Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's ineffective in practice, I consider it to be ineffective. But even if you could design an experiment perfectly and come up with some strong statistical evidence and then had other means to tease out what is actually causal and what is only correlational, you'd only know what influences what and not necessarily why. But yes, I did say that statistics/probability is some rare exception. You can study group theo…
> If it's ineffective in practice, I consider it to be ineffective. Except you have no way to conclude that it's ineffective. Analytical solutions require data to study. Without data, or with little data, what analysis are you going to perform? At best, broad statistical correlations, which is exactly what we find. You're effectively claiming that spoons are ineffective at a restaurant that provides only forks. Well…
When it comes to economics, I know that a lot of people don't agree with the basis of many mathematical models that are used, but I'm not an economist, so I can't speak to that.
So maybe I was overzealous in discounting mathematics for the social sciences altogether. Still, I would contend (albeit with much less evidence):
- There's some measure of people trying to construe "nice models" of things in those subjects instead of trying to make sure they agree with reality. I have a degree in linguistics and I've seen this over and over. Most of these models haven't convinced me at all.
- The amount of maths that you either need or at least benefit from in order to do good research in such areas is still substantially lower than in, say, physics. I think it's still to be noted how we can describe much of physics just with a small number of economic and elegant models. I haven't seen anything comparable in any of the social sciences.