Your Scientific Reasoning Is More Flawed Than You Think

AFAIK, system two is not immune to cruft...

There's a great deal of examples of this in economics, and this is not just a theoretical problem-- it causes bad electoral outcomes.

For instance, the idea that "government spending stimulates the economy" is a naive concept. It sounds good- right, because they are spending money, that means it is creating demand and the goods and services they are buying increases economic activity.

The scientific reality is, this naive concept is ignoring the cost of that government spending. All of the money government has comes from two sources- inflation and taxes. Whichever way they raise the money, they do economic damage.

Thus government spending, like Obama's so-called "stimulus" plan, actually hurts the economy.

This is why, for instance, the unemployment rate ended up being higher than Obama claimed it would be if his plan wasn't passed.. even though his plan was passed.

But it is not very hard to find people who believe that some other thing caused unemployment to be higher.

In fact, both the Republican and Demcorat parties, and their partisan's ideologies, reject the science of economics and embrace pseudo-science.

In my lifetime, I've seen a great increase in embracing pseudo-scientific concepts or even anti-science positions, most recently and alarmingly, by people who insist that they are right because "science" agrees with them.

Another example: Glaciers are getting smaller because of global warming. This belief is completely unscientific-- there is no way to know how many glaciers there are on earth, let alone whether they are getting smaller, and nobody has even tried to guess whether more of them are shrinking than growing.

Another example: The idea that the TSA protects us against airplane hijackings. Or that somehow the government is protecting us against terrorism. Or that mass shootings would be worse if guns were less regulated (the stats: 9.2 is the average number killed in areas where guns are banned, but only 2.2 people die in areas where the intended victims are allowed to be armed.)

Politics' natural enemy is science.

Hmmm, a very political comment...

Firstly confusing Economics with a science rather than pseudo-science (or at least very bad science in that in most cases the assumptions required for the mathematical models are unrealistic and instantly forgotten), then stating as a fact some simple controversial (among economists too) statements which if true at all have a great deal more subtlety behind them and a number of which I believe to be flat out wrong.

I think trying to tackle the points would go way off topic but in my view the parent post gives a good example of some naive beliefs (although economics is insufficiently scientific to be able to prove them inconsistent with reality).

Edit: Changed 'post' to 'comment' and 'unrealistically' to 'unrealistic'.

Stimulus is more about wealth redistribution in times of duress, when income equality is seriously out of whack. The only problem today is that the money is coming from low interest loans from China vs. heavy taxes on the rich (as during the Great Depression).

The flipside of stimulus spending is supply-side economics (or Voodoo economics according to the elder Bush), where cutting taxes magically increases revenue since there is more economy to tax. In reality, they basically drive up inequality, though either position can be useful in moderation and both are incredibly damaging when used too much.

Neither technique is based on scientific theory, rather they are more like strategies or heuristics to be used in managing the economy that are based more on experience and perhaps ideology. Economics is not a hard science, its a social science. So is forecasting their effects, or forecasting future economic behavior; without stimulus unemployment might have been worse, meaning Obama could have been more optimistic about the future outlook of the economy at that time.

The reason people persist with unscientific conceptions of the world even after learning the scientifically correct explanation is because scientifically correct explanations often have little benefit in our day to day lives.

The heliocentric model of the solar system, for example, has no effect on our normal lives, and thus by Pierce's Pragmatic Maxim is of little value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim