable medical scientists should be able to explain the effects of vaping as a physiological process, axiomatically. Are we saying our medical scientists do not want to attempt that?

"Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC.

There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad").

So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#97

Post by SiempreViernes »

daxfohl wrote: post #64
billfruit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in general skeptical that statistical experiments will give use much insight into complex behavior. I think building theoritical models is the better approach to study complex systems, since then we will can explain why a certain behaviour shall manifest. Do astrophysicists use controlled trials to study the universe?

There's the "shut up and calculate" thing within particle physics. I don't know how seriously it's taken.

What? Shut up and calculate is an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in general, and is probably most common as a backup to the Copenhagen interpretation.

It doesn't have much to do with theory building at all, as most theory involving QM doesn't need to concern itself with exactly why QM works despite its strange philosophical meaning.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#98

Post by matt4077 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #58
jerf wrote: post #21

These critics should spend some time speaking to the medical research community. These aren't new questions. It kinda reveals the deep underlying assumptions; "of course we can know the results of these interventions in advance, so we must base our ethics on that"... ok, but if you already know the effects, why are you testing them? You're testing them because you don't know. Unfortunately, there's no royal road to s…

But the thing with the de-worming experiment is they did know it worked . They were studying a procedure known to be beneficial and merely asking "is this beneficial also to our policy goal" and using as a pretext to deny people a known beneficial medical treatment (for 1-2 years as the system was rolled-out). Which is to say this seems neither analogous to medicine or ethical in the same fashion to controls for medi…

> Maybe, if somehow they had no choice but their "phased roll-out

It seems intuitively obvious, not "maybe, somehow", that bringing medical treatment to thousands of rural communities doesn't happen instantly.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#99

Post by cannonedhamster »

grandmczeb wrote: post #87
billfruit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am somewhat bothered about the reverse scenario. For example e-cigarettes, some people are eager to quote statistical data on it, but I feel we should be able to state if e-cigarettes are harmful or not from a purely theoritical standpoint, an explanation on how it interacts with the chemistry of the human body and say it is harmful or not. We didn't send the man to the Moon on the basis of statistical experiments,…

The human body (and biology more generally) is fractal-like in its complexity. One day we may be able to model things accurately enough to not require experimental work, but probably not in our lifetime.

Modelling the basics of a human lung isn't all that difficult. You can see the effects of vaping on an enclosed space just by having the smoke pulled into an enclosed space like they used to do for cigarettes. That would give you substances created though the vaping process and likely to stick in the lungs. Longer term effects are drastically harder obviously as it doesn't take into account the cleaning mechanisms in the lungs but for basic verification that something is toxic that's not a difficult bridge to cross.

Now when you get into whole body or things with mutations such as cancer I agree with you while heartedly. While we can understand in a petri dish how to kill something in a human you've got to worry about things like delivery, hidden single cells, toxicity, and drug proliferation all of which can be different in every single person with a cancer. In biotech we're still just barely out of the dark ages.

To bring this to the original topic, we're still in the dark ages with fields like economics. While we understand many of levers that exist we have little idea of how and when to effectively pull them.

Re: This year’s Nobel prizes prompt soul-searching among economists

#100

Post by SiempreViernes »

billfruit wrote: post #91
samvher wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those models aren't worth much if you don't test them, so these efforts will have to go hand in hand. The way it tends to go now is RCT -> try to explain findings by hypothesizing about mechanisms -> think about an RCT that can test this hypothesis -> repeat. It's a slow and expensive process and not always successful, but I would say that it's progress.

I would say testing is a small part of building models: building models should essentially be driven by theory, not by experiments.

Stare upon the FRBTheory wiki in delight then, here are ~50 different theories describing the same thing: https://frbtheorycat.org/index.php/Main_Page

As a generous guess at most 40 of these models are wrong, since they all describe basically the same few events with vastly different mechanisms. I guess that majority of interesting but wrong models is what you are after?

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