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.
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.
I agree with the sentiment but the truth is ballistics is several order of magnitude simpler than biology/biochemistry. I find medicine fascinating, but the more I learn about it the more I am astonished at the huge mismatch between perception of the field and what we actually know. And have always more respect for practitioners.
> Paracetamol was first made in 1877.[21] It is the most commonly used medication for pain and fever in both the United States and Europe.
> How it works is not entirely clear.
Economics already has huge credibility problems.
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.
We didn't send the man to the Moon on the basis of statistical experiments, we knew it was possible even before the first screw was put in on the rocket.
I am fearful that depending on experiments would lead to the same dire credibility issues that plague experimental psychology.