Is economics really a science?

Economics is generally regarded as a social science, although some critics of the field argue that economics falls short of the definition of a science for a number of reasons, including a lack of testable hypotheses, lack of consensus, and inherent political overtones. Despite these arguments, economics shares the combination of qualitative and quantitative elements common to all social sciences [0]

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030315/economics-sc...

Whether it's a science or social science or research domain or discipline, how is that relevant to this discussion? It doesn't change GPs point.

Well is it possible that an Alan Sokal kind of trick be pulled of in economics if it is a social science.

Relevant : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

Yes, economics is science, and the people who don't understand that and love to point out how economists are never right in their predictions about the economy fundamentally have no idea what the field is even about.

Economics is not about predicting the stock market or economy as a whole, nor is it about coming up with excuses for free market capitalism and neoliberal agendas. It's about studying things like market failures, tax incidence, deadweight losses etc etc etc and coming up with solutions.

So basically creating a strawman toy model of actual complex economy and solving it. That's what theoretical physicists do initally but once developed they get to prediction stage. Just like rational agent axiom is false, I wonder what other badly formulated axioms does economics harbour.

> So basically creating a strawman toy model of actual complex economy and solving it

Uh, no. Read up on what economists did to empirically study and fix the kidney market and how many lives that has saved. (before you start typing, no, it wasn't to sell kidneys to the highest bidder)

> rational agent axiom

If you knew anything about economics, you'd know that no economist subscribes to any "rational agent axiom". But you have made up a strawman in your head so enjoy poking sticks at it.

Why doesn't _____ just ______? I've thought about this for only 2 minutes and it's already obvious.

Clearly you’re not in the field or you’d know that ______ is actually better understood as _______, which means your question doesn’t even make sense.

I would simply _____.

I as an coder would ____

_____, _____, land value tax.

UBI, _____, _____

And the closely related I could write _______ in _______ days.

At the same time, with "just" removed, those questions are often pretty good I think.

It seems I would just remove just, and make the question great again

Indeed. Intelligence is just I/O and gradient descent. The Universe is code. etc.

Coupled with an asocial, greed-driven and essentially anti-humanist agenda its just the worst possible moment (severe environmental stresses across the planet) to hijack whatever potential digital tech offers...

Sigh.

Unfortunately the lack of a definition of intelligence makes all claims unfalsifiable too.

But Western reductionism/Laplacian determinism is still taught even at the PHD level as cannon and not as a target for practical models.

Perhaps the rise of research into indecomposable continua and the discovery of Strange non-chaotic attractors in nature may help.

Obviously math and computer science as taught today is insufficient.

I particularly blame the way we teach things as absolute truth and then pull the rug out from under those previous supposed hard facts.

But I am showing my own ignorance here because we do learn about the computable set etc...

It doesn't seem to help with people making claims about universal quantifiers being a few quarters away.

Seriously. Folks in tech like to complain about MBAs, but it's a toss up in my book for "most egregiously overconfident".

Doctors get a good shout as well.

> This study basically describes 99% of people here, lol. Because you know how to write code, you're suddenly an expert not only at that but also at economics, medicine, international relations etc etc. Every field is ready for you to disrupt it. The hubris is astonishing.

Aka "Engineer's disease." There's an overestimation of one's personal competence and the effectiveness of the tools and mental models you're most familiar with. Basically think asshole software engineer who tells everyone they're dumb and should just solve the problem like they're writing software.

One thing I've realized about this site are the insane amount of software engineers that have a disdain for the medical field. It comes up all the time deeper into comment threads where people say medical school entrance exams being so hard is a form of "gatekeeping" - which it is, on purpose, but they're using it as a pejorative to tell themselves "I could've been a doctor too if they didn't make it so purposefully hard."

The other very very disturbing trend are the "makers" who denigrate medical devices as overly complex. One thread I'll never get over was on old pacemakers. The prevailing sentiment was they're designed for failure because "evil medical industry profit", not that, you know, they wear out.

The other part felt like watching the theory of memetics demonstrate itself in real-time. One person commented that the single small mechanical component is rated to actuate 5,000,000 times or something like that. Someone dismissively said "Well yeah but Adafruit keyboard switches are rated at 2-3 million presses, they mass-produce them, thus it can't be that hard" (adafruit's data sheet says 1,000,000 btw). Very quickly, people picked up that line and repeated that the actuator in a pacemaker isn't "actually that complicated", citing the 2-3 million keycap example. I still see that keycap "argument" pop up all the time.

BTW: Pacemakers are actually rated for about 100,000,000 stimuli cycles.

I wanted to write a very similar comment, except about cosmology instead of medicine. The amount of people with high school level physics knowledge who think they know better than almost all luminaries of the field combined just because their gut feeling is telling them something about dark matter is astonishing.

I mean I barely know about pacemakers. Just that I have a congenital heart condition and will need one in a decade or so, and have taken a hobbyists interest in learning about them/ following the field. Just the level of arrogance and just completely wrong "facts" astonished me. The bit that moves is a few strands of hair thick. In what world does "I built my own keyboard" translate to "I built my own keyboard so how much different could a pacemaker be?"

> the insane amount of software engineers that have a disdain for the medical field

What field doesn't they have insane disdain for? Software engineers even have insane disdain for software engineers!

The disdain extends to all other fields because they were told software was going to eat the world - they felt like special snowflakes entitled to call everyone else special snowflakes, and it went about as well as you'd expect.

Cross field contamination a fantastic product of our interconnected world, but it's more fun to shit on people when they fail. I'm sure some folks here would've loved to tell davinci to stay in his lane.

Well, at least we're not physicists, amirite?

https://xkcd.com/793/

Not everyone who posts here is a coder but I do agree with you the narcissism and astro-turfing on HN is high.

I suspect the high-confidence/narcissist combination is especially high here due to this being an industry/entrepreneurial forum where being confidently wrong is a positive trait.

The astro-turfers appealing to the confidently wrong go by unnoticed to the majority.

The abstract of the study states the metric for over-confidence they developed is "the tendency to give incorrect answers rather than ‘don’t know’ responses to questions on scientific facts". I think that's true. I maintain that being confidently skeptical of confident claims and research is not the same thing.